But it does provide interest perspective on the cost of not owning THE domain name for their company. Perhaps they should rename the company.
Disclaimer lest their be any mistake: I am totally charmed and bedazzled by the real gail.com, and hope that web archeologists of the future will still find gail.com running a hundred years from now. I just thought the post didn't deserve downvotes.
Perhaps they are confusing it with the San Francisco Armory, a historic building the NIMBY neighbors blocked from being converted into housing so a porn company bought it instead and turned it into a production company instead.
Yes. I guess a few years of this was more than even the NIMBYs could take. It's now owned by some capital group seeking to build housing there, but new NIMBYs will come to the fore to block it, and the combo of declining SF real estate prices and rising interest rates may well make the project unviable, since a developer has to pay interest for a decade or more while stalling tactics delay approval.
Can't think why they'd add NSFW to that site, it's a plain text site primarily. I guess there may be something NSFW in the FTP archive somewhere, but I think that's probably an overactive filter.
As someone already mentioned nearby in the thread it could easily be something in the “purity test” content that has tripped an automatic naughty word filter.
It could even be the name of the site, depending on the location weapons and such might be considered NSFW (or for overly strict companies, not-relevant-for-work-we-dont-know-why-you-are-wanting-to-look-at-it-in-work-time!).
My only complaint is it goes full wide screen. If he put a limit on the width the text expands to so it was readable on large screens that would be perfect.
No, the page layout is likely designed to be readable on anything that speaks HTTP. Including text-based browsers, mobile devices with low bandwidth and performance, screen readers, etc.
All you have to do to get the text width you want is resize your browser window.
for the uninitiated, you're looking for an audio file at the above link. you need to delete your HN referrer in order to do that because jwz is a "special" kind of adult.
The trouble is that everyone else's idea of "reasonable" is about 1/3 of what I want. You can all make your browsers narrower, but I've got no way to make your sites wider :(.
I worked a block away in 2017-8, when the street-level floors housed retailer Totokaelo (RIP). I'd go window shopping just to be able to explore it a bit.
The basement held a giant vault, converted to shoe merchandising duty [1] … an apt commentary in the late aughts (and now, for that matter).
Q: Gail, your website contains some pretty controversial stuff; aren't you worried about laws like SOPA being passed?
A: Yes, if SOPA passes, my little piece of the 'net could be blacklisted. This is why I urge you to please support the Electronic Frontier Foundation, who will fight to protect your rights from the corporations who seem to have Congress in their pocket. Here’s a link to the EFF’s website where you can learn more: http://eff.com
A: Like SOPA and PIPA before it, the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act (CISPA) attempts to further errode our rights on the 'net. Also like SOPA and PIPA, we should do our best to inform ourselves and others, and kick this bit of evil to the curb before it can even come to a vote in Congress.
In short, CISPA is a very broad and loosly written law that allows any private company to give any and all data it has collected on you and give it to the government without any kind of judicial oversight. This is some seriously scary Orwellian stuff our own government is trying to implement, and it needs to be stopped.
To start educating yourself about what's going on, please read this great Wired article about the massive data center the NSA is building in Utah to house and data mine your personal data (e.g., telephone calls, e-mail, credit card charges, etc.) This article was written by James Bamford, who literally wrote the book about the NSA back in the early eighties. Once you've read the article, head over to the Democracy Now website and watch the interview with William Binney, who worked for the NSA for almost forty years and provided Mr. Bamford with some of the information for his article. Want to help do something about this knuckle-headedness? Head over to the Electronic Frontier Foundation website and learn how to help.
(Both the CISPA and SOPA questions are gone by 2014 and replaced with the EFF "ad".)
Another one that used to amuse me every time I mistook its domain for that of the magazine was http://www.theeconomist.com, but I see it is now long gone.
I think this is a good example of how if your desired username/domain is already taken, there’s usually a clever tweak you can do to get a similar one that works. In the case of Steam they went with “steampowered.com” instead.
It makes me wonder why so many people go with like “firstname225” rather than spending a couple of minutes coming up with something little bit less silly-looking. In fact there was a funny thing for a while where a user iterated through all the @kevin(number) Twitter users every Friday: https://www.gawker.com/5895578/weird-internets-how-one-man-i...
There are like 8 billion humans alive at any given moment though, so this trick doesn’t scale for usernames. “Just be a little creative” has been extremely unlikely to work for years now at say…gmail
It must have been nice to have been alive in the early internet where barely any domains were taken.
On the bright side domains have been less relevant since the rise of accessing sites via search engines and the move to mobile apps whose stores don't suffer from the squatting issues.
They were much more expensive in those days IIRC - today they are the cost of a couple of coffees, those days they were more like 25% the cost of a new computer... per year! It was also quite inaccessible in terms of purchasing - contracts, call our sales team etc. Things like GoDaddy were still either non-existent or very nascent in the mid-late 90s when I was just starting out as a early teen online.
I had dreams as a youngster of owning my own domain name (just one!) and running my own site there... Now I don't even know how many domains I own!
-- in the early 90s you could easily get domains for free - there were many registrars who would give you free .com or .co.uk in return an iframe that advertised the registrar! - this all but disappeared after 1995 =( --
I remember getting a free .co.uk domain name around the year 2000. Can't remember the business model but it was probably similar to the underpant gnomes.
In the mid to late 90s, domains cost $50 per year, and you had to buy the first two years up front, so a domain cost $100. Nowhere near 25% of the cost of a new computer which were much more expensive back then.
In the UK I recall being quoted about £200 a year for a domain (this may have been direct from nominet or non-consumer company for a UK one - as I mentioned the services in the mid-late 90s were less developed and it was harder to just buy online, especially without a credit card which you cannot have in the UK when under 18). Our pentium PC was £899 IIRC.
The most famous story that I can think of was the one of the Wired journalist that bought mcdonalds.com and that the company didn't seem to care for a while. Eventually said journalist just gave the domain to them in exchange of a $3500 donation to a public school in NY.
> since the rise of accessing sites via search engines
This is worse as now you have to compete with ads (potentially from scammers) and SEO. At least with domains, once you register all the major misspellings for a nominal fee, the problem is resolved. With ads, it's an auction so you're constantly paying a protection racket to the search engine to outbid the malicious actors.
<!-- Okay, if you really want to see a photo of my cat and have resorted to looking at the source HTML, here is a photo: https://gail.com/boxcat.jpg -->
I find it even technically outstanding. Is that some sort of natural Moire pattern on it's back? Spliced-in turkey genes? I find this cat oddly fascinating.
Makes me wonder at how much bandwidth would be consumed by putting an image of the cat embedded in the page, with the volume of unique people typoing gmail.com on a daily basis.
It's so refreshing to see someone on the Internet not looking to make easy money showing off some lousy advertising. I would love to know more about the author; she's most likely interesting.
GAIL[1] is also the name of a publicly traded Indian Oil Company. Just like most pre-Internet companies that "comes online", they also went with gailonline.com just like how SBI went with sbionline.com. However, for SBI, I saw recently that they have become pretty Internet savvy -- they own the `.sbi` TLD.
This GAIL came to my mind as well. I feel there is no reason for GAIL (India or Brasil) to have a .com email domain since they don't really depend on internet traffic for their day to day business.
That gets repeated a lot, but I've never seen a confirmation. There may be a perception like that because non-classic TLD are usually cheaper, which leads to easier spam. But that's still a problem with the specific domain, not the TLD.
The only confirmed thing I heard is manual email filtering where some people don't understand the bias above and ban all non-com/net/gov emails and think they're clever.
There is some basis of the fear of new gTLDs being unfavorable. Remeber free-as-in-beer ccTLDs like .tk? They were (are?) indeed ranked lowered than .com et al due to their nature as being too easy for a spammer to have a new domain. Nowadays though most search engines now include age of domain in their ranking algorithms so this is no longer a real issue.
Not just manual filtering, there are many automatic/default filters like "KAM_INFOUSMEBIZ = Prevalent use of .info|.us|.me|.me.uk|.biz domains in spam/malware"
It's not a guaranteed strike but I just had a look at the last email I had from a .biz and it got 0.8 added to it's spam score because it had a biz domain. Still got through as it was otherwise legit though.
"vii) it is unlikely that the Respondent was unaware of the Complainant’s trademark considering the fame and tradition of the trademark GAIL;"
Are lawyers allowed to lie like that? It is obviously not unlikely that the someone has never heard of this obscure "manufacturer and distributor of ceramic products for architectural use" company.
This is a summary of claims. Lawyers are generally allowed to make claims based on incomplete information which they believe that they can show to the legally-required standard.
Necessarily, in an adversarial proceeding where there is a material dispute of fact, some claims of one side or the other will be rejected.
I learned that lawyers are allowed to lie like there's no tomorrow, especially in civil cases pre-trial, in my jurisdiction.
This was especially emotionally scarring when I hired a lawyer to rebuke civil claims of several thousand Euros for (supposed) downloading of some TV show episode, a practice which is either considered a national sport, or a major contributor to GNP in Germany (the copyright claims, not the downloading).
The lawyer sent his usual spiel, his €300 template letter to the opposing council, which claimed that I'm a bumbling idiot who has no clue how to power up a PC, let alone plug in a network cable the right way 'round, and thus, can't possibly be guilty of any such shenanigans.
I asked her whether a Linked In-profile that identifies me as a Sys Admin and IT Systems Architect might become a problem with this tale, but various lawyers assured me that this is a highly scripted industry (both the copyright claims and the defenses) and nobody cares. And the scripts are actually legal students sitting at home with access to a fax gateway.
It used to be the same in Germany. There is still the right to "Privatkopie", meaning that one is technically allowed to make both backup copies, and things like a mix tape for a friend. After all, if they denied this, there would be no justification for upholding the leech farm that is GEMA, i.e. the body collecting fees for blank media. These fees are then given to the musicians, fairly (at least if one believes in fairy tales ...).
However, they then decreed that circumventing any copy protection makes this illegal. Also, if the source of the material is "evidently illegal" (i.e. unlicensed), it's not applicable either. So eventually, downloading off of Bit Torrent without ever uploading MIGHT still be legal in Germany, unless courts declare that this constitutes an evidently illegal source.
And that's the other fascinating thing: there are, to my knowledge, no truly binding judge rulings in Germany most of the time. Unlike English-born case law, a judge might rule for a pirate bay downloader one day, and the next judge rule against another downloader the next day, every other aspect of the cases being equal.
Last I heard, some court had opined that even consuming streaming content, like sports, was illegal now, even with no uploading happening, if the source isn't an established, evidently licensed one.
It's a friggin' mine field really.
(edit): Oh yeah right, there's more. I learned during my defense against their claims years back that it's all as horrible as you'd expect from judges mostly clueless about technology, and then some.
Apparently there was precedence for the following: Let's say someone torrents a Miley Cyrus song. I have no idea why one would do that, but for the sake of example, let's assume. Then the music industry would say: "But there is a torrent, or a zip file or whatever, with that song, and 50 others. Because you downloaded that one song, we legally assume that you downloaded the 50 others, too!" There was at least one court decision where this stood. The state has tried to reign in the rampart threats against citizens by copyright lawyers (it's ** publicity when a grandma gets sued for outrageous amounts). The one thing they did was limit damages to a set amount. Then the copyright holders circumvented that with "legal" "theories" such as the one above. That was also why they stopped going after movie shares for some time, and concentrated on those sharing TV series. Many more individual claims of 10k each to be made, when people download a whole series of TV episodes.
I'm also personally convinced after doing some research that copyright holders give material to specialized companies who in at least some cases are then doing the seeding themselves, in order to catch offenders. There is at least one company in Germany where I have strong suspicion of this happening ca. 2012.
Perhaps we should start a Go Fund Me to create a permanent endowment for gail.com so that it never goes away. This is a precious piece of internet history that deserves to be preserved for future generations.
Can anyone sue you for owning a domain and say that it's their trademark ?? I tought that the .com domains were 100% free of that bullshit..or how else is there so many domain shakals reserving thousands of domains..?
related to their appeal:
https://www.wipo.int/amc/en/domains/decisions/html/2006/d200...
Not only they can sue you, but they can make your life a living hell if you choose to fight them back. See one of the most famous examples: http://nissan.com/
I see. That makes sense. On a related note, I recall that when Gmail came out another domain (Gamil.com) had a funny banner on top saying:"Gamil is not Gmail, but we're glad you're here!".
"You would never guess how many people use asdf@asdf.com (or some variant form) as a filler email address across the Internet. Opening up @asdf.com lets in hundreds of email messages a day pertaining to porn site registrations, real audio downloading, mailing lists dealing with Windows NT ... the list goes on and on! If you would really like to send us an email, you can do so here."
This opened up my eyes. My pseudo is "ploum" and I have the ploum.net domain since 2006/2007. I’ve used the ploum@ploum.net adress for years but it became unbearable regarding spam.
It took me this post to make the link that, in France, "ploum ploum" means "whatever random thing" and that surely people are filling "ploum@ploum" as a random address in every web form.
That's a weird take. I am French, I have never heard (except for Téléphone's song) that expression. The closest thing that comes to mind is "plouf plouf".
Wouldn't it simply be because you have been using (and publicly disclosing) that mail address for quite some time and it probably became part of each and every email list script kiddies are able to get their hands on?
Belgian here. I don’t use "ploum ploum" either (else I would never have this pseudo) but realized over the years that a number of people use this expression. (look on twitter for "ploum ploum" for example).
And, yes, lot of spam is because this email was in multiple exposed account but I’ve received lot and lot of "fresh subscription/confirm your emails" where it was obvious people were simply writing whatever in a field.
Used to work for a software company in 2008 or some such. Back when IBM acquired the company, two remarkable things happened:
One, I heard Microsoft's Ballmer shout through a conference phone (MS had wanted to acquire it, too, but IBM prevailed).
Second, and within context here, I quickly excused myself from the all-hands and discovered that IBM had failed to get the ibm-whatever.com (or was it ibmwhatever.com? not sure) domain.
So I registered it. The next year, I would get loads of miss-guided and personal mail. I used to joke that I was now much better informed about product road-maps than when I was employed there.
My intention with the domain was to hand it over to IBM anyway, for a shirt and some pens or some such token. However, I was informed that much like the US government with terrorists, IBM does not negotiate, and would likely send me the lawyers instead of a shirt. So I caved to the suspected chilling effects proactively, and let the domain expire after a year.
223 comments
[ 3.9 ms ] story [ 260 ms ] threadDisclaimer lest their be any mistake: I am totally charmed and bedazzled by the real gail.com, and hope that web archeologists of the future will still find gail.com running a hundred years from now. I just thought the post didn't deserve downvotes.
WOW
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Francisco_Armory
As someone already mentioned nearby in the thread it could easily be something in the “purity test” content that has tripped an automatic naughty word filter.
It could even be the name of the site, depending on the location weapons and such might be considered NSFW (or for overly strict companies, not-relevant-for-work-we-dont-know-why-you-are-wanting-to-look-at-it-in-work-time!).
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Purity_test
All you have to do to get the text width you want is resize your browser window.
http://www.jwz.org/hacks/why-cooperation-with-rms-is-impossi...
On second thought, I'd rather see the hairy nut in an egg cup than have to listen to RMS singing that.
http://maddox.xmission.com/
He has posts from 1998 to 2020 but I'd say he still actively posts. He's just run out of things to say. lol
https://vimeo.com/ondemand/jaymyself
I did Jay's workshop back in the 90's. He completely changed the way I look at photography and I was an assistant to Ansel Adams primary printer.
I worked a block away in 2017-8, when the street-level floors housed retailer Totokaelo (RIP). I'd go window shopping just to be able to explore it a bit.
The basement held a giant vault, converted to shoe merchandising duty [1] … an apt commentary in the late aughts (and now, for that matter).
[1] https://i1.wp.com/gothamtogo.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/... via https://gothamtogo.com/germania-bank-building-190-bowery-is-...
I'm afraid it just has.
Perhaps it'll go up again eventually. In the meantime, the Wayback Machine: https://web.archive.org/web/20230106230031/https://gail.com/
EDIT: Oh neat, the FAQ's changed over the years too.
https://web.archive.org/web/20120119204931/http://gail.com/
Q: Gail, your website contains some pretty controversial stuff; aren't you worried about laws like SOPA being passed?
A: Yes, if SOPA passes, my little piece of the 'net could be blacklisted. This is why I urge you to please support the Electronic Frontier Foundation, who will fight to protect your rights from the corporations who seem to have Congress in their pocket. Here’s a link to the EFF’s website where you can learn more: http://eff.com
https://web.archive.org/web/20130102160945/http://gail.com/
Q: Why isn't there any content here?
A: All personal web content is hidden on back pages to conserve bandwidth.
Q: Wow, you have a great website, can you suggest others like yours?
A: Yes, here's one of my favorites: http://purple.com
Q: Gail, what is your take on the CISPA bill?
A: Like SOPA and PIPA before it, the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act (CISPA) attempts to further errode our rights on the 'net. Also like SOPA and PIPA, we should do our best to inform ourselves and others, and kick this bit of evil to the curb before it can even come to a vote in Congress.
In short, CISPA is a very broad and loosly written law that allows any private company to give any and all data it has collected on you and give it to the government without any kind of judicial oversight. This is some seriously scary Orwellian stuff our own government is trying to implement, and it needs to be stopped.
To start educating yourself about what's going on, please read this great Wired article about the massive data center the NSA is building in Utah to house and data mine your personal data (e.g., telephone calls, e-mail, credit card charges, etc.) This article was written by James Bamford, who literally wrote the book about the NSA back in the early eighties. Once you've read the article, head over to the Democracy Now website and watch the interview with William Binney, who worked for the NSA for almost forty years and provided Mr. Bamford with some of the information for his article. Want to help do something about this knuckle-headedness? Head over to the Electronic Frontier Foundation website and learn how to help.
(Both the CISPA and SOPA questions are gone by 2014 and replaced with the EFF "ad".)
The current state aside from traffic numbers seems to have come in around 2018-19: https://web.archive.org/web/20190127034732/https://gail.com/
purple.com has since caved.
Nice work, everyone.
Background here: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nissan_Motors_v._Nissan_Comp...
Here is an Archive link for reference: https://web.archive.org/web/20130119083638/http://www.theeco...
[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20161013203919/http://www.steam....
[2] https://web.archive.org/web/20220730090724/http://www.steam....
(The site is offline at the moment.)
It makes me wonder why so many people go with like “firstname225” rather than spending a couple of minutes coming up with something little bit less silly-looking. In fact there was a funny thing for a while where a user iterated through all the @kevin(number) Twitter users every Friday: https://www.gawker.com/5895578/weird-internets-how-one-man-i...
On the bright side domains have been less relevant since the rise of accessing sites via search engines and the move to mobile apps whose stores don't suffer from the squatting issues.
I had dreams as a youngster of owning my own domain name (just one!) and running my own site there... Now I don't even know how many domains I own!
preferably one without hyphens too.
Once upon a time search for songs by The The on youtube was a nightmare, that, at least, has improved.
This is worse as now you have to compete with ads (potentially from scammers) and SEO. At least with domains, once you register all the major misspellings for a nominal fee, the problem is resolved. With ads, it's an auction so you're constantly paying a protection racket to the search engine to outbid the malicious actors.
You probably wouldn't want it to be a 8.5MB PNG
https://www.wipo.int/amc/en/domains/decisions/html/2006/d200...
"The Respondent registered the domain name <gail.com> on April 4, 1996, named after his wife’s given name, as a birthday present for his wife. "
So yes, looks like was wrong. It's his wife's site (A gift)
also, https://www.tandfonline.com/na101/home/literatum/publisher/t...
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GAIL
Is there a link one can read up on it? This looks like insert free real estate meme to me
a short how to register your own TLD can be found here: https://dev.to/kailyons/tutorial-make-your-own-top-level-dom...
Non-classic TLDs get the worst search and email filter ratings, don't they?
The only confirmed thing I heard is manual email filtering where some people don't understand the bias above and ban all non-com/net/gov emails and think they're clever.
It's not a guaranteed strike but I just had a look at the last email I had from a .biz and it got 0.8 added to it's spam score because it had a biz domain. Still got through as it was otherwise legit though.
It's actually onlinesbi.com
"vii) it is unlikely that the Respondent was unaware of the Complainant’s trademark considering the fame and tradition of the trademark GAIL;"
Are lawyers allowed to lie like that? It is obviously not unlikely that the someone has never heard of this obscure "manufacturer and distributor of ceramic products for architectural use" company.
This is a summary of claims. Lawyers are generally allowed to make claims based on incomplete information which they believe that they can show to the legally-required standard.
Necessarily, in an adversarial proceeding where there is a material dispute of fact, some claims of one side or the other will be rejected.
This was especially emotionally scarring when I hired a lawyer to rebuke civil claims of several thousand Euros for (supposed) downloading of some TV show episode, a practice which is either considered a national sport, or a major contributor to GNP in Germany (the copyright claims, not the downloading).
The lawyer sent his usual spiel, his €300 template letter to the opposing council, which claimed that I'm a bumbling idiot who has no clue how to power up a PC, let alone plug in a network cable the right way 'round, and thus, can't possibly be guilty of any such shenanigans.
I asked her whether a Linked In-profile that identifies me as a Sys Admin and IT Systems Architect might become a problem with this tale, but various lawyers assured me that this is a highly scripted industry (both the copyright claims and the defenses) and nobody cares. And the scripts are actually legal students sitting at home with access to a fax gateway.
So basically if you downloaded a hypothetical torrent, and set upload bandwidth to zero, you‘re safe.
I guess the lawyer could argue that I’m a bumbling idiot who forgot to turn off the upload facility…?
However, they then decreed that circumventing any copy protection makes this illegal. Also, if the source of the material is "evidently illegal" (i.e. unlicensed), it's not applicable either. So eventually, downloading off of Bit Torrent without ever uploading MIGHT still be legal in Germany, unless courts declare that this constitutes an evidently illegal source.
And that's the other fascinating thing: there are, to my knowledge, no truly binding judge rulings in Germany most of the time. Unlike English-born case law, a judge might rule for a pirate bay downloader one day, and the next judge rule against another downloader the next day, every other aspect of the cases being equal.
Last I heard, some court had opined that even consuming streaming content, like sports, was illegal now, even with no uploading happening, if the source isn't an established, evidently licensed one.
It's a friggin' mine field really.
(edit): Oh yeah right, there's more. I learned during my defense against their claims years back that it's all as horrible as you'd expect from judges mostly clueless about technology, and then some.
Apparently there was precedence for the following: Let's say someone torrents a Miley Cyrus song. I have no idea why one would do that, but for the sake of example, let's assume. Then the music industry would say: "But there is a torrent, or a zip file or whatever, with that song, and 50 others. Because you downloaded that one song, we legally assume that you downloaded the 50 others, too!" There was at least one court decision where this stood. The state has tried to reign in the rampart threats against citizens by copyright lawyers (it's ** publicity when a grandma gets sued for outrageous amounts). The one thing they did was limit damages to a set amount. Then the copyright holders circumvented that with "legal" "theories" such as the one above. That was also why they stopped going after movie shares for some time, and concentrated on those sharing TV series. Many more individual claims of 10k each to be made, when people download a whole series of TV episodes.
I'm also personally convinced after doing some research that copyright holders give material to specialized companies who in at least some cases are then doing the seeding themselves, in order to catch offenders. There is at least one company in Germany where I have strong suspicion of this happening ca. 2012.
Can anyone sue you for owning a domain and say that it's their trademark ?? I tought that the .com domains were 100% free of that bullshit..or how else is there so many domain shakals reserving thousands of domains..? related to their appeal: https://www.wipo.int/amc/en/domains/decisions/html/2006/d200...
Well duh? Anyone can sue you for anything and say anything.
[...]
> "My husband and I"
[...]
> "If you have a question not answered above, feel free to send it to: faq at gail period com"
I wonder if the emails sent to the faq inbox would bounce haha
Although Gail seems to be blessed with not receiving most of the email people are sending.
"You would never guess how many people use asdf@asdf.com (or some variant form) as a filler email address across the Internet. Opening up @asdf.com lets in hundreds of email messages a day pertaining to porn site registrations, real audio downloading, mailing lists dealing with Windows NT ... the list goes on and on! If you would really like to send us an email, you can do so here."
(Although she does enjoy initialing things with just her first and last initial - AF)
It took me this post to make the link that, in France, "ploum ploum" means "whatever random thing" and that surely people are filling "ploum@ploum" as a random address in every web form.
Must be even worse for the ploum.com domain.
Wouldn't it simply be because you have been using (and publicly disclosing) that mail address for quite some time and it probably became part of each and every email list script kiddies are able to get their hands on?
And, yes, lot of spam is because this email was in multiple exposed account but I’ve received lot and lot of "fresh subscription/confirm your emails" where it was obvious people were simply writing whatever in a field.
https://nitter.lacontrevoie.fr/pic/orig/media%2FFm1yTf1aMAIC...
Ploum-ploum is only used in the south-east of France.
One, I heard Microsoft's Ballmer shout through a conference phone (MS had wanted to acquire it, too, but IBM prevailed).
Second, and within context here, I quickly excused myself from the all-hands and discovered that IBM had failed to get the ibm-whatever.com (or was it ibmwhatever.com? not sure) domain.
So I registered it. The next year, I would get loads of miss-guided and personal mail. I used to joke that I was now much better informed about product road-maps than when I was employed there.
My intention with the domain was to hand it over to IBM anyway, for a shirt and some pens or some such token. However, I was informed that much like the US government with terrorists, IBM does not negotiate, and would likely send me the lawyers instead of a shirt. So I caved to the suspected chilling effects proactively, and let the domain expire after a year.