I Am Mark Zuckerberg

https://iammarkzuckerberg.com/

by jb1991 • 9 months ago

1286 428 9 months ago

iammarkzuckerberg.com

koolala2• 9 months ago

it is pretty funny

lukan• 9 months ago

Mostly

"I routinely receive death threats and harassment on the Messenger app directed to the "other" Mark Zuckerberg"

koolala2• 9 months ago

you'd hope they would notice their mistake before its too late

Fire-Dragon-DoL• 9 months ago

He should be glad to be a lawyer, otherwise he might have spent so much money dealing with the name lol

chao-• 9 months ago

The best bit:

Like I said, I don't wish Mark E. Zuckerberg any ill will at all. I hope the best for him, but let me tell you this: I will rule the search for "Mark Zuckerberg bankruptcy". And if he does fall upon difficult financial times, and happens to be in Indiana, I will gladly handle his case in honor of our eponymy.

According to the Algorithm Lords of my particular filter bubble, he does indeed rule the search results for "Mark Zuckerberg bankruptcy".

geoffbp• 9 months ago

I wonder if he’s ever had anything positive happen because of it. That list looks like a PITA :)

XenophileJKO• 9 months ago

The "rich" Mark Zuckerburg should give him some compensation for the hassle.

That would be right thing to do.

burnt-resistor2• 9 months ago

Answer the question: What would an asshole do? They would buy up their neighbors' houses to make an unapproved mega compound, buy up ancestral Hawaiian land to block communal land access, and do unlicensed shit without permits making their remaining neighbors miserable. So what is right by virtue is unlikely to happen because almost all billionaires are legitimized criminal aristocrats subject to a different set of rules than average or poor people who are killed in the street for selling loose cigarettes like Eric Garner.

lpln3452• 9 months ago

No. The individuals genuinely at fault here are

1) those who inflict harm on others, considering that being wealthy or disliked does not justify actions such as death threats

2) those who target the wrong person simply due to a shared name.

Any discussion of compensation should be directed at them.

Freak_NL3• 9 months ago

He should at the very least ensure that there was some kind of liaison person at Meta for these not quite as rich (and certainly less obnoxious) Mark Zuckerbergs to reach in case of trouble with his service. This lawyer Mark should just have his account flagged with a huge 'Vetted, this guy is called that; leave it.' notice for any Meta algorithm or employee looking into it.

eknkc• 9 months ago

I share the same name with a local TV star in my country. Even that is a PITA. Can’t imagine being named Mark Zuckerberg or Michael Jackson or anything like that.

At some point there were teenager girls calling me (no idea how they got the phone number). I started acting like they called the right person and there would be happy screams on the other hand. I guess the high point was that. I decided that might not be a good idea though. Would definitely continue if my “fans” were middle aged men.

rzzzt4• 9 months ago

Michael (A.) Jackson is the inventor of representing programs in this diagram format: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jackson_structured_programming

nickserv2• 9 months ago

Michael Jackson is a fairly common name though, I went to school with one. Also with a George Washington, he had a harder time...

mat0• 9 months ago

Good for you, Mark! I had a nice chuckle. On a more serious note, I really feel for the people that cannot get any kind of support and try to get some help by messaging "the owner" of the social network they are in. With big companies, you used to be able to get someone to talk to you when you had a problem. Not anymore. The best you can get is a well trained LLM

debtta3• 9 months ago

I mean another theory is that those people are misguided and vexatious, and that this correlates with them not actually checking which Mark Zuckerberg they are sending their urgent complaint email to.

Propelloni• 9 months ago

Good for you, Mark! I had a nice chuckle.

Me too! Mark S. Zuckerberg seems to be a relaxed guy with a good sense of humor. Very likeable presentation!

dan-robertson• 9 months ago

What do you think happens today if you mail a letter addressed to the CEO of a big company (or their office)?

glenneroo2• 9 months ago

Please try... for science... and write about it and post here referencing this discussion. Thanks! :)

a5c114• 9 months ago

A couple of years ago when I still was on Facebook, I had a problem with my account being falsely accused of hacking. I believe it happened because I had been chatting with my friend about computer malware.

All my chats were gone, and I couldn't write to any of my friends. "Okay, I will just reach the tech support, and solve the problem" - silly me back then. I was genuinely shocked that there was no "Facebook support". Just a bunch of FAQs, general help, and that's it, no way to talk to anyone. I felt completely helpless and lost, really unpleasant feeling.

My account got back to normal after one day or so, but that was the day I decided to begin the process of leaving that platform.

alex11382• 9 months ago

Facebook will ban you for the most odd of reasons, but report actual gore etc? Well now, that doesn't actually violate our TOS/community guidelines/blah

Gmail/Google has the same problem but I suspect and correct me if I'm wrong that it's less surface area to ban you - unless that did happen to people on Google+? But Google+ also didn't have its founder famously tell people "...they 'trust me', dumb fucks"

lifthrasiir2• 9 months ago

rzzzt4• 9 months ago

Close approximation: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_v._MikeRoweSoft (this was not Mike from "Dirty Jobs" but a different person)

lifthrasiir2• 9 months ago

Yeah, but in this case MikeRoweSoft.com redirects to microsoft.com after the settlement. Uzi Nissan was able to keep his domain to this day, even after his death in 2020.

swiftcoder• 9 months ago

Man, litigating versus a 12 year old boy has got to be the easiest job in the business - "Will you settle for an Xbox and a bundle of games?"

cyberax• 9 months ago

A more hilarious example: https://korrespondent.net/strange/522473-belorus-soobshchivs... ( translated: https://korrespondent-net.translate.goog/strange/522473-belo... ).

Cockbrand• 9 months ago

Also somewhat similar, the first large domain name dispute in Germany, in which a person called Andreas Shell held the domain shell.de:

https://www-heise-de.translate.goog/-55795?_x_tr_sl=auto&_x_...

German Original: https://www.heise.de/-55795

swrobel• 8 months ago

First thing I did was check https://nissan.com which apparently I haven’t done in years. RIP Uzi!

makeitdouble5• 9 months ago

On the "fake name" thing:

I felt guilty reading it, as in many past companies "Mark Zuckerberg" (and Bill Gates, and Tim Apple, Elon Musk etc) was indeed often used as a placeholder for test accounts and test data, and it never crossed my mind that we were basically training ourself to also treat a "Mark Zuckerberg" on our service as an account that escaped the sandbox or some other attack on the service.

whatsupdog• 9 months ago

Lol, it's Tim Cook, Mr. President.

f4c39012• 9 months ago

Tim Apple is an awesome mnemonic

makeitdouble5• 9 months ago

It was kinda funny from across the pond, the first time around. Putin horse riding topless was also a funny meme.

Looking back at that period is depressing af.

rzzzt4• 9 months ago

Hopefully there aren't too many people with the name "First Last" running around.

makeitdouble5• 9 months ago

It was tricky to use too literal names, as they're basically the placeholders in the input forms for instance, or the translations keys.

To defend a bit the choice for somewhat realistic names, there is a gestalt decomposition where you're looking through "First name" first names for hundreds of lines. Same for Lorum ipsums, designers' reaction are completely different when the page looks somewhat realistic and isn't just a blatant test.

jowea• 9 months ago

This is why we should replace names with uuids.

joshu• 9 months ago

that is silly. Obviously it should be the hash of someone’s genetic code plus the hash of the mind state vector at last checkpoint (to account for twins and clones)

generic92034• 9 months ago

Even monozygotic twins do not have absolutely identical DNA. And even with clones I bet there are many errors in cell replication, besides the epigenetic differences.

drdaeman• 9 months ago

Right after we upload minds into machines.

chistev• 9 months ago

See, someone told me few days ago that sarcasm doesn't work via text. Lol

nrhrjrjrjtntbt3• 9 months ago

Even better: social security numbers

defraudbah2• 9 months ago

lol, if it's downvoted that's how you know americans did it, because people from other countries have no idea why SS number is important or what it is

swarnie• 9 months ago

A quick tattoo on the arm and your set for life.

actionfromafar• 9 months ago

And forehead. Maybe four letters, on a scarlet base.

speed_spread• 9 months ago

I'm _Not Sure_ this is a good idea

ed_mercer• 9 months ago

"Ohhh, if it isn't 99adbad3-f3c8-4c52-99d8-be692c62b9db again! Man, what a blast last Friday at e128001f-9737-4245-b08b-73bc50db0204's party, right?"

debtta3• 9 months ago

I just go by Ad Bad. Yeah I know about the other guy. E7 123 and the other college friends call me Ad Bad 3 and him Ad 88

chabska2• 9 months ago

That's impractical. Someone made a base8192 Hangul UUID conversion, only ten characters long.

GCUMstlyHarmls• 9 months ago

Well obviously in your personal circles you'd still use nicknames.

99ad and e128 in this case.

nrhrjrjrjtntbt3• 9 months ago

But you'd call em 99ad for short in casual conversation

keyle• 9 months ago

okay, mr... nullptr

agnishom2• 9 months ago

At the very least names should be unique strings, preferably pronouncable

prashantsengar• 9 months ago

Correct horse battery staple

mFixman2• 9 months ago

You need to have a restricted set of allowed syllables to prevent attackers from having names with similar pronounciation to common ones.

In unique name world I would totally for a scammer telling me "Hello, my name is Marck Zuckaberg, give me all your data".

Symbiote2• 9 months ago

In The Dispossessed by Ursula Le Guin, the anarchists have names assigned at birth by a computer, guaranteed to be unique. They are gender-neutral (I think their artificial language doesn't have the possibility for gendered names) and monomial.

(I highly recommend reading the book, it's one of my favourite novels.)

pnut2• 9 months ago

Urbit IDs https://urbit.org/overview/urbit-explained/urbit-id

tmtvl2• 9 months ago

Pronounceable by *someone* or by you? Try getting together a native Cantonese speaker, Arabic speaker, and Inuktitut speaker and find a name all three of them can pronounce without noticeable issues.

AmbroseBierce3• 9 months ago

Sorry but I am voting for the opposite solution, meaning:

    with Session( engine ) as session:
        youngest_ids_subq = (
            select( func.max( People.id ).label( "max_id" ) )
            .group_by( People.name )
            .subquery()
        )

        purge_stmt = (
            delete( People ) 
            .where( People.id.not_in( select( youngest_ids_subq.c.max_id ) ) )
        )

        session.execute( purge_stmt )
        session.commit()

    unique_idx = Index( "uq_people_name", People.name, unique=True )
    unique_idx.create(bind=engine)

sebastiennight4• 8 months ago

So as the younger iteration, our friend Mark would now own bankrupcy offices now, on top of his shares in Meta, and be protected from impersonation forever.

Your version of the Purge would make an interesting Stephen King movie.

ricardo812• 9 months ago

An IPv6 would also. Then this chap could have his website hosted on it.

marginalia_nu• 9 months ago

I propose we use UUIDv4 to interfere with any attempts to build demographic databases.

chtitux• 9 months ago

I strongly suggest UUIDv7, with our birthdate encoded as time.

Ordering the world population by birthday becomes so easy. Plus no endless discussion on wether or not we should use UUID as primary key.

dsego2• 9 months ago

We do have personal numbers used for identification purposees, in my country we have the OIB

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personal_identification_number...

which superseded the JMBG

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unique_Master_Citizen_Number

eastbound• 9 months ago

Countries don’t really want unique IDs per person, even though it would extremely simplify all administrative work, because:

- How can spies have false identities, if you can account for every individual?

- The only scalable way to get voters is not to make people switch to the opposite party, but to flood a country with people who will vote for you.

foobarian• 9 months ago

JMBG? One of the ex-YU countries?

nvarsj2• 9 months ago

What is more likely to happen is a global namespace of unique names. Famous and powerful people get to pick first, because they are more important. Names can be inherited and become signs of your class and wealth.

You get to be Bob192382, because you got in early and only had to add 6 numeric digits. In the year 2100, we're at 15 digits.

poly2it2• 9 months ago

How would this be enforced? Do you get punished on social media if you claim you are Bob?

gcanyon• 9 months ago

15 digits

A billion (-1) is only 9 digits, even with only one "name" that would likely be sufficient, or 10 maybe digits at the absolute extreme.

nvarsj2• 9 months ago

I guess people missed my sarcasm here.

See the username efforts of tech companies like Discord, etc.

ChrisMarshallNY7• 9 months ago

Every time that kind of thing is suggested, people go on about “The Mark of the Beast.”

This is why we can’t have nice things.

DonHopkins• 9 months ago

Everyone should get their own emoji that looks just like them.

sebastiennight4• 9 months ago

My parents had me done one for my first ID card! They called it "a photo".

vintermann3• 9 months ago

Don't give the Unicode consortium ideas!

greesil2• 9 months ago

That would make parties a bit awkward, but it would avoid collisions.

hoppp• 9 months ago

Hi,my name is 1bd0a30d-b415-4747-9650-f1f6e530cd2a, can I get you something to drink?

mihaaly• 9 months ago

As someone moved several times in my life I could support (potentially several) personal uuid with global post routing service. Having declaring new postal address to all essential and random places one by one where I was mandated to give out to receive something I couldn't miss (authorities, banks, essential service providers, all else) is a common nuisance in an otherwise difficult period of life. Having a trustful[*] service (preferably post services itself, trusted parcel services) that translates a postal uuid to a current address each time a postal mail is supposed to be sent, current living address is righfully needed, would be a great advance (some countries have a postal address change service locally, some partially, that does similar).

[*] trustful, yes, that is a hard nut to crack! Who can be trusted with physical address and for what purpose, but in some sense it may be better for its controlled nature rather than the wild west of postal address world that we live in.

ronbenton• 9 months ago

As someone who already has trouble with names, I endorse this. Now everyone will feel my pain

augusto-moura2• 9 months ago

Which version? Probably UUID v7, right? So names can be easily indexed in a btree database

busymom0• 9 months ago

I vote for [nanoid](https://github.com/ai/nanoid).

gwbas1c• 9 months ago

I dare you to name your kids UUIDs and see what happens.

I suspect when they are old enough to change their names, they will. For example, Wavy Gravy's son changed his name back to a normal family name: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wavy_Gravy#Personal_life

avestura• 9 months ago

Some names are problematic, like this one. Some others are lucky [1] (I know it's a joke)

[1] https://ifunny.co/picture/go-gle-most-popular-actor-in-video...

ivolimmen• 9 months ago

Even with people that are not famous it can be difficult. My wife knows three people with the same name. So when I ask with whom are you going out she needs to add the city to make me understand.

lazide• 9 months ago

Part of why in many times, ‘of x’ was a common ‘surname’. Also, profession - basically ‘Bob the Smith’, ‘John the Baker’, etc.

A lot of places (India, Brazil) still use one of your parents on official documents to disambiguate (Bob Smith, son of John (or Jill) Smith from Smithville).

mjd3• 9 months ago

There's a lawyer in Philadelphia named Justin Bieber.

I'm not sure which would be worse.

defraudbah2• 9 months ago

haha, you are in trouble, i am calling justin bieber!

AmbroseBierce3• 9 months ago

The data is pretty clear, Justin Bieber, specially in February 2011 (but improving since) https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=%2Fm%2F0...

tuzemec• 9 months ago

Who is Justice Beaver?

---

Sorry, an old joke from The Office and I couldn't resits...

wslh• 9 months ago

If I were him, I would start singing and sending my music as a side project.

incanus77• 9 months ago

I know the guy who had Twitter/X @Justin (also my name) early on and he would constantly get mentions for “@Justin Bieber” because people didn’t understand the space.

swyx• 9 months ago

there's several dudes named Jeffrey Epsteins out there who i assure you have far more negative associations

pinkmuffinere• 9 months ago

Having the same name as a famous person seems like a decent marketing benefit. And funnily enough, that’s achievable with some paperwork in many areas of the world! I wonder how/if this interacts with trademark (or other?) law. Can I change my name to Sundar Pichai? If so, then why haven’t a bunch of techbro founders done that already?

andsoitis• 8 months ago

Can I change my name to Sundar Pichai? If so, then why haven’t a bunch of techbro founders done that already?

Yes, you can. But it’d be stupid.

jopsen• 9 months ago

Sometimes your life would be easier if you just changed your name.

ncr1002• 9 months ago

It's unjust.

Freak_NL3• 9 months ago

Sure, but if tomorrow some dude with the same name as me decides to go on a killing spree, or sexually assault a toddler, I'd change my name. Just or unjust.

I'd have to change my email domain too though, so that would suck, but at least I could put up a website there explaining my new name and that I am not the now world famous terrorist who shot up a kindergarden/fondled the pope/ate a baby.

jbreckmckye• 9 months ago

"Why should I? He's the one who sucks"

hunterpayne• 9 months ago

He could easily use his middle name or go by Marcus. Just saying...sounds terrible having to deal with all the insanity.

awestroke• 9 months ago

I wouldn't want to humiliate myself by letting The Zuck prevent me from using my own name

debtta3• 9 months ago

Why should I change my name? He's the one that sucks.

kristopolous• 9 months ago

ctrl+u this ... there's some nice parts commented out

Freak_NL3• 9 months ago

That lost bit of sample HTML below the body is cute too:

    <a href="https://www.example.com" target="_blank">Link Text</a>

It gives the site an artisanal feel.

burnt-resistor2• 9 months ago

Michael Bolton: https://youtu.be/WjZKVKxZcAo

stillworks• 9 months ago

I celebrate the guy's entire catalog.

llamasushi• 9 months ago

Lol, this reminds me of a funny story. I had a lawyer whose name was Jim Halpert. Turns out he was the very Jim who was inspired his namesake on the office. Asked him about it once. His reply? "Hey, it's been great for getting clients." =)

He was also very much like Jim on the show. Fun times.

Biganon2• 9 months ago

Did he look at the camera after replying?

firefax2• 9 months ago

I've heard of this guy, but not met him. My CEO told me that I remind them of Jim Halpert and I was like "Really? The guy from the Office? I always pictured myself as more of a Creed"[1], which made them bust out laughing and declare "That's such a Jim thing to say" and wander off after explaining that it's based on a real person.

It made me wonder how many of those characters are based on real people, since they themselves reminded me of another character I'll omit for privacy's sake...

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AeZ6a1A0-ow

piker• 9 months ago

Interesting look into what Zuck and other mega celebrities experience day to day. I'm sure Zuck and others of a certain stature have many protection layers, but surely some things slip through and it's interesting to consider those just a tier lower that can't afford all of the security, etc.

Reminds me of the Bill Murray quote: "I always want to say to people who want to be rich and famous: 'try being rich first'. See if that doesn't cover most of it."

unyttigfjelltol• 9 months ago

The website security model breaks down when people constantly try to enter your password.

The currently model assumes good behavior by most people most of the time in order for basic web services to function. Seems like an obvious vulnerability to malicious activity.

makeitdouble5• 9 months ago

Yes. Outside of the sheer security, people telling rich people they're fake will just warrant a cute condescending laugh and they go on with their life, while the guy here is basically denied his identity.

ChrisMarshallNY7• 9 months ago

With the Internet, you can now be famous, without being rich.

Many of the truly rich people are quite anonymous. The billionaires you read about are really just the tip of the iceberg.

lordnacho4• 9 months ago

Plus fame minus rich is probably not great. You can get a lot of unwanted attention that you can't avoid by moving or hiring guards.

squigz2• 9 months ago

Rich is relative. Famous YouTubers/streamers/etc making even a few hundred thousand a year would be considered rich by much of the world.

xg153• 9 months ago

Also interesting how the definition of "famous" has changed due to that: We now have thousands of "micro-celebrities" who undoubtedly have a fan/celebrity relationship with their specific audience, yet are completely unknown to a wider audience. So even fame is now a relative term.

DiscourseFan• 8 months ago

Many of the truly rich people are quite anonymous

Are you trying to tell me that there are people out there worth more than Elon Musk who are not throwing money at political campaigns, funding mass projects or cultural pursuits? Because, yes, its possible for someone who is worth say, half a billion or even up to maybe 10 billion dollars or so to stay out of public life, but at a certain degree of wealth that wealth becomes institutional and closely tied to political power, so it becomes functionally impossible to remain fully anonymous. What state, what government would allow a private citizen worth so much money to go untaxed, without that person somehow being tied to the government? Or are you saying that the state, which commands use of force and violence, would not use that force to extract wealth from those who are not apart, directly, of its apparatus?

xg153• 9 months ago

I wonder if the emergence of "virtual celebrities" like VTubers has anything to do with that. Seems like the best of both worlds: You get the loyal fanbase and positive energy of a celebrity, but can also simply "log out" of that identity if it would negatively impact your "real" life.

a5c114• 9 months ago

Depends. If you are a really recognisable persona and you just log out one day, then expect a bunch of psycho-fan creeps looking for you in the real world.

dangus• 9 months ago

I’ve heard stories of celebrities having things like hotel room and rental car reservations canceled because people thought they were playing a prank.

withinboredom2• 9 months ago

This is why people like my wife exist. They solely are the “human in the loop” on reservations making sure a human on the other side knows it’s legit. It’s a fascinating field.

Lerc2• 9 months ago

It's something to remember when considering the reactions and attitudes of extremely high profile people. If you've ever felt bad because of a shitty comment posted by someone you don't know, you have just a fraction of what some people have to endure. Even when you know the comments are unreasonable and 'haters gonna hate' there's still some damage done.

High profile figures may appear distant, callous, or even fully radicalised by that onslaught. While you shouldn't have to blindly accept poor behaviour from people just because of their fame, I think you should still try to have compassion for their situation. If you think in terms of a bad person compared to bad behaviour we risk normalising a response to that behaviour that creates a feedback loop that exacerbates the problem.

Part of me wonders if there is nothing to be done. Perhaps the worst of people will still create enough poor feedback for someone famous enough. Will the majority being more compassionate mitigate the problem, I'd like to think so.

nullc• 9 months ago

At times I'm mused that man is perhaps calibrated to live in tribes of 100. If you're known to ten million, however, you can get the 100,000x the correct dosage for whatever attention your actions draw.

Hard to fix, -- since even if people were considerate enough to make a tenfold reduction you'd still be overdosed by 10,000x.

alex11382• 9 months ago

Like for example how Facebook search results and graph search seem to encompass an ever enlargening circle of Friends Of Friends (and if not just reset the privacy settings to public anyway)

mjd3• 9 months ago

Dennis Ritchie (co-inventor of the C programming language) had a page on his personal web site called “My other lives” with a list of other Dennis Ritchies.

“Outside of my main professional career, I have accumulated other WWW-recorded accomplishments and have other interests. Generally I pursue these interests using separate mail addresses, SS#, and DNA.”

It's preserved here:

https://www.nokia.com/bell-labs/about/dennis-m-ritchie/other...

Fnoord3• 9 months ago

It's preserved here: https://www.nokia.com/bell-labs/about/dennis-m-ritchie/other...

Which is preserved here [1]

[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20250919063134/https://www.nokia...

tigerlily• 9 months ago

This made me feel the world is huge and I know nothing about the lived lives of others.

latexr• 9 months ago

You’re experiencing sonder.

https://www.thedictionaryofobscuresorrows.com/concept/sonder

https://www.dictionary.com/browse/sonder

SXX2• 9 months ago

Easy living. Go try to register company, open a bank and then send few payments if your name is "Vladimir Putin".

throwaway290• 9 months ago

any sanctioned individual. Some of their names are super common. Sorry Ivan Ivanov, you are on the list, no bank account for you. based by a true story.

(meanwhile the sanctioned Ivan is chilling on his yacht with 3 passports and 5 golden visas)

spacechild12• 9 months ago

Wouldn't they at the very least compare the birth dates?

steve_taylor• 9 months ago

I once received a number of hateful mentions and DMs on Twitter because I share my name with a 60 Minutes Australia journalist who was the producer on a story about Conrad Murray (Michael Jackson's personal doctor). People really are that stupid.

fastasucan• 9 months ago

I worked with a guy that shares the name with the Norwegian mass murderer who targeted children at a youth camp. I think had some pretty though years, but never changed his name.

siva7• 9 months ago

I can't even imagine how you would go on with this name if you're living in europe as it guarantees instant recognition almost anywhere.

ricardo812• 9 months ago

It's good that he has his own website! I can relate (for non famous reasons) about the Facebook issues. I can't even sign up any more, using my real name anyway.

It can be a pain as so many local organisations use Facebook as a free way to share information. Unfortunately if you're not logged in pages can be rate limited, get spammed with modals to sign up, can't scroll very far into any feed and probably in his case a nuisance as a platform for his business.

ra• 9 months ago

poor bastard he cops all the flack

olirex99• 9 months ago

This website looks a lot like the one of Saul Goodman from Breaking Bad.

a5c114• 9 months ago

I think that's the usual way the american attorneys advertise. I kinda like that style. In Poland, attorneys aren't allowed to advertise that expressively, which I think is a stupid regulation.

firefax2• 9 months ago

Poland's universal health care also removes the incentive for the type of lawyer who most commonly uses "Saul" style advertising -- personal injury attorneys.

It is a big business because people need to recover their costs or be render homeless is someone hits them with their car or whatever.

As a fun cherry on top, part of the opioid crisis stems from people abusing prescription drugs to return to work sooner than they would in the EU.

jb1991• 8 months ago

This is his personal site not his law business site, which he links to in the page.

shevy-java• 9 months ago

Mark Zuckerberg may soon sue Mark Zuckerberg about name issues.

I most assuredly would not want to be Mark Zuckerberg. That name is not inspiring to most people. (Also, by the way, because Zuckerberg is perfectly fine german: Zucker = Sugar, Berg = Mountain, so a mountain of sugar. That's not good for your health either, in particular your teeth.)

precommunicator• 9 months ago

already did https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c5yk810pgkko

nickserv2• 9 months ago

The Facebook founder's father was a dentist, which is pretty funny given the name.

firtoz• 9 months ago

How do Chinese people deal with name conflicts?

If I wanna check the internet for someone, I find it impossible because for a lot of names there's at least thousands of people with the same exact full name. It must give both a feeling of safety but also frustration if you may want to stand out.

nurettin• 9 months ago

India is an interesting subject with so many Kumars and Prasads. They probably don't try to stand out with their name brand.

rwmj2• 9 months ago

In Korea: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kim_(Korean_surname)#Clans

Gigachad• 9 months ago

From what I can tell, official documents rely on ID numbers, and for the social side, people can just come up with informal more unique names. But I'm not an expert.

liqilin15672• 9 months ago

How do Chinese people deal with name conflicts?

In a big company, there are often many people with the same name. some companies may add a numeric suffix to their name like abc1, abc2, abc3.

We usually don't use our real names for social media accounts

Agraillo• 9 months ago

We usually don't use our real names for social media accounts

It's interesting how cultural differences can make some life algorithms hardly work in some countries. I sometimes use a method to find people from my past by googling their full name, switching to the image results, and spending a manageable amount of time scrolling through them until I find the person. I've successfully used this method several times. The images are usually related to job activities or social media profiles. However, from your description, this approach probably won't work in China for at least two reasons: too many raw results and few or no social media results.

UPDATE: a follow-up question. If in a big company two or more figures happen to have the same full name and need to be exposed publicly (on a site or promotional materials), are there any tricks for this?

petesergeant• 9 months ago

Indonesia is next fucking level.

Javanese names used to commonly be mononyms, was only required that people have a surname in 2022.

In Bali, children are essentially numbered. First kid is called Wayan, Putu, Gede, or Ni Luh. Second kid is Made, Kadek, or Nengah. Third kid is Nyoman or Komang. Fourth kid is Ketut. Fifth kid? They go back to Wayan. Most of these names aren't gendered, either.

WhyNotHugo• 9 months ago

A lot of names which are spelt differently in Chinese are translated to the same Latin spelling. So there’s a lot less conflict than it seems.

skopje• 9 months ago

moslem naming is also not very different sometimes. lots of duplicate names like ahmed ahmed and mohammad mohammad. must be very frustrating! (it would be interesting to know how they manage it, since i do not know any of them personally.)

croisillon• 9 months ago

i went to his professional website https://zucklaw.com/ and ironically the accessibility features there are largely inaccessible

2dvisio• 9 months ago

In the south of Italy where families were very close to each others, children abundant, and passing the name of grandparents to first and second borns was expected people ended up with tons of namesakes. I have 6 people in my direct family who all share same name and last name.

xdavidliu• 9 months ago

One time in around 2008 when I was in undergrad, I got facebook requested by a guy named David Liu (same name as me) who was going to a school many thousands of miles away, and I noticed that he had facebooked about 20-30 other David Liu's.

About 3-4 years later, I was in grad school, I meet this guy in person (he happened to be going to the same grad school), I recognize his name and face, and let him know that he facebooked me back then, and he got a chuckle out of it.

anonu• 9 months ago

Reminds me of this prank where you call two people with the same name and you conference them together and have them figure it out.

Zhyl• 9 months ago

The most recent episode of the BBC Satire Radio show "The Naked Week" reached out to hundreds of name-alikes to get them to comment on a recent UK news story.

They ended up interviewing Taylor Swift, an MMA instructor from Cheltenham, UK.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/m002lppb

damethos• 9 months ago

This is pure awesomeness. It made my day.

mdtrooper• 9 months ago

In Spain we have 2 last names:

- first last name from last name first of the father.

- second last name from the last name first of the mother.

And with this method we have collisions.

In Portugal the last name come from the mothers.

luckys• 9 months ago

In Portugal you can have one or more last names, but the very last one will be from the father's side. Unless both parents have the same double-barreled name? Never seen that here.

bertil2• 9 months ago

A friend of mine has a relatively common first name and last name, and she regularly gets mail that is clearly not meant for her. She started a Facebook group for homonyms to help her route mail, and it now have a hundred members and have helped people get important documents.

At some point, they even organized an impersonation because someone needed to retrieve an official document and couldn’t be there in person. Another member nearby offered to go and get it. “Won’t you need my ID for that? — Oh, I have one with just the right name…”

mywacaday• 9 months ago

I'm Irish and have a common firstname.lastname@gmail.com At some point the head of a national hospital thought he had that address and wasn't using his official email for everything, I got several emails that should not have been for me and some were quiet sensitive, I always emailed back the sender to let them know and eventually I emailed his secretary as it kept happening. I've also received purchase order confirmations from Australia, building contracts from Canada, HR emails from a university to which I had to confirm I had deleted the mail as letting them know led to GDPR investigation

baubino• 9 months ago

I’m in the midst of a similar situation. My firstinitial.lastname email keeps getting very sensitive legal documents from law firms handling the case of someone who does not seem to know what their actual email address is. I called the firm and told them they needed to have an in-person meeting with their client and get a correct email address from them. That seemed to help for a few months. But now I’m getting emails again from a different law firm.

rkomorn6• 9 months ago

My spouse suffers from this as well. It's bananas to me how many people use that email address clearly thinking it's theirs.

mcv2• 9 months ago

There are several people with my name at the company I work for. I frequently get email meant for someone else.

Worst was at another company where a person with the same name has just left, so they gave me that email address. Turned out he was subscribed to several Confluence pages for which I now received updates. But I didn't get his Confluence account, so I couldn't unsubscribe from those updates.

cogogo• 9 months ago

I have a canonical gmail address for what I thought was not such a common name pair. I get so much sensitive stuff. I used to email the sender but I have given up. One of them runs a business and the businesses that interact with his business just keep emailing me. Or stop for a couple of years, change personnel and start right back up.

heffer• 9 months ago

Same here. My Google Account is something along the lines of jose86@gmail.com (a common hispanic first name + birth year; I'm German).

It's unusable. I have received full blown mortgage applications from couples in Mexico (including paystubs, tax forms, credit ratings, phone bills, passports). Mostly, these days, it's transaction notifications for a guy in Nigeria and phone bills for people in South America.

MaxBarraclough• 9 months ago

I'm Irish and have a common firstname.lastname@gmail.com

At the risk of nitpicking, @gmail.com email addresses use a dots don't matter policy [0] so really you have a common firstnamelastname@gmail.com and are free to add dots wherever you like.

[0] https://support.google.com/mail/answer/7436150

zukzuk• 9 months ago

I have a relatively rare name — I’ve actually never met anyone with my last name, never mind someone with my full name — and this happens to me regularly. Last week I got a job rejection from New Zealand post, for a while I was getting someone’s pay stub notifications from the US, etc.

I suspect it’s because I was the first to register the first.last@gmail.com address for my name. I guess it’s a bit like owning a simple noun .com domain.

donohoe• 9 months ago

I use my lastname [at] gmail (same as my HN username). Over the years, I’ve received all sorts of misdirected messages: medical, financial, support, even real estate documents. When it seems important, I do my best to contact the sender and let them know.

What I’ve learned is that “no-reply” email addresses can cause real harm in situations where it’s critical to reach an actual person.

giancarlostoro3• 9 months ago

I have met someone with my last name, if its not hyphenated, which mine is. My name is as unique as it gets with hyphenating. I never use my hyphenated name anywhere other than 100% legal stuff.

notahacker• 9 months ago

I have a sufficiently uncommon last name to be able to figure out which branch of the family the misdirected emails are meant for. Was quite nice getting updates from the chip shop we used to get fish and chips from when we went to visit grandma, intended for someone who afaik I never met.

cootsnuck• 9 months ago

Yea I own first.last@gmail.com for my name too and I get emails for who I think is the same person fairly often. Like job stuff, professional education emails, etc. I used to reply to them saying wrong person but have given up...the guy must not care about not getting these emails...

My first name is very uncommon and my last name is very common.

Grazester• 9 months ago

My address is the same. Someone with my name thinks their email address is firstlast@gmail.com

Its annoying especially since we have the same bank and they are not very good at paying their credit card on time. I therefore get their bank emails. Initially It will always have me confused as weight wait. I don't have any balance on my credit card. Was this fraud?

mrec• 9 months ago

I'm in exactly the same situation - very rare last name, first.last@gmail.com address, wrong mail from all over including NZ.

torben-friis2• 9 months ago

My name isn’t super known, but it happened to be the same as that of a very big fish in the financial institution I worked for.

Thankfully these people were working mostly through physical meetings and calls, so no sensitive info was leaked, but I did get calendar invites to discuss the future of entire countries as an engineering intern.

I used the name a couple times to set up our internal meetings in the fancier upper floors, so we could have whiteboard discussions over a fancy hardwoods table. No one questioned the name appearing in the entrance display as the current user.

georgeburdell• 9 months ago

Not identical, but I once shared most of the first name as well as my last name with a VP of research at the company I worked for, and we were in the same technical field. My (much less impressive) publication record got confused with his frequently and I always wondered if it gave me a career boost.

bitwize• 9 months ago

Nice to meet you, Jeff Lebowski.

antidamage• 9 months ago

My deadname was not only owned by some other people in my industry, it was also used by someone else born in the same hospital, same ward on the same day, on the same morning as me. That was endlessly irritating.

Glad to see that after five years post abandoning it my contribution to the name is basically gone from the internet now.

burningChrome• 8 months ago

> My name isn’t super known, but it happened to be the same as that of a very big fish in the financial institution I worked for.

Same thing happened to me. My name in outlook was the right under a high up VP. Outlook auto correct would bring my name up at the top of the list so people would just hit enter and write their email.

Same thing, I was getting some emails I clearly should not have been viewing, with budgetary spreadsheets and names of people who were being considered for layoffs.

One of them I sent back to the VP and diplomatically explained the mixup. I didn't get any emails for a few months and wondered how they fixed the situation. I guess they gave the VP and underscore in his name instead of the normal firstname.lastname@company.com so now when I typed in my name, his came up first.

deanishe• 8 months ago

We had a board member who frequently emailed confidential documents to a security guard with the same name as another director.

It was his iPad's fault, apparently.

Yetino• 9 months ago

The other end of the spectrum has its own problems too. My first and last names are both quite rare — deliberately so, thanks to my parents. That means when someone, say a potential employer, googles my name, it’s reasonable for them to assume every result they see is about me. For a while, I actually liked that. It felt like having a unique identity online. Until one day I discovered someone else had created a YouTube channel under the exact same name. Presumably they happen to share this unusual combination legitimately — but the content on that channel wasn’t exactly what I’d want showing up when someone searches for me. I tried to “correct the record” by setting up my own channel, just to add some better signals. But since YouTube isn’t my thing, my videos barely register, and Google still insists on showing the other person’s channel first.

eru7• 9 months ago

I wonder if I'm accidentally doing that to someone.

My complete name is rare, but I share it with a journalist who's quite a bit older than me.

fortran772• 9 months ago

My firstname / lastname isn’t common but if you google it you get a disbarred attorney with the same name. I’ve been asked on interviews about being disbarred; I know then that someone at the company is a sloppy “researcher”.

reactordev3• 9 months ago

I did a similar thing during lockdown Covid era. Got online and rounded up everyone with the same name as me as we all decided not to tarnish the name, to build respect on the name, and each of us to excel in our fields. It was powerful. One’s a musician/DJ in buenos aries, the other a mechanical engineer for SpaceX, me - a software leader, another is a luthier making traditional folk instruments, and one is a writer across the pond in the EU.

A few years later Tina Fey did those commercials where she pulled in other Tina Feys and we all messaged the group like “Hey! They did it too!”. I’m sure many others did it. The world is so connected now that you should reach out and learn about your “alter-egos”.

Anyways, this reminded me of that and it’s nice to see other people have similar experiences being weird with, I guess themselves.

mysterydip• 9 months ago

I once worked at a company whose lawyer shared the same first and last name. Rarely I would get an email and then a "please don't read that, delete immediately" afterwards.

linohh• 9 months ago

That is so incredibly smart. I have a very common gmail address (initial + last name) and literally hundreds of people use this mail address and I would love to resolve the countless issues I can witness from getting the mails alone, but I essentially have no chance at all.

jacquesm3• 9 months ago

At some point, they even organized an impersonation because someone needed to retrieve an official document and couldn’t be there in person. Another member nearby offered to go and get it. “Won’t you need my ID for that? — Oh, I have one with just the right name…”

That's a felony in many places.

kingkawn• 9 months ago

Shhh, snitch

dahart4• 9 months ago

If it hypothetically was a crime, I wonder how often it would actually get prosecuted given someone used their real ID, showing the office failed to check anything other than a name known to have dupes, and/or given they had no intent to steal something and acted with knowledge and permission of the intended recipient, showing no malicious intent. I can imagine reasons those wouldn’t be considered a valid defense, but I guess it probably depends on what office & document & law we’re talking about.

toast05• 9 months ago

Is it? An authorized agent picked up the document. Someone with matching ID picked up the document.

Where's the crime?

bertil2• 8 months ago

I think you are massively overestimating the legal follow-through of an administration with opening hours so tight and irational they would be scadalous at a lingerie show.

speckx• 9 months ago

I have a similar username on a "social media" site as the founder's username. I would get hateful personal messages, requests for favors, begging for money, etc., constantly. At first I would respond to correct people, but after years and years I stopped. I just disable notifications for that site and never read my mailbox, personal messages, etc. This has been going on for about 19 years now.

dietr1ch• 9 months ago

It's ridiculous that the US still runs on name matching when you could just have a public Id number (unlike the SSN that everyone needs to pretend it's secret).

TheNewsIsHere2• 9 months ago

We still have to pretend SSNs are private until both law and common practice change. I expect that to be “functionally never”. Maybe within our lifetimes. Maybe.

My SSN is out there several times over at this point, thanks to breaches at phone companies, insurance companies, CRAs, ISPs, and the rest. I stopped tracking breaches that included the kind of info you’d need to impersonate me, about six years ago. The list was long and it seemed to be a pointless exercise by then.

I also have a mixed credit file with all major CRAs because of more than one person with the same name I have, one of whom lived in the same area.

Even if I didn’t have freezes everywhere, over the phone KBAs stopped working years ago even with my SSN.

abhiyerra• 9 months ago

I have nickname@berkeley.edu as my alumni email address and I get a lot of interesting emails directed towards more important people…

s0rce• 9 months ago

I have a common first initial and last name and that's my gmail and I get more email for other people than myself

cbsmith• 9 months ago

I have this problem badly enough I was interviewed for this article: https://www.wsj.com/lifestyle/workplace/work-colleague-same-...

You wouldn't believe some of the things that have shown up in my inbox.

ChrisMarshallNY7• 8 months ago

I had an Australian criminal defense attorney with my name, register the .au version of my personal domain.

I used to get very sensitive documents sent to me. A lot of juvenile cases. I suspect people could have gone to jail for sharing it.

It's really on the sender, to make sure, but it's still a nasty situation.

It eventually stopped. I think they ended up registering a different domain name. I used to diligently respond, when sent erroneous documents, but never got a reply. I destroyed them, but there's no telling where other copies might have gone.

sceptic123• 8 months ago

I have a relatively uncommon first name (for my age group) but a very common surname. The first person I met with the same first name as me was when I was about 13 — they also had the same surname.

mrgaro• 8 months ago

I used to have a very common name (before getting married and took my wife's last name). Imagine that I have firstname.lastname@gmail and somebody was genius to take firstname.lastnam@gmail.

I felt this was so stupid, that i quickly lost any willingness to try to relay the emails to their original owner, as the other person had zero interest to change their address to be harder to mistype.

bloovis• 9 months ago

My ex-wife had the same name as a woman in another state who had beaten up a cop and done jail time. So every time my wife's driver's license came up for renewal, the DMV decided she was that criminal, and refused to issue the license. This happened so often, she eventually was on a first-name basis with the DMV director, who had to intervene every time. I'm guessing this problem due to the DMV in our little state using an ancient computer system, perhaps written in COBOL in the 1960s. I can just see the code now, where it compares the name, but not state of residence or any other identifiers.

noja• 9 months ago

Did she share the same DOB?

lordnacho4• 9 months ago

Are criminals not allowed to drive?

dirtybirdnj• 9 months ago

No, those are the people who refuse to upgrade the old COBOL systems. They are allowed to drive.

phyzome• 9 months ago

We might be missing information, such as that the person who beat up a cop also had their license suspended.

Simon_O_Rourke• 9 months ago

I would send business that guys way if I could, he seems like good people, unlike the more famous Zuckerberg.

lordnacho4• 9 months ago

I have a fairly common name, along with an uncle of the same name. I found a few others as well, and was thinking of visiting the business of one of us. Sadly, that Nacho passed away, so the plan is not going to happen, but at least we got a chuckle out of sending out the NYT obituary to various friends.

cube00• 9 months ago

Time for other Zuck to sort out his SSL.

Firefox does not trust this site because it uses a certificate that is not valid for markzuckerberg.com.

The certificate is only valid for the following names: *.facebook.com, *.facebook.net, *.fbcdn.net, *.fbsbx.com, *.m.facebook.com, *.messenger.com, *.xx.fbcdn.net, *.xy.fbcdn.net, *.xz.fbcdn.net, facebook.com, messenger.com

Ylpertnodi• 9 months ago

Thanks for the list. Blocked.

dogman1050• 9 months ago

My name is so common that people laugh and say, "come on, what's your real name?" There are two of us in our little town. When the other one robbed a convenience store I started getting calls from friends who thought it was me. I also look like many people, to the point that I once told someone, "no, I'm really not your cousin."

bryanrasmussen• 9 months ago

Hey, this is one of those rare folks Facebook doesn't even know about! https://medium.com/the-haven/5-people-facebook-doesnt-know-a...

stacktraceyo• 9 months ago

For a long time I would get hardcore stopped and hassled at the airport cause my name matched a terrorist. Although I was born in the USA. Made no sense to me why our system would flag someone just by name

donatj• 9 months ago

After we got acquired I suddenly found myself getting invitations to many many meetings I had no place in. It took me a number of years to figure out it was down to myself and the companies lead architect sharing the same given name. At the time we were the only two Jesse's in a pretty big company. The problem seems to have gone away since we hired more.

hasbot• 9 months ago

I have the same name as a former MLB player. We both use Yahoo Mail. I was there first and use my name without the middle initial as my email address. He uses his middle initial. I've received many emails for him where people have overlooked the use of his middle initial. Sometimes it takes me a second to realize the mistake and I'm wondering WTF is this email on about.

mcdonje3• 9 months ago

I would change my name. Family tradition isn't worth the hassle. The older people in my family would eventually get over it. This harassment will not stop.

vintermann3• 9 months ago

The Facebook founder can change his name, he already changed his company's name. Mark Metaberg would surely be a more unique name.

mcdonje3• 9 months ago

But he won't

smrq• 9 months ago

"Why should I change? He's the one who sucks."

mcdonje3• 9 months ago

That was funny in the movie. In real life, he won't change. You're the one who has to deal with constant avoidable frustration.

fiatpandas• 9 months ago

Could anyone shed some light on the password reset email “hack”? I don’t really understand the attack sequence if the attacker doesn’t have access to your inbox. Even if you clicked them they don’t get access. My conclusion is trolling / annoyance.

The same thing happens to my Instagram account, which is an old 3-letter username that is desirable. I get hundreds of reset emails per month, all generated by the real service with legit outbound links.

willsmith722• 9 months ago

how much are these services wasting sending out these emails? surely some rate limiting would be sensible

mr_toad2• 9 months ago

Compared to the torrent of actual spam this is just a drop in the bucket.

toast05• 9 months ago

What are they wasting, other than recipient time?

Hundreds of reset mails a month is probably rate limited; otherwise it would be hundreds a day.

eru7• 9 months ago

If our Mark here ever thinks his live is too easy, he should consider moving to England, specifically Scunthorpe.

willsmith722• 9 months ago

As a Will Smith with no acting abilities I can relate. I have heard it got my resume to the top of the stack out of curiosity though

Findecanor• 9 months ago

I live in a relatively small country, but my first and last name are very common over here.

There have been at least seven others with the same name in my city (population 1M) who had bought computer equipment in the same shop. In the country, there are at least three other software engineers, of which one had published his undergrad thesis on the same topic as I had at about the same time.

random29ah• 9 months ago

"Welcome to iammarkzuckerg.com"

Okay, the site needs a little revision =p

tpoacher• 9 months ago

Yes I also spotted that and wondered if it was intentional or not

Nursie• 9 months ago

I’m have a very common first name and moderately common second name. The people who I have discovered that share my name have been nothing but a pain in the arse.

There was the Guantanamo inmate who managed to get me flagged for extra checks on every flight I took from around 2005-11.

Then there was the guy who leased some mining equipment and failed to pay, which somehow ended up on a background check for me for a job.

emsign• 9 months ago

Something tells me Mark E. Zuckerberg might need the services of Mark S. Zuckerberg soon.

HeavyStorm• 9 months ago

Another successful Zuck? What a blessed name.

Lerc2• 9 months ago

My namesake was(died a few years back) the wealthiest person in the city I live in. He was worth peanuts compared to my brother's namesake who made billions through some sort of Lisp derivative shenanigans(or something along those lines, it's unclear).

ordu• 9 months ago

In Soviet Russia... Or not so Soviet but rather "modern" Russia, people are facing treason charges due to mistaken identity. Such a story unfolds right now: https://bereg.io/feature/2025/11/09/my-zhivem-v-raznyh-mirah

avalys• 9 months ago

The most recent hilarious example of this was a British newspaper that contacted “Bill DeBlasio” by email for comment on the NYC mayor election (Bill de Blasio is a former mayor of NYC), without ever verifying (or apparently, even asking) that they had found the person they intended.

https://www.semafor.com/article/10/29/2025/british-newspaper...

The man at the heart of a high-stakes mix-up that rippled through global political journalism in the final days of the New York mayoral campaign was neither “falsely claiming” to be former Mayor Bill de Blasio — as the Times of London suggested — nor, as The New York Times wrote, a “de Blasio impersonator.”

He is, instead, a 59-year-old Long Island wine importer named Bill DeBlasio, who merely responded to an email from a journalist seeking his views on Democrat Zohran Mamdani’s policies.

“I’m Bill DeBlasio. I’ve always been Bill DeBlasio,” DeBlasio said in an interview conducted Wednesday evening through his Ring doorbell in Huntington Station, Long Island, from his current location in Florida.

“I never once said I was the mayor. He never addressed me as the mayor,” DeBlasio told Semafor. “So I just gave him my opinion.”

Polizeiposaune• 9 months ago

Another recent name collision story: https://www.yahoo.com/news/articles/british-newspaper-spoke-...

(Note the slightly different spelling; the former mayor is "de Blasio", while the wine importer is "DeBlasio")

quote:

He is, instead, a 59-year-old Long Island wine importer named Bill DeBlasio, who merely responded to an email from a journalist seeking his views on Democrat Zohran Mamdani’s policies.

“I never once said I was the mayor. He never addressed me as the mayor,” DeBlasio told Semafor. “So I just gave him my opinion.”

failingforward• 9 months ago

“said in an interview conducted Wednesday evening through his Ring doorbell in Huntington Station, Long Island, from his current location in Florida.”

We are truly living in the future.

ThrowawayTestr• 8 months ago

Video doorbells have been around for a long time.

rebewhd• 9 months ago

Similar situation here. My name is far from unique, but it's not common either. My best known impersonator is a prolific sci-fi author.

Whenever I'm introduced to someone and they perk up at my name, it's almost guaranteed that they're fans of that author. Then I have to disappoint them... Still, it's a good conversation starter.

ChoGGi• 9 months ago

I'm more interested in what your opinion on their works is? Are you a fan of yourselfsake?

nayuki• 9 months ago

When I was in university a decade ago, a classmate of mine shared the same name as some high-ranking university staff. The classmate's university email account received some unsolicited confidential messages that were intended for the staff, not him.

zeroq• 9 months ago

Reminds me of CV lcamtuf published on his website shortly after leaving Google. A single page that mainly said: "my name is Zalewski, yes, that Zalewski".

jart• 9 months ago

Sucks to have all the downsides of being famous, but none of the benefits.

dspillett• 9 months ago

A couple of decades ago I got sent some potentially sensitive (not sure how sensitive, I read as little as possible) employment related messages intended for someone with a name very like mine (same forename and middle name, surname differed by two typos, they also had the relevant <surname>.net domain).

I replied politely saying that I wasn't who they thought I was, and that I'd deleted the messages, and the buggers threatened to sue me if I continued to receive any more messages that they sent! This was an American firm, so there was no language barrier involved, though apparently an intelligence gap.

I didn't contact the other person until that threat, but at that point I looked him up and passed on that part of the comms trail with a “just to let you know what sort of idiots and litigious fools you are dealing with…” note.

dbg31415• 9 months ago

Just a reminder that there are ongoing issues where Facebook prevents Native Americans from signing up or being allowed to use their legitimate names because their legal names are judged “inauthentic.”

This has been documented for well over a decade. Facebook has publicly promised changes, but the problem persists and support responses appear weak. Almost like they don’t care at all…

https://www.vice.com/en/article/facebook-is-still-making-it-...

todotask2• 9 months ago

I’m Jet Li, not the real master. People laughed and couldn’t believe it, but both of us live in Singapore.

tlogan• 9 months ago

A friend of mine worked for a company with “cloud” in its name, but company had nothing to do with computer clouds.

He said they got at least two calls a day from angry people complaining that their “cloud” wasn’t working (he’s pretty sure most of them meant iCloud).

iambateman• 9 months ago

This article gives a window into both how oppressive social media can be for high-profile folks and how confused a LOT of people are basically all the time.

It also helps me remember that there’s a lot of people out there who are pretty angry and feel unheard.

The world’s a tough place for a lot of people.

mikewarot• 9 months ago

Last I heard, the other Mike Warot was a guard at the British Museum. I'm sure there are more.

My brother in law, William Morris, got me more than one notice when his caller ID showed up at the marketing firm I used to work at. ;-)

A few years ago, I was trying to find fun things to show my friend Ward, and you wouldn't believe how many Ward Christensens there are mentioned in newspapers.com.

This must be some analog of the birthday paradox.

neilv2• 9 months ago

I'd never heard of anyone with the same name as me, until '94 or so, when I put up a Web page, and some nice person with the same name contacted me.

Name-wise, apparently there are at least two instances of a Dutch man (surname) unable to resist the marriage-material charms of the Irish.

Decades later, my namesake and I have email addresses differing by one letter, and I still forward email intended for him.

My namesake is accomplished and respected, and at least once I inadvertently rode on his reputation. A remote colleague referred offhand to me being a volunteer firefighter, apparently having Web searched, and confusing me with my better namesake (whose contributions include being a fire chief).

neilv2• 9 months ago

Some kinds of law specialties can get fun marketing.

In Boston, a personal injury lawyer is recently doing a bus advertising sign that seems to be a play on "Better Call Saul" (of the scrappy fictional TV series character's ads).

https://www.reddit.com/r/boston/comments/1nboypw/someone_at_...

pogue• 9 months ago

I think I would rather change my name than deal with all that, tbh.

rboyd• 9 months ago

I wonder if Facebook Mark ever receives emails from people needing bankruptcy help. It goes both ways.

_-_-__-_-_-• 9 months ago

I share my name with a corporate lawyer living a few hours away. Maybe one day I'll cash-in on that domain name.

matthewfcarlson• 9 months ago

I am fascinated by the people who just send a request to mark zuckerburg for money in Venmo. I guess shoot your shot, it costs you nothing. But still

andrewinardeer• 9 months ago

I got halfway through an exec level interview process with an international food service conglomerate due to them trying to internally promote my namesake.

comonoid• 9 months ago

"I don't know who they are, but their attorney is Mark Zuckerberg".

coltnz• 9 months ago

I rue the day (in 2004/5?) I got my name as my gmail address. My first name is not rare and my surname very common. Since then I've collected an eclectic group of homonyms who I just can't get out my inbox. The list includes: the retired English nurse who races remote control yachts and never pays his telco bill, the South African gold miner whose best new spots I am privy too, the NZ sports shop chain owner with a large property portfolio linked to my identity, the English lad on probation who ignores my suggestions to improve his dire CV presentation, and the Perth member of an illegal motorcycle group who is called occasionally to ride outs for fallen members.

sandspar• 8 months ago

You must have the most English name imaginable!

muhammadusman• 9 months ago

my name's Muhammad Usman, let me tell you, there are 1000s of us out there if not more. It's very hard to get a username without numbers on any site except somehow I got it on HN :D

WastedCucumber• 9 months ago

This post is somewhat related and always makes me chuckle:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43929724

snitzr• 9 months ago

https://nissan.com

nadermx• 9 months ago

I mean, I guess since he is on the front page of Hacker News, he is in fact the real Mark Zuckerberg

brunoff• 8 months ago

My name is composed of three parts, each one is common, but I thought that their sequence was supposed to be rare for statistical reasons. I sometimes searched for it in the internet to take a look of how my homonyms were going. Before 2010 they were few in terms of search results, but as years passed by, they started to show their faces. Most of the time they weren't bringing good news, like for example writing a best seller. I remember one year, a news site said one got killed by a shot. Then a few months later another one was also shot. I even sent a joke message to a few close coworkers "sorry, I won't be able to show up at work tomorrow. reason: I got killed (again) - <link to news>".

Another name "rareness" related story. Somewhere around 2010's I was backpacking east Europe and border police hold a train from Croatia to Slovenia for something like 15-20 minutes asking me to prove that I really was myself. Then they released me and let the train enter the country, but even so the police randomly appeared to ask my specific documents (in places that there were other people they came and asked only my docs). Then it started happening in other countries, most (but not all) countries started to hold me on the border control for one hour or two to do some clearance. Then in Argentina the border police said that someone with my whole name AND birth date was in some kind of interpol search list. Then two or three years later it stopped happening. I am sure someone stole my id and commited some crimes and then he was caught, because it is impossible to someone with my same three name and birth date happen to be in a interpol list just by coincidence. Interpol lists have how many people? 25k? Divide by days in a year. 69 have born in same day as you. From those, one have the same name as you.

CHB0403085482• 8 months ago

Singer Katy Perry vs Sydney designer Katie Perry

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2025-09-09/high-court-to-decide-...

maebert• 8 months ago

I literally just hired Ben Horowitz last month, but I must assume that mine is the better systems and integrations engineer so I consider myself having getting the better deal.

kinleyd• 8 months ago

OK. I avoided this post for a while, and then had to find out what was up. It was worth it. Ha ha, it brought a bit of levity to my afternoon.

steve469• 8 months ago

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mghackerlady• 8 months ago

Honestly the more I read the more I felt bad for the guy. Like yeah, having your personal facebook disabled a bunch is funny but I couldn't imagine getting a bunch of threats directed towards you is very good for the psyche, especially while getting hundreds of calls a day

integer_i• 8 months ago

My name is Jonathan Apple, a variety of a fruit.

If I want to find myself in a search engine I usually have to add -fruit -trees.

I work in tech so the jokes are endless.

Jotalea• 8 months ago

this reminds me of Adolf Hitler Unnona [0]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adolf_Hitler_Uunona

I Am Mark Zuckerberg

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