Shame on me for thinking Google would take a different tack on this.
http://www.zdnet.com/blog/violetblue/google-plus-deleting-accounts-en-masse-no-clear-answers/567

The relevant part of their ToS states: "In order to access certain Services, you may be required to provide information about yourself (such as identification or contact details) as part of the registration process for the Service, or as part of your continued use of the Services. You agree that any registration information you give to Google will always be accurate, correct and up to date."

This does NOT say that you must register using the name on your birth certificate or government ID, etc. If you are known friends or fans by a name other than your given name then that is still an accurate, correct name.

They want celebs on Google plus, but are Google going to force Lady Gaga to register as Stefani Germanotta? Unlikely. I'm pretty sure this guy's name isn't listed on his driver's license as $0.50 either: https://plus.google.com/114809488257853535663/

EDIT:
The Google+ Content Policy also addresses the name issue, using different language: "To help fight spam and prevent fake profiles, use the name your friends, family or co-workers usually call you. For example, if your full legal name is Charles Jones Jr. but you normally use Chuck Jones or Junior Jones, either of those would be acceptable"

Some more good info on the topic here:
http://infotrope.net/2011/07/22/ive-been-suspended-from-google-plus/
http://infotrope.net/2011/07/24/more-comments-on-google-plus-and-names/

And a data collection effort for people who have had their profiles suspended, here:
https://spreadsheets.google.com/spreadsheet/viewform?formkey=dFZHSEZ6ZURPQkpyTldMMXFFNkJrU0E6MQ#gid=0

EDIT+:
Another good article on this subject:
http://nakedsecurity.sophos.com/2011/07/27/google-misses-an-opportunity-privacy-is-an-important-part-of-openness/

There is yet another page at Google explaining their profile name policy and this one is more specific than the other two I've seen, stating that you must use the name you go by "in daily life".
http://www.google.com/support/+/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=1228271

Posted by ra at 12:49 | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0)

I recently revamped my home and business networks and found myself in need of a way to automatically attempt hostname resolution in two different dns domains.

This can be easily acheived by editing /etc/resolv.conf like so:

search alpha.example beta.example

However, I use DHCP so I wanted a DHCP solution. DNS search domains can be specified using DHCP option 119, which is supported by both dnsmasq and isc-dhcp-server on Debian Squeeze. Client-side DHCP support for DNS search domains, especially multiple search domains, is reportedly rather limited; but fortunately it's supported out of the box by Debian and Ubuntu so it's just a matter of getting the server-side configuration correct. I had some trouble finding the correct syntax and as a result my first attempts (using apparently incorrect examples I found on the net) resulted in failure, as indicated by this log message on the client:

dhclient: suspect value in domain_search option - discarded

After fixing the server-side config (isc-dhcp-server 4.1.1) to match the following format, it works great:

option domain-search "alpha.example","beta.example";

If you use dnsmasq for DHCP, this should be useful:
http://lists.thekelleys.org.uk/pipermail/dnsmasq-discuss/2005q2/000231.html

Posted by ra at 14:24 | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0)