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The other Sean Byrne doesn't exist

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Re: The other Sean Byrne doesn't exist

#191
post #32
post #26

This is one of the obvious consequences of not having a national identity number assigned to everyone at birth, which exist in most developed countries, except for anglosphere, for some reason.

in Egypt, every person is born with a universal national ID number , which is standardized everywhere here, but it created some problems, it became extremely valuable to attackers. If leaked, it can be reused across completely different services ( and you can never change it under anycase ) Having the full name + national ID was enough to bypass verification and activate various services, and many people weren't tech…

Right, people and organizations failing to (care to) distinguish between "highly distinctive" versus "true" is not a data design problem, it's a social/political one.

Re: The other Sean Byrne doesn't exist

#192
post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One good reason to introduce a national ID system in the US would be in order to replace and deprecate the Social Security Number, which is a terrible system that never should have been used as a de-facto national ID system.

Something tells me the people misusing the SSN would just misuse this new national ID number too. Wasn't the issue that people were treating knowledge of the (de facto public) ID number as proof of identity? Nothing is stopping them from doing the same with any future ID number.

Ironically, a certain level of secrecy is worse than having them fully public, because it leads people to (wrongly) design systems and processes that trust it or assume something from it.

All else being equal, I'd rather see national ID numbers which are so incredibly obviously un-secret that, at least on their own, they're nothing except a tool for avoiding overlaps and collisions.

Re: The other Sean Byrne doesn't exist

#193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Private key would be stored on a government HSM obviously

Unfortunately so. Any solution would rely on trust and for that reason alone would be unworkable.

I wonder if you could leverage etherium smart contracts to reduce the need for trust.

Re: The other Sean Byrne doesn't exist

#194
post #26

This is one of the obvious consequences of not having a national identity number assigned to everyone at birth, which exist in most developed countries, except for anglosphere, for some reason.

That doesn't work unless everyone is always referred to by that number. All it takes is a "credible" information on some database that says you're the other Sean Bryne, now with the related national ID.

Re: The other Sean Byrne doesn't exist

#196

You can't seriously match people on first and last name and claim "fully matched". Think of how manny John Smiths there are? How can this be the company started by Wozniak and Jobs ...

> How can this be the company started by Wozniak and Jobs ... The same Jobs that routinely denied publicly that he was the parent of his daughter, even though he knew? The same Jobs that cheated Wozniak financially? The same Jobs that led to a change in legal legislation on how organ transplants work? The world needs to move on from this marketing bs that he was somehow a "great" man who is morally solid and must be…

Being an asshole is a different problem from believing that there is only one John Smith on the planet.

Re: The other Sean Byrne doesn't exist

#197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unfortunately so. Any solution would rely on trust and for that reason alone would be unworkable.

I wonder if you could leverage etherium smart contracts to reduce the need for trust.

Yes, but still someone/thing real has to be trusted to ID the human initially.

Re: The other Sean Byrne doesn't exist

#199

I found some very intriguing/disturbing things while I was paying for full access on Ancestry.com. Those genealogy sites have powerful searches over a lot of public-records databases if you pay them enough. So naturally, I investigated myself. One of the biggest mind-benders was finding a person with a string of addresses going back 25+ years. Now I've lived in this area for 27, and for some reason, this person's add…

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