[tveita]

Would love to read specific examples of "the same trick being used to dismiss health concerns about medical supplements or influence financial information provided by Google's AI about retirement", but the relevant link in the article currently goes to

file:///Users/GermaTW1/BBC%20Dropbox/Thomas%20Germain/A%20Downloads%20and%20Documents/2026/And%20there's%20evidence%20that%20AI%20tools%20are%20being%20manipulated%20on%20a%20wide%20scale.

[cube00]

There's been a few mistakes like this recently in BBC articles and more troubling is they've stopped adding notes to indicate they've made revisions to the published article when they fix them.

[sparqlittlestar]

I've only ever had `first.last@company` as a username or email address, so this `last[:5]initials#` scheme is bewildering. Must lead to strange looking usernames.

[jacobgkau]

I've had several usernames/emails more similar to the `last[:5]initials#` example at universities and large companies. It's more secure (harder to guess based on the name alone), more private (harder for outsiders to tie back to a person from email alone), and reduces or removes the possibility of duplication (especially important for schools that let alumni keep their emails). It actually surprised me when a school gave me first.last once.