What a Flocker!

Image via CrunchBase

Flock You, NineMSN!  Is Flock the Browser affiliated with the new "The Flock" in the new NineMSN news site?

Who knows?

Is it wrong?

"The Flock"

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• Flock Breaks Up With FireFox and Goes Google (lockergnome.com) - actually, sort of, it is only a BETA at this point - not replacing the current update of Flock browser.  Yet.  "Goes Google" is a misnomer, as well.  Really Flock is changing its engine to Chrome-like, dropping the Mozilla-born FireFox engine.

Chess.com way behind the times or just confused?

A cohort of mine sent an email to chess.com after some odd registration issues, inquiring why they consider the use of the '+' to be invalid.

Special characters are valid on the net on all mail servers, the + being one of the major ones in use today. By default, ALL mail programs allow use of the + and many other special characters.

The following is their response (note; no explanation as to why not the use of + and the ticket is closed, with no allowance for rebuttal)

The following is the chess.com response:

Julie Howells to me

show details 5:48 AM (14 hours ago)

xxxxxxx

I'm sorry, but we won't be using or allowing the use of + in email addresses.

The only special characters permitted are dash, underscore or dot.
- Kohai
Chess.com Support
www.Chess.com

Ticket Details

Ticket ID: 0000000

Department: Registration & Activation Problems
Priority: Normal

Status: Closed

You can check the status of or reply to this Ticket online at: http://support.chess.com/

She apologizes that chess.com won't be following any web standards? Only those 3 characters? Even if the issue was that of using the email as username (not needed at chess.com, as you can sign in with your nickname), there would be no reason - security or otherwise - to disallow, by deliberate choice by the way, the use of any standard special character in emails. In fact, the disallowing of the + character is itself more of a security risk to the user of chess.com than ever chess.com servers. Using the + can actually prevent spam on servers, in both directions (as whatever comes after the plus is used as an effective spam mask - you know exactly where the original email would have come from)

Obviously, I don't need to say anymore here. As usual, I must defer to the wisdom of Steve Gibson at grc.com

So for now, stay FAR away from chess.com -

I recommend instead, redhotpawn.com