There are some fairly beast defense lines just past Pokrovsk the Ukraine has had plenty of time to build. Hopefully it works as advertised.

000, 666 and 900-999 are invalid area numbers and any digit group of all zeros is also invalid. Thanks for playing!

I am making a slightly different point and have a bias to this perspective: https://www.legis.iowa.gov/docs/publications/SD/19230.pdf

I am saying that an SSN can be part of a larger validation scheme, not the only key to the castle. Specifically for government sites, SSNs can be linked to IRS data to verify places of last residence. A person generally needs to verify multiple items that are referenced by the SSN before basic authentication can be established and set by the user. (This is part of the full Authentication, Authorization and Access Control triad.)

An SSN is just a broad level identifier. If you look at many laws around the release of SSNs, the redaction is usually in place to prevent the linking of different documents and other data points.

If I released my SSN in this chat, I could be fully doxxed in a matter of seconds. It’s mainly because there are many legal systems in place that use an SSN as a primary key, of sorts. (It’s a bit more than that, as SSNs can be duplicated in some circumstances.)

So to say, at a high level, an SSN is considered private is absolutely correct. However, it’s so easily referenced and obtainable it really isn’t fully private either.

If I was to generate a full list of every possible SSN in the US (which I have done, multiple times), that list is effectively useless to anyone who obtains a copy of it. So, by itself, an SSN is effectively public.

SSNs are generally considered public information but how the SSN is linked to other information is usually the more difficult bit to find and it’s generally pay-walled. (Any jackass with a business license and a credit card can usually buy background check information for ‘hiring’.)

But no, it shouldn’t be solely used for authentication. That is just dumb. However, it can be used as part of a larger verification and validation scheme while building authentication/authorization profiles. In most systems that I have seen that use full or partial SSNs, it is always linked to several other identifiers that need to match.

69% of developers report losing 8+ hours weekly to inefficiencies—20% of their time (Atlassian, 2024)

Yep. If there is any company that knows what it takes to drive inefficiencies, it’s Atlassian. (Fuck them and their software.)

I would speculate that it’s related to Russia’s ability to retaliate and Russian allies willingness to help. Also, Russian reliance on the shadow oil trade is exponentially higher than it was a couple of years ago, so the investment loss is much higher now.

Most of all, politicians are just slow. I am not extremely familiar with EU politics, but my assumption is that decisions can take much longer to make when multiple countries are involved in taking actions like this.