I think you’re misreading this. OP has an email account. Someone else signed up for some website that doesn’t verify that you own the address before allowing you to log in and use the service. If the site did verify it, the user wouldn’t have been able to log in because OP would have been getting the verification emails, and not the user.
Later, after OP told the user and they failed to change their address, OP logged into the site and changed their password, putting an end to the spam they were receiving from the user’s actions.
I don’t have an ethical qualm with this. He didn’t want to sign up for the service. Someone else signed his email address up for it. Legally, I can’t imagine that being prosecutable.
One thing I've found, occasionally the hard way, is that helpful bystanders are always offering advice based on "ethical", "intuitive", "logical" and "common sense", usually without any aspect of "legal".
I got divorced a decade ago, and every well-wishing person in my life was strongly urging me to do things which were shockingly counter-productive / dangerous / wrong, based on their confident understanding (assumption, really) of the law which was completely and dangerously inaccurate.
Hacker News audience is global. People start accounts for various purposes. Yet people still freely share the notion that logging in to some unknown website run by an unknown company from a hard to spell country and then touching things is universally safe.
I miss the old "IANAL" tag which at least provided basic warning and self-awareness :-).
While true, I think that's implicit in all online conversations. I'm certain my thinking is 100% wrong in some jurisdictions elsewhere. Anything I say is wrong somewhere.
"It's OK: you can curse on the Internet." "Not when you're typing from Iran!" "Well, OK, if you're in Iran, don't take this American's advice for dealing with a government."
Part of our obligation as a reader is to consider what others are saying in the context of our own circumstances and experiences before trying to apply it. If you don't, and things end badly, that's on you.
But I stand on my words: I think it's ethically OK. You may not. That's alright. We're not required to have the same ethics or morals. And I don't think that's prosecutable. That's my opinion, based on my circumstances, not a statement of fact that applies in all jurisdictions around the world.
Above all else, I got tired of giving disclaimers about every single thing I say lest someone jump in with a "gotcha! scenario" I hadn't considered because it's not relevant to the context of the discussion.
IANYL, though! Offering legal advice with the disclaimer “I am not a lawyer” could be prosecuted as practicing law if a reasonably party could still infer a potential lawyer-client relationship from your message and/or intent. Instead, “I am not your lawyer” explicitly denies the lawyer-client relationship, which closes the door on both being accused of practicing law illegally and on being found as party to a lawyer-client relationship whether or not you have the appropriate certifications.
> closes the door on [...] being accused of practicing law illegally
Does it? So I can say, "I'm not your lawyer, but I'm happy to go ahead and give you specific legal advice on your case." and I can't be accused of illegally practicing law? I was under the impression that this could still get you into hot water. But not being your lawyer, due to the fact that I am not a lawyer at all, I don't know if it is true or not.
As with all things, who are you going to get in trouble with? And what's so magical about legal practice as opposed to, say, giving shitty medical advice or telling someone how to build porch? Asking genuinely. No one falls all over themselves to say "I am not a doctor, but...", even though their next words could kill someone. The implication is that they don't have formal training but they saw something on Facebook that you should try. What happens next is on you, not on them.
> No on falls all over themselves to say “I am not a doctor, but”
This is precisely why I’m pointing this out: IANAL is a very curious case of people self-labeling their statements as “not trustworthy for the topic”. I can think of perhaps no other cases where it is so popular to claim to not be a professional in the relevant field, which suggests that IANAL is a ‘badge of honor’ rather than a proper legal disclaimer. Certainly few (if any) claim IANAD before writing about their experiences with medical issues, body things, or nutritional supplements here, even though those topics are (as you correctly indicate) potentially lethal.
Thus, IANYL: if your goal is to ensure that the recipient of your advice / opinion / whatever does not have grounds to claim that you provided legal advice, and therefore are their lawyer, then you can either do so weakly with TINLA (“this is not legal advice”), which still leaves the door open for awkward claims by some desperate grifter-rando to reach a bench, or you can do so strongly with IANYL (“I am not your lawyer”), which closes that vulnerability in full.
Not once in years of using IANYL have I seen anyone else properly protect themselves from this vulnerability; meanwhile, “IANAL but” remains in use as a badge of honor. So, yeah, I don’t think anyone considers the particular avenue of vulnerability a serious threat, and yeah, the general context of IANAL here is prideful rather than protective. But after twenty years of dealing with a stalker who was adept at internet and tried to fuck with my job at one point, I do now tend to value closing off legal vulnerabilities with certainty, and as a bonus it doesn’t imply insult to the professions of law.
Right. Techies are always quick to suggest I do something naughty or funny with this "great power" I've unwittingly gained, but in reality it's just a liability. If I ignore it and they do something nasty and implicate me, it's a pain. If I touch it with a 10 ft pole, now I'm even more actively involved.
Just include "not me!" In the verification email, dam it
I think it’s more like you registered the car in their name. Now they’re allowed to use it, and also responsible for the thing which they didn’t want.
Consider that the “imposter” starts uploading child porn or something, and it’s on an account registered to your address. I think it’s perfectly A-OK to tell the service that it’s not me using the thing and I want them to close the account someone created in my name.
On the other hand, in Hong Kong it would be straight to jail. Someone was sent a link by the airlines, he changed a couple of characters and it ended up showing another person’s data. The guy voluntarily reported the vulnerability and all he got was a criminal charge and found guilty
I’m a different person, but this happens to me, too. I have the kstrauser@yahoo.com email address because I signed up for it like 25 years ago. I log in every 6 months to see what the few other kstrausers in the world have signed me up for.
Not jsmith, but kstrauser. Not Gmail, but Yahoo. And I still get banking docs, and HOA meeting minutes, and birthday party invitations, and Facebook logins, and other bizarre random stuff.
I have so many questions. I’ve typoed my address before and had to correct it. That’s understandable. But to wholly invent one and say, yep, that looks good even though I’ve never used it before, I’m sure it’ll be fine! I just don’t get it.
I have a catch-all on a .com.au domain where there exists a later 1000+ people organisation with the equivalent .gov.au. I get what you described but from many, many people - divorce proceedings, legal discussions, financial documents, health things, etc.
Yeah I have josephg@gmail. The amount of spam that account gets is wild - about 50-100 emails hit the inbox per day. I got soft-locked out of google docs a few months ago because my google account's 25gb quota was exhausted.
Some of the emails are really unfortunate stuff. "Your account was added as a backup address." - Then inevitably, a few weeks later, dozens of password reset emails. Sorry bud. I've received pay stubs. Orders and invoices. I get phone bills every month for someone in India. Its chaos.
Early on I'd sometimes reply to these random emails telling people they've got the wrong address. The most astonishing reply I ever got was from HSBC bank telling me I needed to come into the branch to change my email address. Over the course of a week, I explained about 3 times that that was impossible. That I live in Australia. That I'm not their customer, and its not my account. Eventually they told me they were disabling online banking on my account. Now I've given up replying at all.
Send emails into that pit of PII misery if you want. I don't read them.
I had one that person seemed to think their @twitter name was the same thing as my gmail address. Haven't seen it in a while, maybe they figured it out after I told their kid's teacher they had the wrong person...
That may be what they're hoping for, using a similar modus operandi as those WhatsApp/IM messages from strangers who text you with things in the vein of ‘Hey, it was great meeting you at the conference’ or ‘Did Martha like your flowers?’ etc.
A few months later, the owner of the u/batman account added my mail as password reset mail.
I looked up the account. It was hardly ever used in 15 years, mostly for once in a blue moon dropping in a random comment role-playing as Batman. It was not obviously anyone I knew. It looked like they were basically inviting me to take over the account.
That was actually a bit tempting, but then the owner, whoever they were, would know who I was, and I still didn't know who they were.
(For that reason I've changed the name, it wasn't Batman, but it was equally "I can't believe you got THAT as your Reddit username" rare.)
So I clicked "this wasn't me" instead. After a few weeks the account was deleted by the owner. It seems they were willing to burn a 15+ year old account with a super-desirable (to many) name in order to get me back to Reddit, and then when I refused they just deleted it. That was VERY weird, and I wish I knew what was going on.
There are times where you just can't... someone uses my email address in person at tractor supply co. and I'm getting a ton of marketing email I can't usnsub to.
I've had this happen several times... There's a lawyer I used for a dispute a few years ago, and they now have another "First Last" name that matches mine, and he keeps emailing me... my reply, "Wrong Michael, again..."
It's kind of annoying all around... I need to get off my butt and get a few things shifted, then just start relying on my own MTA again, instead of forwarding *@mydomain to my gmail to. I'll still wildcard the domain, but to a single mailbox on my own mta.
I'm not sure how bad the spam might get though... I've had a test account on my mta for a couple years and it hasn't really recived any... my wildcard accounts either... I use the wildcard so I can do things like walmart@mydomain, to see if/where an email address is sold/leaked from regarding spam.
they have to open the envelope to see what's inside - they get mail that is not ideas and they have to open it.
But I assume the people who get the mail are trained to see if the envelope contains ideas to stop reading and return the mail with the canned lawyer response.
you can get a lifetime fan just by replying to a letter - like you see here. That's a very effective marketing.
I got a rejection letter once from a company I submitted my resume to (online) and I still remember that and in a positive light even though it was a rejection.
Now they just ghost you even if you went through 5 rounds of interviews and spend a bunch of your time.
Plus for many years Word was one of the main cash cows for MS, so they didn't want to make an editor that would take away from Word.
And you could see how adding new things adds vulnerabilities. In this case they added ability to see/render markdown and with markdown they render links, which in this case allowed executing remote code when user clicks on a link.
I noticed significant slowdown on my home computer, so I did some optimization - namely turning off some services.
AI related things, one drive (this could be one of the reasons file browser is slow), widgets on the screen like news and weather, some other optional/not needed things.
They added a lot of not needed crap to File Manager. I think it's almost better to install a third party one.
This is why I don't get so many of the "windows is fine" arguments here. It's always "Windows is fine if you run LTSC and dick around with the registry and disable these 37 specific services." If I'm going to have to futz with it constantly, why would I pay money for the privilege?
Others responding to my speech by exercising their own rights to free speech and free association as individuals does not violate my right to free speech. One can make an argument that corporations doing those things (e.g. your Play Store example) is sufficiently different in kind to individuals doing it -- and a lot of people would even agree with that argument! It does, however, run afoul of current first amendment jurisprudence.
Either way, this is categorically different from China's policies on e.g. Tibet, which is a centrally driven censorship decision whose goal is to suppress factual information.
> Either way, this is categorically different from China's policies on e.g. Tibet, which is a centrally driven censorship decision whose goal is to suppress factual information.
You'll quickly run into issues and accusations of being a troll in the "free world" if you bring up inconvenient factual information on Tibet. The Dalai Lama asking a young boy to suck on his tongue for example.
Pretty sure that event was all over the western web as a gross "wtf" moment. I don't remember anyone, or any organization, that talked about it being called a troll.
I see you trying to equalize the arugment, but it sounds like you are conflating rules, regulations and rights versus actual censorship.
Generally the West, besides recent Trump admins, we aren't censored about talking about things. The right-leaning folks will talk about how they're getting cancelled, while cancelling journalists.
China has history thats not allowed to be taught or learned from. In America, we just sweep it under an already lumpy rug.
- Genocide of Native americans in Florida and resulting "Manifest Destiny" genocide on aboriginals people
- Slavery, and arguably the American South was entirely depedant on slave labour
- Internment camp for Japanses families during the second world war
- Students protesters shot and killed at Kent State by National Guards
I had prepared a long post for you, but at the end I prefer not to take the risk.
You may believe or not believe that such exist, but EU is more restrictive. Keep in mind that US is a very rare animal where freedom of speech is incredibly high compared to other countries.
Not really, I was thinking about fake news, recent events, foreign policy, forbidden statistics, etc.
The execution is really country-specific.
Now think that at the EU-level itself, they can fine platforms up to 6% of the worldwide turnover under the DSA. For sure they don't want to take any risk.
You won't go to jail for 10 years, it's more subtle, someone will come at 6 am, take your laptop and your phone, and start asking you questions.
Yes, it's "soft", only 2 days in jail and you lost your devices, and legal fees but after that, believe me you will have the right opinion on what is true/right or not.
For what you said before, yes, criticizing certain groups or events is the speedrun to get the police at your door ("fun" fact: in Greece and Germany, saying gossips about politicians is a crime).
The US is way way way more free. Again, it's not like you will go to jail long time, but it will be a process you will certainly dislike, and that won't be worth winning a Twitter argument.
Spreading fake news (especially imagery) or insults fall in defamation cases, politicians or not.
Germany is indeed a bit harsh on that.
But in any case you're really cherry picking very very rare examples, if you want to feel the US is "way way way more free" and you're convinced about that good for you.
>Private entities might have their own policies, but government censorship is fairly small.
It's a distinction without a difference when these "private" entities in the West are the actual power centers. Most regular people spend their waking days at work having to follow the rules of these entities, and these entities provide the basic necessities of life. What would happen if you got banned from all the grocery stores? Put on an unemployable list for having controversial outspoken opinions?
CBS News installed a new editor-in-chief following the above merge and lawsuit related settlement, and she has pulled segments from 60 Minutes which were critical of the administration: https://www.npr.org/2025/12/22/g-s1-103282/cbs-chief-bari-we... (the segment leaked via a foreign affiliate, and later was broadcast by CBS)
TikTok has been forced to sell to an ally of the current administration, who is now alleged to be censoring information critical of ICE (this last one is as of yet unproven, but the fact is they were forced to sell to someone politically aligned with the president, which doesn't say very good things about freedom of expression): https://www.cosmopolitan.com/politics/a70144099/tiktok-ice-c...
I hope it's because I have small simple email and not because they want to steal it.
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