> I am hoping for the day something and more appropriate for this age will make them irrelevant.

We have the technology to build vastly superior replacements right now. It's mostly network effect requirements that make this extremely challenging/slow to implement.

An example of something we could do is cryptographically authenticated web-of-trust creditworthiness estimation, with techniques like proof of burn and selective trust anchoring used to establish terminal nodes in the unrolled trust DAG. This sort of thing would allow for pseudonymous, automated determination of trust without the extreme security and privacy risks posed by centralized identity stores like the credit bureaus.

I find technical discussions around this subject extremely fascinating but I'm a total noob in this space. Would you mind sharing any relevant links on the topics you mentioned?

> are not Engineering/Tech companies

Which means each and every line of code was written by the lowest bidder.

Or CEO/CTO's buddy's company

The CSO apparently graduated with a music major. Not that it should it disqualify them, many in tech didn't graduate with a CS degree but in light of the incident one has to wonder.

I don't think that is relevant at all. There are plenty of incompetent CS graduates, and plenty of highly competent non-CS graduates.

In general it would not be, now that the personal data of 100+ millions of people have been stolen from these clowns, it seems relevant.

Leadership sets the priorities, and expectations. They get paid disproportionately more than other employees and I think they should be scrutinized and bear responsibility correspondingly.

But I have no doubt they probably found someone lower in the ranks as a scapegoat.

"Joe was in charge of patches. And we are all equally disturbed and horrified by his behavior. But we've reached out to him and let him go. Now give us more of your personal information so you can get free credit monitoring for 6 months [+]. -Sincerely and with deeper regrets, the Executive Team [++]"

[+] (fine print) then charged as $49.99 a month until cancelled. To cancel please visit one of the 3 Equifax location in person on the first Wednesday of the month. Accepting

[++] (even finer print) by accepting the free credit monitoring you agree to binding arbitration and forfeit your rights to participate in a class action suit against Equifax and its subsidiaries.

I'm not saying we shouldn't have serious questions about his competence after this breach. Rather, my point is that we should be questioning his competence (and that of the rest of the executive team's) due to this breach, not his credentials.

If he had a CS degree, that wouldn't make him any less responsible for this massive data leak.

Usually, the larger the company, the deeper processes go, shielding it from individual incompetence (so the company can hire for easy to measure attributes, like compensation, and protect itself from difficult metrics, like technical competence). Unfortunately, processes also prevent individual competence to have a noticeable impact on the company.

If I got the story right, this bug was present for the last 9 years and patched upstream a couple days before the leak. Some measures could have prevented its exploitation or reduced its impact, like throttling by IP, one-time session keys and so on - and should be in place for any serious application - but it's entirely possible they had fixed schedule for patches and mis-evaluated this flaw as non-critical.

A LOT of companies carry obsolete dependencies for a long time.

That's where they learned to play the tiniest violin in the world. I sincerely hope that person has at least the dignity to resign.

That's very common at all non-tech institutions: the top technology management positions are held by people who don't have a technical background and may know very little.

Reasons are:

• It's hard to find technically skilled people who want to spend all day doing management tasks.

• It's easy to find essentially unskilled people who do want to spend all day doing management tasks.

• There is a large set of unwritten rules and social expectations that the people who created and run such companies use as proxies for competence. Do you dress nice, can you play an enjoyable game of golf, are you married, how old are you, etc. These proxies invariably de-select the kinds of people who have a deep understanding of their field (i.e. single young men who are able to devote enormous hours to their craft).

Edit: note the recommendations in her LinkedIn page. Every single one talks about her collaboration and communication skills, not a single mention anywhere of technical skills. It's tempting to shoot "Susan M" here but the real issue is a boardroom culture in which management is seen as a skill entirely divorced from the effort being managed.

So sad, that is so true these days that it shouldn't even be funny.

A meritocracy is not born when rich corporations (buyers of labor) select vendors (sellers of labor) based on personal connections and not ability to do the job

I'm reasonably sure that "tech" companies try to save costs just as much as "traditional" companies. The difference might only be that they how to formulate their requirements better.

I am 100% certain that "tech" companies have an entirely different attitude towards engineering costs than non-tech companies. The former want the best people working on problems and will pay what it takes (within reason), the latter want problems solved for the lowest price.

This is extraordinarily evident in the distribution of engineer salaries.

That's a massive reach! Have you been spending too long inside the bubble? Define a "tech" company.

Which part is a massive reach? The fact that certain companies (which I choose to classify as "tech" companies) are willing to invest 2-3x as much into their technical employees?

A "tech" company is a company for whom technology (ie. developers) is a profit center rather than a cost center.

How does Equifax, a private company, have the rights to access my personal data in the first place? Who exactly is giving it to them without my explicit consent, and why?

You do give your consent. Everytime you deal with a financial, or credit issuing institution.

Of course, effectively, you don't have a choice - you need those financial institutions to live a normal life. Equifax (and other bureaus) are coercive monopolies.

I hope that this story will bring down the hammer on their heads - not just Equifax, all of them.

Every financial institution you deal with gives them your info, and they do it so collectively they all have lower risk on loans. I suspect if this wasn't in place, we'd be paying significantly higher interest rates on loans.

You don't own your own data, unfortunately. At least not in the US.

I mean...you consent when you hand your details over to a financial institution. How credit reporting agencies end up with your information is very straight-forward. Save the alarmist rhetoric for the headlines.

> “There’s nothing in any statute or anything else that allows you to ask Equifax to remove your data or have all your data disappear if you say you no longer trust it,” said John Ulzheimer, a consumer credit expert

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/08/technology/seriously-equi...

That sounds to me like I don't own my own data.

The companies on the other side of your transactions.

Even all-paper companies back in the day had ops.

This sounds like blockchain could have application. But honestly, other countries do fine without them, IMO they should just be abolished.

A blockchain is public. You want everybody's credit public?

The data isn't public if it's in encrypted form. When you apply for credit, you'd decrypt it with your own private key and re-encrypt it with the creditors private key and send it to the creditor, they would then decrypt privately, process the application, and discard the data.

> you'd decrypt it with your own private key and re-encrypt it with the creditors private key and send it to the creditor

Creditor's public key, not private key.

Yes, goofed on that one.

No, blockchains are magic technology that makes money appear out of nowhere and hides all activity from evildoers.

Well, ethereum doesn't exactly have that good of a security record.