Sadly he passes many years ago. His wife called me in desperation. She needed to get rid of and donate a bunch of tools and hardware filling their garage. However, everything had his SSN on it, I mean, he had an amazing collection of Snap-on tools with his SSN engraved on everything, down to the screwdrivers.
She trust me implicitly. We took everything out of their garage and donated it to our local high school's robotics club. The caveat was: The kids had to help me grind off the SSN from every single tool they got. That was an interesting week.
SSN for deceased people is published broadly in various forms.
Plus I use Bitwarden, which auto-fills the boxes so I don't need to paste passwords at least.
If you’re writing a little JS snippet to “fix” this, https://gist.github.com/nuxero/6dda1287ccfb91999e9f8c42d7246... or https://gist.github.com/SukkaW/26dc57f3bf3d7f17a89763dcd9f7d... might also help.
It should be possible to add this to iOS using the Shortcuts app. https://support.apple.com/en-us/guide/shortcuts/apd218e2187d... Though... I’m not entirely sure you can block pasting in Safari on iOS. I can’t say I’ve noticed it there, perhaps the native keyboard password manager integration avoids it.
Don't assume a specific keyboard layout when you're trying to filter out non-numeric values in a text field
I use a French keyboard, and numbers on the top keyboard row are accessed with Shift. A unmodified keypress in this row is for various accented characters, quotes, parentheses and a few others. In other words, it's the opposite of a US/UK keyboard.
Almost every week I come across a website (including a large US stock broker) whose numeric fields seem to block out modifier keys. I have to switch my Macbook to US layout just to type those in (because conveniently, they also disable pasting in those fields of course)
This is very widespread (is that part of a popular front-end framework maybe ?) and difficult to report, because most devs in English-speaking countries never experience the issue first-hand.
What harmful thing can an attacker do with it that doesn't require further identity verification?
Is this an urban legend?
So, for example, "I" had "my identity" "stolen" according to Verizon.
In reality, some criminals learned facts about me and then Verizon happily let them run up thousands of dollars in phone charges in a two month period. (I assume this is part of a larger scam where a 900 number pockets the charges?) This had nothing to do with me, but Verizon then polluted my credit history by falsely reporting the unpaid charges as being mine. So even though there were clearly two parties at fault—the criminals for the fraud and Verizon for not verifying the ID of the person getting the phone line and then falsely harming my credit reputation—I, an uninvolved third party, was made to do the legwork of cleaning up the mess. It's really scandalous that we allow this, but the PR of "identity theft" has been quite good at brainwashing the public.
The summary is that the USA does not have an official national person identity number. The SSN is the closest approximation, so it is being (ab)used as one. This is despite that it is explicitly not designed for it and has some qualities which make it less suitable (the numbers are small and very predictable).
In general, nearly every national-identity-system suffers from a contradiction between assigning identities and identifying. Where the number you get assigned is simultaneously your identity and a secret you use to establish your identity. There are initiatives to solve this using cryptography, but this is complicated by political attitudes towards privacy and government tracking. I dare say in the USA this is more pronounced due to both the problem and the political attitude against solutions being more pronounced.
As personnel management became more sophisticated and formalized, a unique identifier was needed that was guaranteed to refer to one and only one person. And since SSNs already existed and were guaranteed unique, most of them just used those rather than inventing a unique identifier of their own.
Yeah.... about that: https://www.cio.com/article/3004596/a-tale-of-two-women-same...
- Blocking copy-paste of my bank account information
- Input value for income can't contain commas or a dollar sign
- Obscuring input field of SSN as if it were a password (I suppose this might not seem wrong to some folks, but technically SSN isn't a password and most other sites I've used don't treat it like a password)