Earlier this week, we discovered a concerning extortion issue involving Bluesky, which surfaced after the social networking platform announced its plan to verify public figures by using their domain name ownership.
While Bluesky has not completely tackled the matter, it has made a move towards alleviating the problem of scammers impersonating prominent individuals on the platform…
Bluesky Extortion Issue
Cybersquatting—the practice of purchasing domain names associated with well-known individuals to impersonate them or to sell those domains at inflated prices—has been a persistent issue.
This situation has been exacerbated by Bluesky’s recent announcement that it would utilize domain name ownership as a verification method for usernames on its platform. To illustrate, if you own the domain johnnyappleseed.com, Bluesky would permit you to use that name alongside the domain on its network.
This approach resulted in scammers attempting to extort various prominent figures by registering their domain names and then informing them they would need to purchase those domains to use their own names on Bluesky. Bloomberg columnist Conor Sen shared an illustrative example of one such extortion attempt:
Hello Conor, I own conorsen.com. As you may be aware, Bluesky is using .com domains for account verifications. bsky.social/about/blog/4…. We are currently setting up an email sign-up page featuring your favicon at the domain.
If you decide to report the bsky.app/. profile/cono… account, you will lose the ability to verify the domain yourself. It will appear as if the verified domain has been suspended. You may opt to make an offer for the domain or choose to do nothing.
TechCrunch highlights that this situation led to a discussion where actual and fraudulent accounts of Hustle founder Sam Parr were engaged in arguments.
Introduction of Partial Protection
TechCrunch has reported that Bluesky has taken measures to address one facet of this issue by safeguarding your original username whenever you switch to a custom domain.
Bluesky is implementing safeguards against username squatting by reserving your original Bluesky username with a (.bsky.social suffix) when you modify your username to a custom domain.
For instance, if Johnny was initially registered as johnnyappleseed.bsky.social and later changed it to johnnyappleseed.com, someone else could have seized the original username. Bluesky has now put a stop to this possibility.
New Mentions Tab Introduced
Moreover, the app now features a dedicated tab for Mentions, rather than having them concealed within the Notifications tab.
Additionally, users have new options for organizing replies.
Users may select between linear and threaded views. They can also arrange replies through various filters such as hot, oldest, newest, most-liked, and random.
Bluesky has recently surpassed 25 million users; however, Threads appears to be the most promising contender for replacing the social network previously recognized as Twitter.
Photo by Yohan Marion on Unsplash
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