GitHub sued for aiding hacking in Capital One breach

I even have trouble with this premise, in addition to general agreement with a lot of the other comments in this tree arguing that SSN detection is a red herring.

I agree that displaying SSNs for human consumption has an agreed upon standard format. This doesn't imply that code (and therefore any tests or distributions of data) working with SSNs is handling them as XXX-XX-XXXX.

I've seen plenty of clients storing them without dashes in database tables. I saw one storing them as INTs and handling padding in display logic. I don't know if an SSN can start with a leading 0, but they guarded against that.

Especially given the storage and memory implications of a 32-bit integer vs a 9-11 character string, I see lots of reasons to work with SSNs in code as ints. Should we flag all ints as SSNs? Or maybe we can be "reasonable" and flag any integer in the range 100,000,000-999,999,999 (aka 100-00-0000 to 999-99-9999) as an SSN?

I can trivially generate a list containing all valid SSNs with a simple loop. Should I hesitate to publish code with loops over integers in the range above? That code could easily be used by a malicious hacker to generate the SSN list!

Overly litigious firms causing rising legal costs across industries? I don't care if it's hard to solve, the onus for fixing it is on the firms, they figure it out or face penalties. Perhaps in the interests of helping the disenfranchised we could institute something like what real estate has, where banks are required to sell a quota of mortgages in certain areas regardless of the financial viability. Lawyers could be forced to seek out clients they would ordinarily never entertain due to the risk of loss. If would stink for them, but what do I care? That's their problem.

PDF link: http://www.law.harvard.edu/programs/olin_center/papers/pdf/R...

"Coffee spills, Pokemon class actions, tobacco settlements. American courts have made a name for themselves as a wild lottery and a money machine for a lucky few lawyers. At least in part, however, the reputation is unfounded. American courts seem to handle routine contract and tort disputes as well as their peers in other wealthy democracies.

"More generally, Americans do not file an unusually high number of law suits. They do not employ large numbers of judges or lawyers. They do not pay more than people in comparable countries to enforce contracts. And they do not pay unusually high prices for insurance against routine torts.

"Instead, American courts have made the bad name for themselves by mishandling a few peculiar categories of law suits. In this article, we use securities class actions and mass torts to illustrate the phenomenon, but anyone who reads a newspaper could suggest alternatives.

"The implications for reform are straightforward: focus not on the litigation as a whole; focus on the specifically mishandled types of suits."

I don't know where I first heard this, but I have in my head the impression that America has the reputation of being overly litigious because mis-behaving companies think they benefit from creating that misconception.

Just the other day my mom texted my address to a friend that wanted to mail me something. I want to know why Verizon didn't stop that from happening!

Verizon should be censoring all addresses from text messages, but I suppose it could allow them after a manual review process.

HN is guilty here as well:

  1600 Pennsylvania Ave NW, Washington, DC 20500

What could go wrong with that process (!) apart from almost everything