News for hackers. Stuff that matters.
Re:German town votes ‘No’ to street names by StreakyCobra on Monday February 04, 2019 @07:18AM (#19075671)
> Personally I really hope something like https://plus.codes/ will catch up. People should be easily able to provide address without knowing or caring about local arrangements.

It would already be a better solution indeed. But ultimately I would prefer to have a kind of unique identifier for my person that is not based on my location nor my name, like for instance A23C-B442-9F72. It could then be associated to a first name, last name, and geographical address in a database. Delivery services can then look-up the geographical address and your name at delivery time to find you or your mailbox.

This would avoid so much troubles for stuff like:

- Moving: I can change my address in one place and everything will be delivered to the new place, no needs for thousands of calls and letters to companies to update every subscription.

- Changing name: Whenever someone is changing his name for any reason (weeding, gender change, etc.) it should only be modified in one place.

- Disposable address: It should be possible to get disposable identifiers that can only be read by delivery services for hiding your real identifier/address from suspicious website

Of course this system is not perfect and probably has drawbacks, but it would be already a step in the good direction for me. Implementation details are left open for discussion (Centralized vs distributed database(s), checksum for spelling mistakes, financial repercussions, etc.)

Re:German town votes ‘No’ to street names by leetcrew on Monday February 04, 2019 @08:21AM (#19076084)
maybe this is already obvious to you, but a disposable address only hides your location to a certain degree. an untrustworthy vendor probably couldn't figure out your exact address, but I bet they could narrow down your city/town by requesting shipping quotes from many different locations and triangulating via price differences.