See the post on BlueSky: https://bsky.app/profile/provisionalidea.bsky.social/post/3lhujtm2qkc2i
According to many comments, the US government DOES use SQL, and Musk is not understanding much what's going on.
this post was submitted on 11 Feb 2025
1301 points (98.6% liked)
Programmer Humor
20492 readers
803 users here now
Welcome to Programmer Humor!
This is a place where you can post jokes, memes, humor, etc. related to programming!
For sharing awful code theres also Programming Horror.
Rules
- Keep content in english
- No advertisements
- Posts must be related to programming or programmer topics
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
"Several generations" well that is fucking garbage
Nah. It’s worked for 50 years and if we get another 30 then it’s done its job well. Government is supposed to review and adjust things as time goes on and Social Security Numbers weren’t intended to uniquely identify citizens. They probably expected an overhaul to be done by 2020.
They fact that we haven’t reworked portions of it and rely on SSNs to identify citizens shows that we haven’t had a forward-thinking Congress in the last 20 years at minimum.
The entire number is garbage. Change the last digit and you have randomly guessed a perfectly valid SSN.
Less secure than a gift card
Well, it's an identifier, your problem if that you have been using it as some kind of access key
You can guess a phone number as well by changing the last number, but that information has 0 value unless it is coupled with other informations.
You can reverse engineer a good bit of an SSN if you just have someone's birth date and where they were born.
I am not sure if you are agreeing with me or not, but DOB and location where you were born are additional informations as I mentioned in my replie before.
Oh yeah I agree that just getting a SSN is not a big issue itself but the fact that you can reverse engineer it from known information makes it not a very good security measure to prove identity.
Oh I totally agree with that. It's dumb that there is so many systems that use SSNs as an identification.
My identity infos have been leaked with the Desjardins leaks, so my SSN is forever known and all the critical services that uses SSNs are now more vulnerable.
well tbf, the standard coming from computing is doubling the bits until it stops being a problem, or with ipv6 practically having more IPs than there are atoms in the entire planet of earth (i think i did the calculation a while ago, and it was like, most of the atoms in earth, so like, not quite, but for all intents and purposes, might as well be)
According to XKCD about 40% of the earth
https://xkcd.com/865/
yeah that sounds about right, someone should make an XKCD search engine i think.