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Discussion on: Changing your name is a hard unsolved problem in Computer Science

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William Gathoye

@penelope_zone Interesting topic which clearly helps devs like me who like to get their users at home. The OAuth part is quite interesting as well because I have to admit, I did make the mistake :(, but I now try to get the unique ID (when returned by the authenticator).

Just a question. In Belgium, the national security number is made on the date of birth reversed: YYMMDD-XXX.YY. With the year using 2 digits, you can easily understand the issues we are beginning to face. More and more people begin to have numbers conflicts (currently avoided by running the random generator a bit longer and checking each time, but that another topic to discuss).

The random number being generated at the end is ending with an odd digit for people identified as men. Do you have a similar (stupid?) logic in US as well? Does changing the official gender change the national security number as well? This cause a lot of harm as well for services used to authenticate against the national number. I know US isn't great wrt social security, so pardon my ignorance here.