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.

Idiocy.

Those logs are going to get slurped by another AI, of course.

That’ll be great in the case of my chats where I mainly use ChatGPT for security research and I trigger all kinds of LLM recursion issues and sanitization bypasses.

They can have at it with my logs and they can go fuck themselves at the same time.

I looked into that and the only question I really have is how geographically distributed the samples were. Other than that, It was an oversampled study, so <50% of the people were the control, of sorts. I don’t fully understand how the sampling worked, but there is a substantial chart at the bottom of the study that shows the full distribution of responses. Even with under 1000 people, it seems legit.

In this study, we conducted a survey (n = 742) including a representative U.S. sample and an oversample of gender minorities, racial minorities, and disabled individuals to examine how demographic factors shape AI attitudes.

I have been using 6ghz for about a year or so now and I found it to be quite fast. MLO can be super weird sometimes and seems to get confused, but it works. (It’s probably just a driver I haven’t updated.)

There seems to hundreds of studies on that and there seems to be a fairly uniform “Yes” and “More than you would guess”, etc.

Here is one: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.3233/ADR-220062

B is for Buy n Large (and billionaire) your very best friend.

I am not sure if I would trust a company that claims a glorified fanny pack will protect your health from EMF radiation.

It’s worse. We are reverting back to the age of lügenpresse and hearsay comes in short-form video formats.

Many people simply do not care (or are even aware) if a source is trusted if the message aligns with their own bias or the message is presented as a new “fact”. Trust is irrelevant, unfortunately.

“real” is subjective.

Mostly by Indian and Vietnamese slave labor: https://www.androidauthority.com/where-are-samsung-phones-made-3251712/

Gamers Nexus recently made a video about GPU “shrinkflation”: https://youtu.be/2tJpe3Dk7Ko

It’s a neat comparison of Nvidia GPUs over the years.

Sorry if it sounded like my rant was directed at you as it absolutely wasn’t. Your comment triggered me, because I absolutely fully agreed with yours as well. ;)

setenforce 0 is much cleaner, I have found.

Its just complex

When a security mechanism becomes more complex to manage than what it is supposed to protect, it becomes a vulnerability itself.

If you had a minimal system that you built from the ground up yourself and wanted to only have that system function in very specific ways, SELinux would be perfect. I would go so far as to say it would be nearing perfection in some ways.

Sorry, but in the real world, ain’t nobody got time for that shit. If you use auto configuration tools or pre-canned configs for SELinux on a system you are unfamiliar with, it’s more likely to cause application issues, create security gaps and will likely be shut off by a Jr. admin who really has no fucking clue what he is doing anyway.

It’s just easier to keep your system patched and ensure basic network security practices anyway.

It’s not impossible to manage these days. In the early days it was, but most everything is automagic now. If I am not mistaken, SELinux can be enabled to ‘log only’ which would give you data better handled by a HIPS anyway. (Don’t quote me on that.)

Unfortunately, AI has the creativity of a turnip.

“Political headwinds” is putting it mildly.