SSN numbers are good for 999,999,999 people alive or dead. At some point the US will hit that, right? Do we start reusing numbers? Sounds like a disaster waiting to happen.

  • cmnybo@discuss.tchncs.de
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    24 days ago

    Just add another digit and watch the entire country break down because they can’t find someone to update their 40+ year old software written in COBOL.

    • RegalPotoo@lemmy.world
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      24 days ago

      I want to see the high-octane action thriller where the grizzled old hand and the renegade upstart trek to the remote compound in the woods of Montana to find Bob, the last man alive who understands how some obscure part of the IRSs core systems works and bring him back in from the cold for one last job… to save America(s neglected computer systems from decades of under investment)

      • Prison Mike@links.hackliberty.org
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        24 days ago

        Act II needs to have an overdone political scene where congress doesn’t want to pass the budget and almost shuts down the Fed meanwhile some hackers from <focus group hated country> try to take advantage of the situation or whatever

      • foggy@lemmy.world
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        23 days ago

        Nope.

        If you got your social Security number before 2011, your first three digits represent the geographical location you were born in. You share those three digits with each of your siblings who were born in the same geographical location before in 2011. Go ahead and ask them.

        If memory serves, and all we would really need to do is check a Wikipedia article, the middle two digits were done in some weird sequence, and then the last four were pseudo-random.

        So basically, any people receiving their social security number any multiple of 100 people apart from another (prior to 2011) in the same geographic location have a 1 in 10,000 chance of having identical social security numbers.

        Basically, if you live in a large city, you definitely have a few twinsies out there.

        This was changed in 2011, because of this, but it is still not a unique identifier. It’s just more random.

        • yoevli@lemmy.world
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          23 days ago

          This generally isn’t true. The SSA makes an effort to assign a unique number to each individual. It’s happened before where two people have accidentally gotten the same SSN, but they try to avoid this.

            • 11111one11111@lemmy.world
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              23 days ago

              That white paper was very uninformative lol. I see now rereading your comment that its wasnt meant to support your 40 mil claim. So I googled varius combinations of ID analytics, ssn, studies, and 40 million but couldn’t find anything. I’m not that interested, I just wanted to read it tonsee if my gut feeling was correct. The funny thing is the white paper kinda outlined my gut feeling, that the 40 million count is wildly inaccurate demonstration of duplicate ssn’s being issued. Rather I felt it was more of an indication of the rampant problem this country has with the amount of stolen identities that happen each year.

              Do you have any direction you could point me in to read more about this douplicate ssn problem?

              • homicidalrobot@lemm.ee
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                23 days ago

                Idk dude, just googled “id analytics ssn” and I immediately get a page of results of articles from 2012-15. Could probably just add “as someone else” in scholar for the paper

                • 11111one11111@lemmy.world
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                  23 days ago

                  I guess i shouldve just asked where you pulled the 40 million from? Lol cuz that would mean 15% of the US is sharing ssn’s and that seems super high.

    • rbn@sopuli.xyz
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      24 days ago

      Why stop at hex? You could use the entire alphabet. Even if you take only uppercase letters and numbers, we are at 36^9 possible numbers. If we include lowercase and special characters from ASCII, we can go much further.

      • Piafraus@lemmy.world
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        24 days ago

        E. G. For storage and performs reasons. 5 bytes vs 9 bytes. Multiplying by amount of users and various indexes - can produce very noticeably difference. More records per page.

        • rbn@sopuli.xyz
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          24 days ago

          If we say that the SSN database internally only stores numbers today, but could also store hexadecimal values without significant redesigns, I would assume that SSNs are stored as text already. So no matter if you put numbers, hex or text, 9 places will always use 9 bytes (assuming it’s ASCII only and doesn’t support UTF-8 etc.).

          Furthermore, the post implied that the current technical limit is 999,999,999. That very much sounds like a character data type to me. Otherwise, the limit is usually something like 2^x.

          If SSNs are stored as numbers today, then hex and text would lead to quite some change. If you go for a re-design, you can as well just increase the length of the field.

  • bokherif@lemmy.world
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    24 days ago

    Considering there are around 330M citizens right now, I think they ran out already and they’re probably recycling them.

  • RightHandOfIkaros@lemmy.world
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    24 days ago

    Probably recycle the oldest ones because those people will be long dead by then.

    But let’s not kid ourselves, everyone paying into SS right now is never going to get the benefit of it because it will have collapsed.

    • stinerman [Ohio]@midwest.social
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      24 days ago

      It can never collapse unless Congress votes to make it collapse. Even in the future once the trust fund is spent down, benefits will be reduced to what comes in from current workers. That’s not the full amount but it will be something. I think something like 70%.

      So it’s not going to collapse unless you think that anything but full benefits is a collapse.

    • AbouBenAdhem@lemmy.world
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      24 days ago

      They are regularly recycled.

      Not according to the SSA’s Q&A:

      Q20: Are Social Security numbers reused after a person dies?

      A: No. We do not reassign a Social Security number (SSN) after the number holder’s death. Even though we have issued over 453 million SSNs so far, and we assign about 5 and one-half million new numbers a year, the current numbering system will provide us with enough new numbers for several generations into the future with no changes in the numbering system.

  • dQw4w9WgXcQ@lemm.ee
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    23 days ago

    Norawy is facing a similar issue. Even though the national identification number is 11 digits, the first 6 are reserved for birth date. The 7th digit has some set of rules derived from which century the birth was (something like 5-9 is reserved for year 2000 and beyond). The 9th digit is even for women and odd for men. The 10th and 11th digit are fixed and derived from the rest of the numbers.

    In conclusion, the system only leaves room for around 240 people per date of birth per gender (yes this system assumes 2 genders). So if the birth rate would have a spike, even just for a day, the system could be in trouble.

  • ZealousSealion@discuss.tchncs.de
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    23 days ago

    I don’t know how you could possibly fit 999,999,999 people into an SSN, or even the entire current fleet of US SSNs. And I don’t know how reusing numbers will help, given the time to build a new SSN. But it will undoubtedly be a disaster for the USN and the US. Hopefully, some of us outside the US, will be alive to make memes about it.