[cryptoz]

> but freeing up usernames.

WHAT?! They do that? That's SO dangerous, and perhaps what made me lose a domain name three years ago! I registered a domain in 2001 with my hotmail account, and noticed in 2006 that the registration had changed to another person in Ontaio, Canada. My only guess as to how they did that (after much investigation) was that they must have accessed my hotmail account, which was dormant for probably three years (but was the account I used with my registrar). I couldn't figure out how they got into my email, and I eventually gave up the fight and got a new domain name. Now I'm waiting out the expiration on the first one, hoping I can get it back.

Do they ACTUALLY recycle usernames? Is THAT how I lost my domain name?! Someone just registered my old hotmail account back, and then probably "lost password" to the account? Fuck that makes me so mad. There's no way MS does this...does anyone know?

[oneplusone]

Pretty sure they do. I seem to remember an hacking incident from the last 2 years where access to a Gmail account was gained by requesting a password reset to the defunct Hotmail account. Gmail was so nice as to tell you which account they emailed. Not sure if this is still the case.

[Locke1689]

Yup, I think user accounts are recycled. It's got its benefits and its downsides. I think it will be interesting to see 80 years from now. I guess non-recycled usernames will just get more esoteric?

[dflock]

Yeah, there are a lot of characters in the full unicode set.

[Locke1689]

There are far fewer human-readable combinations. There are even fewer with fewer than 10 characters.

[benologist]

If you register a domain (or anything else) with [e-mail] and stop renewing yourdomain.com you're opening yourself right up for problems too.

[klbarry]

100%. I had a friend in High School who liked to play Neopets (www.neopets.com). He would try out tons of old accounts with valuable pets on it, trying to see if they had guessable hotmail usernames. 1/10 times they did and he got the accounts and had the passwords sent there.