Life has several lanes,there are those pedestrians on the memory lanes, carefully going back to how well they use to be while others walk down the fantasy lane, thinking how well they could be. Now let us for a while take a BRT ride quickly through the fantasy lane fast hold-up free. What would you dream of being? Dangote doing your laundry, Mark Zuckerberg being your secretary or it as worse as sharing a cigarette with the Pope?
Well ride over, alight to reality! A man got a taste of his fantasy when he bought Google.com domain name $12 owning it for for few minutes. Big hit there wearing the shoes of Larry Page (cofounder of Google). Well they weren’t just shoes, he must have felt them to be Loius Vitton boots: big and classy!
The man was consequently rewarded by Google for helping it locate the flaw.
Last month, student and previously Google employee Sanmay Ved had been able to purchase Google.com for an equally tiny amount of money owing to administrative flaws the search giant suffered.
He was quite in shock when he saw that the domain was for sale and he went on to purchase it. The transaction went on successfully with him being charged just about N2400. And the ownership of the site was transferred to him.
But within the span of just a minute the purchase had been revoked with Ved’s money quickly refunded.
“Google could do this given the registration service used by me (aka Google Domains) belonged to Google,” Ved wrote in a blog post on LinkedIn.
The former Googler had help point the technical dent to Google’s security team and he was rewarded with an amount of money which wasn’t really disclosed. And when they Google saw that he intended giving the cash reward to charity, they doubled the amount.
“I wrote back and told them it was never about money, and asked that the money be donated to charity to the Art of Living India Foundation,” Ved wrote.
“They have replied and have stated that they understand and respect the fact that this was not about getting a reward. Despite that, given what they found, and how this was handled, they are ‘excited’ to offer me a reward.”
Rewarding persons who point out administrative errors or potential errors is almost a conventional practice at Google as well as other tech companies. It is popularly tagged as a “bug bounty”.
Well, owning Google.com even just for a second should take up two chapters of one’s autobiography as the volume of emotions you feel that instantaneously would require gallons of ink to document. Would it be on top of the world, or even on top of the heavens?
