abff08f4813c

The explanation is pretty boring. If you look at https://superuser.com/questions/421997/what-is-a-ssh-key-fingerprint-and-how-is-it-generated it's explained that some fingerprints are displayed with Base64, which according to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Base64 allows the use of all 26 letters of the alphabet, and both the complete uppercase and lowercase sets.

So basically it's just random chance that a given fingerprint has some data that shows up as a word.

SSH keys can likewise use base64, e.g. for PEM format, as per https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/492704/what-encoding-is-used-for-the-keys-when-using-ssh-keygen-t-rsa

But I'd add - if someone could draft this up and show me a working prototype, I might be easier to convince. It's a lot easier to think about something when you can play with an idea.

I mean sure…but essentially you’re using the facts as they stand as justification that it will never work

More or less.

when my whole point is that these facts as they stand need to change because they will never work unless we change them.

I think to make that argument you'd have to first argue that this works elsewhere. But we see warnings like this, https://web.archive.org/web/20221104001618/https://old.reddit.com/r/TaylorSwift/comments/yljj15/swifties_be_warned_that_this_is_a_fake_account/ or like this, https://www.instagram.com/czaronline/p/CvAts_9MFDf/

then I'm not at all convinced that this is the case.

You can tweet at celebrities, and you can follow celebrities on instagram, and all the other services, but you generally can’t email them.

Perhaps it's a generational thing? Back in the day you could. Bill Gates used to be reachable at bill.gates@microsoft.com and Jeff Bozos at jeff@amazon.com

On the flip side, just because a celebrity has a handle on a particular social media service doesn't guarantee you can reach them. Taylor Swift has a tumblr but she hasn't publicly used it in years.

People keep using email, and domains as reasons for why it’s not an issue, but there’s a reason celebrities aren’t known for their email.

What's the reason? Two things come to my mind: first, Bill Gates supposedly said he had an entire team whose job was just to read and respond to his public email.

Second, email is direct contact, like a DM rather than a tweet (that everyone sees). The email equivalent would be a mailing list. If you want that, you can join Taylor Swift's mailing list over at https://www.taylorswift.com/#mailing-list

you wouldn’t want a second abff08f4813c to exist.

I wouldn't mind that much, tbh. Though considering the username in question, it's very unlikely.

Even if you don’t use tiktok, you would want to make sure nobody else has the name abff08f4813c on tiktok.

Much harder with a name like Taylor Swift. How many other people have the same name? Even on twitter there's a different taylorswift - so the famous singer is taylorswift13 there.

now suddenly 300 more abff08f4813c on 300 different instances all pop up.

My username is probably the wrong one to use for this example.

But more generally - does anyone want to be taylorswift@hotmail.com and taylorswift@gmail.com and taylorswift@outlook.com and taylorswift@yahoo.com all at once? (Well, okay, yes there probably is someone who wants that, with bad intentions, but practically speaking it's kinda obvious that these aren't all official email accounts by the singer.)

Because if you try to sue one person on one other instance that has abff08f4813c,

But Taylor Swift may not be able to sue the other person - she's not the only one named Taylor Swift after all.

What I’m suggesting is, no matter which instance you’re on, if you search abff08f4813c, the search should find that username, and direct you to the profile that corrilates with you. And even though that profile is only on one instance, it would make it so if I tried to make abff08f4813c, on another instance, I would be told that username is already taken.

And then someone tries to be abffo8f4813c or abff08f48i3c.

I don’t see any celebrity who values their own brand on an international scale, be willing to publically announce they are on the fediverse,

uh ... https://joinfediverse.wiki/Notable_Fediverse_accounts

and their fans can migrate to the fediverse to follow them.

I mean, there's no accounting for the fans, sure. If anything, celebs seek out platforms that have lots of people to connect them with fans, rather than them bring fans to a platform, I'd guess.

From there, you could absolutely create an old twitter style verification system.

Sure, but it's not a required step.

Mastodon.social could implement a mimic of the old twitter style verification system for folks who join that particular instance - and those joining another instance simply wouldn't have the guarantee.

And then threads can implement the verification system for folks joining directly through threads - and again those joined on another instance simply wouldn't have the guarantee.

And then Bluesky can ...

I don't really see anyone but a commercial company even trying to do this - it'd be a headache - and probably expensive - in terms of the requirements to protect the data used (such as identify card verification).

As a temporary fix, instead of service systemd-resolved restart as per the article, you can try this, service systemd-resolved stop

Once the service is stopped the port should be free. You'll have to do this on every reboot (though maybe you can try adding the command to /etc/rc.local to stop it on every reboot)

Yep, it might be enough to just add that file with the setting set to no and restart.

If anything we want to encourage this.

I like the example of SAG AFTRA hosting their own instance to be official, for example. Celebs typically have their own domains and websites, so easy enough to hire a team to create and manage their own instance that supports the celeb but federates. And you know it's legit just because it's on the celeb's own domain. Ditto for gov't agencies having their own instances.

Even without federation and such it's an issue. Old twitter actually did a really good job of this, but other social networks have had problems in the past,

https://www.dailydot.com/debug/katie-hopkins-impersonated-parler/

https://www.politico.com/news/2020/07/02/republicans-parler-trolls-347737

We don't have to guess if trolls will try to impersonate celebs and be successful at it, because it's already happened elsewhere.

That said, there are two nice things about the fediverse. First, verification is explicitly not offered, so folks have to do the digging themselves to see if an account is official or not. (Which is as easy as checking a person's web site). Or perhaps confusing a regular person's account with a celeb of the same name.

Second, you can host your own instance. Celebs might not bother, but official gov't agencies set up their own domains and websites - and in particular under domains like .gov which aren't open to regular folks. So seeing if a gov't agency is really authentic is potentially as simple as checking the domain that the instance is using.

A difference between kbin (and mbin?) vs lemmy (and pyfedi) - the former would show the entire name, including instance. If instance was not included, it was because it was local (so you could assume '@kbin.social')

On lemmy/pyfedi the name shows up alone - though you can hover over and see the instance name. But at a glance I can see how someone could get confused. Not the best UX IMHO.

I can’t ask, because years ago I watched a video on twitter. It was funny. I tweeted “That killed me”. I was banned
youtube doesn’t seem to have a direct messaging system.

Does this person have a patreon or something similar? Could sign up and then ask there. Or leave a youtube comment on a recent video sharing your email address.

Heck, I might risk creating a new youtube account over VPN just to ask in a public youtube comment for peertube (so if YT bans the account for mentioning peertube, it's no loss to me, and the creator has still gotten the message).

They’ve never heard of mastodon.

Makes sense if this was years ago, back when it was younger and less wide spread.. I also imagine you just heard and saw this, but didn't directly ask because, well yeah.

What surprises me is that these seem to be all on other instances - including a few big ones like just.works - rather than someone spinning up their own instance to create unlimited accounts to downvote/spam/etc.

The author (who isn't OP) is using federated wordpress blogs, so expect to see this pop up if you are subscribing to them.

That being the case, and also considering the rough edges around the fediverse right now, I think the link sharing is reasonable. I'll add that this isn't the first time I've seen it shared.

Piefed? It does, at least somewhat. IIRC the main thing is that you can't follow specific Mastodon users.

• From a satisfied pyfedi user.