The same thing happened to me in 2019. I fought hard for a while and then gave up. I thought maybe I could drum up some public support (and work my way to a facebook connection who could restore it) by blogging about it and posting here...but nobody cared.
Seeing this thread and so many familiar stories makes me feel right at home. Sub7 was my RAT of choice. My brother and friends weren't very technical, but I taught them to use Sub7 so they could spread the exe around to their friends and we could all have some fun. We were all heavy ICQ users at the time. It wasn't long before we discovered the ICQ send file box had a size limit on the file name field. So you could, say, call the exe "pic-of-me-nude.jpg .exe" with so many spaces in the file name before the .exe part disappeared that most of our male friends would accept it from a "random female" and run it without any hesitation. Needless to say, we opened a lot of CD ROMS and listened in on many chats.
My parents in PA received a mail in ballot for my grandfather. He has been dead over 7 years. Not only is he dead, he never lived with my parents at their address. I keep checking the status of his mail in ballot online to ensure that he hasn’t voted.
I’m in PA - Lancaster county voter here. My experience matches yours with the scantron. We had no digital option this election, though we did in the last. Two people worked the books at our polling place.
Facebook absolutely did this. A couple years ago I had a junior dev under me that management would not allow me to fire. And it’s so much worse than just the person searching. His feed recommended my close connections to him just because I watched his page.
He spent 75% of most days working for personal clients outside our company. The remainder of his days were spent pimping his projects on Facebook to build his personal brand. He was not a rock star programmer. His work was beyond subpar and he needed extra time, not less. We weren’t connected but I stalked his profile for time stamps and evidence. He lived at least 1.5 hours outside my locations except for the office.
One day he overheard me and another coworker discussing Facebook oddities and he interrupted, “Facebook keeps recommending (insert my wife’s name) as a connection.” He did not know my wife’s name and they had never been in proximity of one another.
Interesting story but why mention that you were not happy with his work? It just seems orthogonal to the story (that FB suggested your wife, implying the social graph was built via your workplace to your wife and that he may have searched for you and you for your wife).
Not to dismiss your story, I am just interested about the reasoning.
No problem. I was just trying to give a little context for why I was stalking the guy. In trying to avoid looking like a creeper I see how it just came off as petty. Neither was my intent. I appreciate the check.
It's funny that you mention this. I was just explaining to a young coworker how we basically had social networking in the 90's. My friends and I (even nontechnical kids) all maintained Geocities, Angelfire, and Tripod pages. We'd load them up with free scripts for counters, guestbooks, and cheesy popup messages. Then we'd all link around to each others' pages and follow each other with web rings.
You are probably onto something with this train of thought. I had an Angelfire website when I was 17 in the 90's. All my friends were blown away by my terrible design and color choices because they weren't on the web. Putting something accessible by the entire world out there seemed like magic to them. The web in general felt much more magical then.
