Please use a personal email. My email is ‘mail’ @ ‘my actual name’. It does not get more personal than that
But you can’t use emails starting with mail@, admin@, support@, info@, main@, etc.
Instead they advised me (3 times) to create a personal email on a service like Yahoo, Outlook, Gmail, Orange, etc
Security professional here. This is legit a good call on their part. It’s because those types of addresses won’t bounce emails but aren’t necessarily in your control; it’s very, very easy to spam those petition forms with mail@ for a million real domains without bouncing the emails, making them seem legit.
You own your domain, obviously, so it’s really as simple as creating a forwarding/alias address of “changeorg@domain.tld”. If creating a forwarding/alias address is that much of a problem for you I suggest that you likely shouldn’t be hosting your own email in the first place.
Your laziness isn’t a good reason to be upset with a company taking steps to reduce their security overhead significantly
They do though mention “+” and “-” also banned in the username part, which is kinda annoying
Yeah I agree that one seems silly on the surface but for their specific situation I understand why: services like Gmail allow using a + to create faux-labels. So for example foo@gmail, foo+bar@gmail, and foo+baz@gmail all get delivered to the same account. For change.org that’s a problem because it allows a single email account to fill out the form many times.
Ideally, they would simply truncate everything after and including those symbols but it’s possible other services have different rules (maybe yahoo let’s you prepend faux-tags instead of appending them, or something like that) so simply blocking their use altogether could be the more robust solution
Eh, honestly I think blocking plus addressing as a workaround to block people from using multiple identities on the site is very weak argument and ignores completely the reason plus addeesses are being used in the first place, tagging.
And the addition of “-” just tells they don’t really know what they’re doing, considering it’s not only valid but also very common symbol in email addresses
I don’t think the reason they’re being used is relevant to their problem though. “Think like an attacker” wins the day here: as an attacker, I don’t care what it’s meant for, only how I can use it to my advantage. If it’s something they observed as a problem, I understand why they would want to stop it.
As for “-”, yeah, I don’t have a particularly good explanation for that one except the assumption that it’s something similar to + addressing on a different service.
“-” is the default delimiter in qmail. I administer a system, where both + and - are valid recipient delimiters for historic reasons and we can’t really get rid of it.
Believe me, it has caused all kinds of problems, where we have to go deep into the finer differences between aliases and virtual aliases and transport maps in postfix to route mails correctly. Especially since we have a lot of Mailinglists with - as a valid character in them.
So to summarize: the assumption by changeorg is valid, however the execution seems rather flawed.
Good info! Sounds like a nightmare :x
Yeah, I can’t say their solution is the most elegant but it certainly makes a kind of sense when their criteria for success is “maximize participation while satisfying ‘uniqueness’ critics”
The local parts of email addresses are standardized, and there is an RFC handling subadressing as well, see RFC 5233 - it’s not like Gmail invented this behavior.
Also, RFC 5321 clearly states (2.3.11) that the local part of an email must only be interpreted by the receiving server, so that part should not be parsed, modified or mangled in any form - the assumptions poor web forms or validation libraries make these days are incredibly annoying and simply not compliant.
So no, non of your suggestions are good, let alone ideal. Ideally, people would simply implement the specs and stop making lazy and false assumptions. In the case you cited, it turns out email validation is simply not the proper tool to limit how often the form can be submitted. Similar websites use e. g. text messages.
Requiring SMS validation is a massive barrier to entry and not a viable option for a service like Change.org that relies on a certain level of participation.
There’s literally another comment made at almost the same time as yours complaining blocking the use of + and such is too high a barrier to entry and just the devs being lazy. Meanwhile your suggestion is raise the barrier to entry even higher if you care about uniqueness of submissions
It’s a no-win situation for Change.org so they went with something that meets their business needs. Can’t really expect much else from them tbh
I’m aware of that, but let’s be honest here: social and political changes are not introduced, let alone solved, by technology.
You said it perfectly: this is about business needs. I’d like to argue to make the barrier for entry even higher (tie it to a form of citizen identity) and mandate the petition must be reviewed / acted upon once it has become significant - frameworks like this do exist already in several countries.
Everyone has multiple email addresses today, does that not fundamentally erode the validity of change.org as a platform for direct democracy then? I do believe this is the case, so I’d love if another website would at least stop violating already existing standards and force their erroneous interpretation of how email addresses work down our throats.
Oh yeah don’t get me wrong, I think change.org as a product is hot stinky garbage. I don’t take anything they produce seriously lol
I just don’t expect them to do anything differently under the current circumstances is all heh. And their business is married to the design at this point, so I don’t see them pivoting any time soon. As you suggest, they need a competitor that can do it right to come along and actually produce some kind of meaningful results in the political arena, but that’s a whole other can of worms.
I literally have an idea for this, and am kinda just sitting on it until I find the right people. I’ve been on the lookout about 10 years now for a) someone with a comprehensive understanding of constitutional law and b) someone with a comprehensive understanding of political finance and lobbying, both of whom also need to be progressive and interested in 501©(3) work. A bit of a unicorn :p
I wonder how they handle gmail addresses with dots as you can put dot in anywhere and it still will redirect to your email.
I’ve setup (for few services which don’t allow + sign) emails like foobar@gmail.com, foo.bar@gmail.com, fo.o.bar@gmail.com and they all come to my inbox.
IIRC Gmail interprets foo.bar, f.o.o.b.a.r and foobar as the same account (the latter).
At some point they didn’t, so I heard there are now a couple of accounts that only differ in dot and it’s not yet resolved by Google ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Yep, that what I was trying to say 😄 Been using that feature for years.
I imagine because it can’t be used to add additional junk characters to the address, they probably just strip them out before doing their string comparison
If they know this case. In other email services dots are usually not a junk characters.
For the same of checking uniqueness it’s probably fine to just ignore them. Yeah, it sucks if johndoe@obscure.domain and john.doe@obscure.domain can’t sign the same petition but outside of the big email services I imagine that kind of collision is pretty rare
that’s to stop people from spamming signatures with user+1@gmail, user+2@gmail, user+3@gmail, etc.
You can still spam with user1@domain.tld, user2@domain.tld etc and it takes basically no extra effort
IF you already have an email domain you control.
Calling “acquiring and setting up an email domain and configuring the mail server for wildcards” “basically no extra effort” is a bit disingenuous compared to “solve a captcha for a Gmail account”
Spamming user+1@gmail, user+2@gmail takes absolutely no technical knowledge whatsoever - anyone can do it with 1 gmail account.
Spamming user1@domain, user2@domain etc requires 1 of two things:
you can sign up for multiple email accounts using a third party service. You’re going to run into trouble with Gmail or other big providers if you start creating accounts en masse.
you create your own email server. this requires someone with selfhosting knowledge and some basic coding (or rather server config) experience.
I’d assume one needs to verify the email by clicking a link, so to spam user1@domain.tld, user2@domain.tld would mean you need access to those inboxes. That means you need to go through the effort to actually create those emailadresses on whatever freemail service you chose, or you need to host the emailserver yourself and have all mails run into a catchall inbox.
Hosting your own emailserver is definately not “basically no extra effort”, even for a lot of tech-savvy people, paying for a hosted email service using your own domain is easier, but also seems like not a good investment just to spam a petition website.
The foo+bar@gmail.com functionality, however, is pretty well known tool - even by non-tech savvy people. Even some people I know that I consider basically tech-illiterate have known this for years, they have told me when they found out about it and asked me if I was aware of this functionality.
The first one I mentioned requires preparation, setting up email accounts or an email server, the second one is basically already set up for most email users and ready to go, the latter is therefore definately a lot less effort to pull off.
Security professional here too. Agree that this is reasonable, and making a big deal about it is kinda meh.
Maybe I’m wrong but isn’t this sub for posting minor annoyances?
True, I do find it mildly infuriating that someone is mildly infuriated at this
They send a mail asking to confirm my email by clicking a link. I can’t see how spam registering with those emails would work
My understanding is that signing a petition and creating an account aren’t necessarily linked, and it’s up to the person who created the petition whether verification is required.
After signing the petition, they pop a large notification about needing to validate my account by clicking on the link in the mail they sent. If I didn’t do it, the signing wouldn’t count
Right I’m saying I always thought that was an optional feature, determined by the person who created the petition. I don’t think it’s a universal requirement for all change.org petitions
Oh ok. Yeah maybe! From a front end user point of view it doesn’t make much sense though
Catchall - the new spam bin ;-) It’s soooo good to have your own domain for mail…
I have been using catchall on my domain since 2002. I have never told anyone any of my real accounts. When I have to send an email, I just add that account (change@ whatever), send the e-mail and delete the account afterwards, rebanishing the company to my catchall. I’ve had it scripted for ages.
When I do get an unsolicited email from let’s say ShittyCompany Inc, I set up a rule to forward all incoming shittycompany@(mydomain) emails to info@ shittycompany. This way they just spam themselves. Takes 2 seconds to run the script and I never see emails from shittycompany again.
That’s a good way to potentially get your personal domain as potential spam.
Yes, potentially. It’s still going strong after 22+ years of me doing this though.
Web developer here. The problem here is not with emails but with change.org’s business model, which is reliant on lying to people that their petitions actually mean anything. But, anyone with half a brain cell can easily spot that they don’t have any legal backing whatsoever nor do they do any kind of identity verification, therefore those petitions are completely worthless. They might as well not give a fuck and allow cheating. For all they care, it only boosts counters and makes them appear more popular than they actually are.
Your laziness isn’t a good reason to add an unnecessary barrier of entry for your users.
Let’s talk about the security of using email to do anything in this day and age.
You’re not wrong, but this isn’t really a security matter, it’s an “apparent uniqueness” matter. Their goal, I assume, is to satisfy critics enough that a given petition’s participants are sufficiently unique while keeping the barrier to filling out the form as low as possible. So they end up in a situation where neither of perfect, but they’re both “good enough” for what the business needs.
I dealt with this in the anti-cheat space: my goal was never to remove all cheating, because that’s too expensive (insanely so). My goal was to make the public believe they weren’t playing against cheaters too often. If the solution was forcing the cheaters to perform at a level that was just below the most skilled human players, that was actually a success, because if the players can’t differentiate between cheaters and pro players, then they can’t effectively determine how prevalent cheating actually is.
Part of me hated that we had to treat it that way, but another part of me understood that if I pushed too hard on “eliminating cheating” my department would become more costly than it was worth and they’d pivot away from gameplay that needed anti-cheat at all
Risk management is the name of the game, as always, eh?
That’s a slick technique for anti-cheat, heh. What did you think of the Call of Duty “fake data” approach? That cracked me up - things in game that only cheaters can see, so they end up self-reporting themselves as cheaters lol
As it ever will be, much as it may pain our moral sensibilities.
Re: CoD - I loved it. Laughed my ass off. Absolutely a big fan of creative approaches to getting cheaters to tell on themselves. I proposed something similar to my team when we had a problem with players manipulating the position of objects in the world so they were directly in front of the player: add an object of the same type inside map geometry and attach a “kill volume” to it, so it was like a landmine. Move the object in front of the player and they instantly die :P Wish we’d done it but couldn’t get the level designers’ time to implement it unfortunately
One we did do though: back when the product I worked on was on PS3 one of the big problems was hacked consoles spoofing platform entitlements (the thing that tells the game what purchases they should have access to). So we added an entitlement that couldn’t be acquired in any legitimate way, and gave you a specific item in game. Then we just checked player inventories once a week for anyone with that item and banned their account, their console, and any account that played on that console for a meaningful amount of time. Did the same thing with an item you could only get to by clipping through geometry. Even put the word “intrusion” in the item’s name haha.
The cheats are so technically complicated at this juncture that the creative stuff is often the most effective. I mean, people are literally voluntarily installing hypervisor rootkits to run the cheats, so they can talk to their drivers below even the kernel. It’s so hard to come to with technical solutions to a problem like that that doesn’t wind up costing massive server processing power to validate every input.
Haha that is a great idea! Give the landmine kill a special animation just to make sure that the cheaters get the message or let them figure it out in time lol?
Heh, did you share that inventory technique on news.ycombinator? I could have sworn that I read a story there a team doing that.
I know exactly what you are talking about - I was digging into the modding of this one game and happened upon a cheater’s forum. Blew my mind that the first step was to completely gut your computer’s security lol. But at the same time, was enlightening to see that. Seems like some of the work has been moved to the Anti-Cheat systems, but I’m guessing that there must be large gaps in what the AC can actually do for you at the application level?
Let em figure it out. Wasting their time is a core strategy in reducing their impact and will to continue cheating
I certainly didn’t share it myself but it’s possible my old boss did!
TBH, in my very personal opinion the third party anti-cheat apps are like 50% placebo. Just makes people feel better. They are very protective of their “secret sauce” but I can say none of them are anywhere close to perfect. The thing they’re best at is taking the easy stuff off our plates so we can focus on the more difficult problems of hardening the game itself and analyzing telemetry.
I spent about a decade in the enterprise software development space, so I totally get it. I couldn’t put it into words as well as you did, however.
After watching the FCC bigwigs debate robocalls several years ago, I’ve become a believer in a future where your internet access is always authenticated to your real life ID, dark web excepted of course.
In their case, it was posited as a best-in-class solution to the problem of spam in the telephony space. Same logic applies to email. I mean, look at what Twixxer did with the verified checkmark requiring a credit card. The trend is already there.
I get the fear of being de-anonymized on the internet, but it may be the case of something we hate being something we need, when you start to throw deepfakes into the mix.
Funny you mention the robocall thing… I’m literally leaving a company that works on that problem (though not as their primary business) Wednesday. It was a short stint - mostly because they are resistant to solving massive technical debt problems and I’m not trying to doom my future self - but what I witnessed was…depressing. Getting anything done was like pulling teeth, and that’s with the recent FTC pivot to taking this stuff more seriously. STIR/SHAKEN is a reasonable start but it still has almost no teeth behind it.
I’m with you on the identity issue. I mean, if we’re being really honest, the only people losing out by not implementing strong personal identification verification are the legitimate end users because the threat actors have gotten so unbelievably good at fingerprinting user behavior. And it’s only going to continue getting worse. With ML growth as unfettered as it is, there is nothing we can do. So I’d much rather take the reigns and make identity verification a robust feature instead of a bug we can’t squash.
Kudos for looking out first your future self - I had to leave the field entirely after it got to the point where I couldn’t stand to look at a computer anymore. Still can’t for more than an hour, two years later.
I intend to reply more later, because this does deserve a longer reply, but I am short on steam.
In the meantime, have you heard of login.gov? Check that out. The day that .com gets a hook into that is the day that identity problems are (mostly) solved.
Yes! I LITERALLY just set up my stuff there a few days ago for TSA Precheck and CBP because I’m heading to Japan next month. I love what they’re doing.
Heh, I saw it on news.ycombinator.com back when it was announced- they have made strides if you can access TSA now!
In the beginning it was just a form for every manner of authentication and then a big CTA, essentially telling other .gov entities to start making project requests.