No lawyer would take the case either. He eventually went to an identity theft company, who took $400 and fixed the issue in three months.
I use to work in Identity Management at a major university. A number of people came through our systems without SSNs. We had a complicated set of rules to make sure we didn't provision two accounts. We'd check if the names were reversed and we'd check both the month/date = date/month on the date of birth (people from other countries might enter it backwards without thinking about it). We even had rules for SSNs that were off by <2 digits with similar names. Every morning we'd have a set of "manual provisions" we'd have to stop and check.
Occasionally duplicate accounts get created and we'd have to go through a big manual process of combining them and telling them "You need to use this account; forget about the other one. It no longer exists," and get their stuff synced across all AD domains (Universities typically have several).
What surprises me about this article is the NYC system doesn't use the SSN (which is good in a sense, it should never be used as a identification number, see the latest GCP Greg: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Erp8IAUouus).
The idea of an identity and criminal record us that follows us digitally is a very new concept, one that didn't exist 150+ years ago; or at least no where near the complexity it does today. Immigration was also treated very differently. Most of are criminal background procedures in the US are plagued with problems like this; which is why most counties require fingerprint/criminal checks for immigration screenings.
Today, the idea of a national identification number is highly opposed in the United States. In some ways I favour this as I feel digital identities lead to a situation where people cannot escape their pasts. But it also means people use absolutely terrible ways to associate people such as name and birthday; totally non-unique fields that should never be used to identify people. SSNs offer no real security; no photos and your number +1/-1 is most likely a valid SSN of someone who was born the same day as you.
people from other countries might enter it correctly without thinking about it
Frankly I'm surprised that we didn't use big endian for x86.
More like: "Let's pioneer this field." Later: "Sure there are international standards now, but we won't change how we do things because money."
But the pioneering argument doesn't apply to everything. Every country or area inside countries had their own units of measurement for basic stuff like mass of things, weight of food, volume of cups, length of poles, exactly like every city had its own time before time zones. There is no pioneering in the size and weight of containers for wheat. It's stuff people have been doing since before writing.
Basically every country standardized most units but the USA didn't. I think that having the larger economy in the world played a role in that. There are no incentives to adapt when the rest of the world will build a slightly different size of everything only for the US market.
[1] Check this conversion table for gas pipes http://www.azzistudio.it/tavola.html and notice the weird values for the metric sizes (millimeters). Nobody would build pipes with those diameters if they started metric centuries ago.
A pint of beer or cider in Britain is 568mL, in the USA 473mL, but everything else in a British bar is sold in metric units. And today is "the third of April", 3/4/2016.
You've also written it in "outer right hand side of a ledger" notation instead of the more correct ISO-8601
https://xkcd.com/1179/ (ISO 8601)
Official forms in Britain (and most of Europe) use the leading zeros, DD/MM/YYYY, though the separator can be / - . or a mixture.
Never the less, the one true date format is ISO 8601, and it should be used everywhere there isn't a clear and over-riding reason to use another format.
From the Midwest, USA and I'd would always refer to the date in the first way (and subsequently, it is logical to write the date in month/day format).
Still agree that day/month/year makes more sense.
The latter. "April fourth" would sound very odd in a British accent.
Example with lots of written dates: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2017/03/29/article-50-brexit... (but I could equally choose a formal document, like my birth certificate, or something very informal, like a handwritten note).
When spoken, the "of" is always included, and the number is always an ordinal (-th etc).
And year/month/day/hour/minute/second is best as its largest to smallest and if you name your documents / fields in this format it sorts better.
Checkuary is the unofficial 13th month of every year. It lasts until you remember to write the correct year number on all of your checks.
As an American, I write it as 3Apr2017 to avoid ambiguity. I can't stand how the traditional all-numeric date format is neither big-endian nor little-endian.
My current British bank account didn't come with a cheque book, but the one I had when I was a student did. So probably 2009 or so; maybe one or two per year before that.
As in a home loan deposit are an outright house purchase?
In Australia when I did this it was done via a different kind of cheque, I forget what it was called because I haven't used one before or since, but I had to the bank in person to get it.
The only other time I've used a check in the recent past has been to void one for direct deposit at an employer.
I wish there was a way around both of these - I hate writing checks.
When you use your bank to pay a bill on-line, unless it's a major utility that worked with your bank to setup an ACH payment means, the bank will typically still print a paper check and send it to its destination.
We have electronic transfer (ACH) using the bank (ABA or routing number) and account number, but it's not available to regular people. People often keep these two numbers secrete to prevent identity theft.
Most other countries, you put your friends bank num, account num and name and it will show up in their account the very next day (even on holidays!) for free. In the US, you have to use 3rd party payment systems like PayPal, which charge fees and don't really do bank-to-bank transfers.
(The UK system guarantees two hours, but it's usually seconds.)
You can also use a mobile phone number instead of knowing the bank account numbers. This is extremely common in Denmark, including for purchases; the same system exists in the UK but it is less often used.
What's a "check"?
From Stan Mazor's 1995 survey article "The History of the microcomputer - Invention and Evolution" from Proceedings of the IEEE, pp. 1601-1607, Dec. 1995,
A. Little Endian
Some have wondered why the addresses in the 8008 were
stored "backward" with the little end first, e.g., the low
order byte of a two byte address is stored in the lower
addressed memory location. I (regrettably) specified this
ordering as part of the JUMP instruction format in the spirit
of compatibility with the Datapoint 2200. Recall that their
original processor was bit serial; the addresses would be
stored low to high bit in the machine code (bit backward).
Other computer makers organize the addresses with the "big
end" first. The lack of standardization has been a problem
in the industry.Just don't use it for any kind of authentication, ever, because it's not a secret. Also, add a checksum to avoid typos.
When I was young there was privacy. Believe it or not, you could start a new life somewhere else if you wished, and leave the old one behind, without any great effort. Move and get an unlisted number and you might as well have vanished from the face of the earth. Freedom as I knew it then required privacy, these were not concepts that could be separated.
I'm not sure what the West means by freedom now; since I'm no longer in a practical sense free to do so much that I was once free to do, without scrutiny. No doubt crime rates are down as a result; but reducing crime wasn't the purpose of freedom. Of course, it would take real effort to maintain privacy in a digital world. I think the time will come when we make that effort.