On Wed, 06 May 2009 20:30:25 +0100, Orchid XP v8 wrote:

>>> Carefully hiding my real name and my employer... and yet, it turns out
>>> to be trivial for anybody who actually cares to discover this
>>> information. (By *multiple* routes.) How precarious life is. :-/
>> 
>> Well, to people who talk to you regularly, you've given enough clues.
> 
> More like, I'm too stupid to hide the information.

Nah, it's not stupidity, it's a part of being friendly and talking to 
people.  I post with an e-mail address of "nos### [at] nospamcom".  It 
wouldn't be hard from the information I've written here to guess my work 
e-mail address:

1.  You know my company, so start by adding ".com" to the company name.

2.  Do a google search of "@company.com" to see if anyone else has used 
their address publicly.

3.  See if the naming is consistent from one account to the next.

4.  Make an educated guess as to what my address would be.

Of course you don't need to do that because I gave you my personal e-mail 
address in another message here with some minor obfuscation. :-)

> So Greats said that the greatest knowledge is in knowing that you know
> nothing. Ah, the sweet sting of being reminded. :-/

I prefer "the more you learn, the more you realise you don't know".

>> Years ago, I managed to track down a deadbeat dad who'd gone AWOL (with
>> one of his kids) from the US military.  His fatal mistake?  Having a
>> CompuServe account with a membership in a D&D gaming forum that used
>> his character name - a unique name (not something like "Caspian", but
>> something that he'd created) that a friend of mine who gamed with him
>> knew.
>> 
>> Turned it over to the authorities, and his ex-wife got to see her
>> youngest son for the first time in something like 10 years...to this
>> day she doesn't know that I was the one who found him.
> 
> ...remind me to NEVER piss you off! o_O

Heh, in fairness, he hadn't pissed me off (I never met the guy myself).  
I was just curious if I could track him down - and once I did, I realised 
that it was likely there is a law in Utah that says that if you know 
where a deadbeat is and don't tell the authorities, you could get into 
trouble.  So I didn't really feel I had a choice at that point.

Jim

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