Re:The law depends on compute power
by stickfigure on Saturday July 30, 2016 @12:20PM
(#12193571)
Social security numbers are in the uncanny valley between something private enough to be plausibly used as a shared secret and public enough to be exploited widely. There is really only one effective solution to this: Make all SSNs public and therefore useless as a secret key. All the services that are currently (ab)using this number will find alternatives.
[ Parent
| on HN ]
> Make all SSNs public and therefore useless as a secret key.
An exhaustive list of all US SSNs will be mishandled, intercepted and posted online. It is only a matter of when, rather than if.
(For precedents of whole-country database dumps, see the Turkish, Philippines and Qatar cases.)
Re:The law depends on compute power
by umanwizard on Saturday July 30, 2016 @02:34PM
(#12194110)
How do you make the leap from "something has happened in three countries" to "it will inevitably happen everywhere" ?
Re:The law depends on compute power
by Qantourisc on Saturday July 30, 2016 @03:47PM
(#12194397)
(chance greater then 0) * (a lot of time)
Right. Reminds me of how to destroy the earth. Just wait until its atoms decay.
Re:The law depends on compute power
by umanwizard on Saturday July 30, 2016 @07:20PM
(#12195058)
This is wrong for a lot of reasons.
The most obvious one is that it assumes the United States social security number system (and the United States itself) will exist for infinite time.
Isn't the point that it is public?
> Make all SSNs public
My (excessively hermetic) message was meant to mean: "All the SSNs will one day be public. Even if the legislator does not make them public, they will leak one day anyway."
Re:The law depends on compute power
by tedunangst on Saturday July 30, 2016 @12:44PM
(#12193668)
SSN is only one example. All your medical records, your entire genome can be represented as a number. Does that suddenly make it acceptable to publish?
Any information can be rendered as a number. The whole idea that there's something special about numbers that makes them different from other kinds of information (i.e. it's OK to publish this "because it's just a number") missed the point rather badly.