Or, as I've questioned previously on here, WTF are the credit rating agencies in the US using non-unique identifiers (and identifiers that shouldn't be used outside a social security scenario) when (usually the exact same) credit agencies in other countries can manage using other (available) data? (Name, DOB, (Previous and current) Address?)

For example in the UK, the equivalent to the SSN is the National Insurance (NI) number - this is never used by the CRAs - only by HMRC (tax office.)

Anyway, sure, they still get false positives using these details (the most common seems to be when they use the name only), but not quite on this sort of scale.

Assuming that those aren't specifically cited as locally administered addresses, I'm sure there are some duplicates in there as well, something else vendors shouldn't be doing. OUI's shouldn't really be starting with 02.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MAC_address#Address_details

A locally administered address is assigned to a device by a network administrator, overriding the burned-in address. Locally administered addresses do not contain OUIs.

Universally administered and locally administered addresses are distinguished by setting the second least significant bit of the most significant byte of the address. If the bit is 0, the address is universally administered. If it is 1, the address is locally administered. In the example address 02-00-00-00-00-01 the most significant byte is 02 (hex). The binary is 00000010 and the second least significant bit is 1. Therefore, it is a locally administered address.[3] The bit is 0 in all OUIs.

Or simply use the private/local range of MAC addresses (02:xx:xx:xx:xx:xx) (The MAC address equivalent of ,say, 10/8)?

Student posts flame about hometown on MySpace, subsequently removes it.

Ex-princicple saw it while it was up, posted it to local rag with her name and address attached.

She gets threats, her father has to close his business.

Laywers, when asked identical questions, disagree on certain aspects of copyright and agree on others when using copyright as a possible way of getting money out of the local rag.

Take up smoking? ;)

It is not beyond the wit of the credit reference agencies to identify a US citizen from stuff other than the (it appears horribly abused) SSN?

I mean, if Experian can manage it in the UK (Name, Address, DOB is usually enough to identify you with the CRA,) why can't they do it in the US?

Or is this just simply laziness on the part of the CRAs?

Ignoring the fact that you seem to think that the 4 places I named are the only places I implied I'd been to, um, yes. In fact not only have 'terrorists' wanted to declare Jihad on them, they already have.

All from the same site because it appears to be useful source of such stuff, and thus probably biased in your eyes anyway:

http://www.historyofjihad.org/canada.html
http://www.historyofjihad.org/britain.html
http://www.historyofjihad.org/germany.html
http://www.historyofjihad.org/malaysia.html
http://www.historyofjihad.org/australia.html

Which is not to imply that every country I've been to has had Jihad declared against it.

I dunno. In the past 7 years, I've flown to around 14 different countries from South America, Africa to the Middle and Far East (clearly not at the same time,) and not once have I ever had my fingerprints taken as part of the process.

No you don't. At least not in the country TFA is talking about: you get prosecuted (which might, but is highly unlikely to, result in jail - our prisons are full enough TYVM,) and you have 42 days to do it in:

http://www.barnsley.gov.uk/bguk/Community/Registrars/Registering_Births_Deaths/Registering_a_Birth

It is a legal duty to register a birth within 42 days. Failure to do so will not only leave you liable to prosecution but will also make it impossible for you to register to receive family allowance or register your baby with a doctor.

That sort of behaviour would likely to earn you a criminal record, and a marker on this database to indicate that your child is now on the child protection register (one of the groups of people for whom this database is for I'd imagine after the farce over 'Baby P.')

And I'm not being cynical, I only wish I were.

I raised no objection in a different message, this being my second on this story.

It's coming to something when even the submitters can't be bothered RTFA. All night hackathons are not going to kill you:

All of these physiological changes are reversible, thoughâ"take a nap, and you'll be on the road back to normal.
[...]
After 32 days of total sleep deprivation, all the rats were dead.

So unless you work 32 days straight, you're not going to die.

Um - Hungarian notation is for coding what the variable represents, not the type of variable it's represented by.

Anyone using iVariable or sVariable to indicate that the former is an int and the latter is a string is doing it wrong.

It's this misunderstanding that's resulted in HN's 'bad' reputation.

See http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/Wrong.html for an example of how HN should be used.

That, also, only works for companies that accept a + sign in the local part. Amex, for example, don't. As do(n't) a wide variety of regex's that people swipe off the net to use in their websites.