By taking the @memcached username on Twitter, Gear6.com has engaged in identity theft. Yes, someone call the police now.<\/p>\n
I’m pretty sure this is one of those posts that won’t make anyone happy.<\/p>\n
Let me first start off with what is meant by identity theft<\/a>. Wikipedia provides a pretty solid, working definition. If you disagree with it, then I’m curious as to why and how, but for this discussion, I’m using it to prove a point.<\/p>\n “Identity theft is a crime used to refer to fraud that involves someone pretending to be someone else in order to steal money or get other benefits.”<\/p>\n For example, if I walked around telling people I’m Chow Yun Fat while flashing a fake ID that says Chow Yun Fat, and I say, “Let me into this party. Wasn’t Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon an awesome film?” then I’m stealing Chow Yun Fat’s identity. There is no way he’d say, “It’s cool, go ahead and pretend to be me.”<\/p>\n Let’s take a look at @memcached<\/a> on Twitter.<\/p>\n First off, having the url, http:\/\/twitter.com\/memcached , is like having a business card. A business card cannot be used to legally establish identity, but it strongly suggests an identity.<\/p>\n In this case, I would expect that http:\/\/twitter.com\/memcached is someone, or a group of persons working on the memcached open source project.<\/p>\n Let’s say I go to the url for the memcached twitter account.<\/p>\n What do I see?<\/p>\n http:\/\/twitter.com\/memcached\/status\/1376487185<\/a><\/p>\n