Hacker News Reader

In the incident that enraged Parson, a Post-Dispatch reporter found that Social Security numbers for teachers, administrators and counselors was visible in the HTML code of a publicly accessible site operated by the state education department. HTML code is the programming that tells the computer how to display a web page.

The newspaper informed the state of the problem and promised not to publish any story until the issue was fixed.

https://missouriindependent.com/2021/10/21/parson-doubles-do...

Right, the SSNs were in plaintext in the html code, and the reporter is a "hacker" for looking at in the browser, reporting the problem to the state, and then to the public. I wonder if browser makers are complicit for including the source view feature.

Previously on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28946392

I have seen some claims that the data was base64-encoded, but I can't find any confirmation of it.

That isn't encryption though, it's just a transformation. More on Wiki https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Base64