Re: dbdebunk 'Quote of Week' comment

"JGE" <finarfinjge_at_hotmail.com> wrote in
> On 2005-08-18, -CELKO- <jcelko212_at_earthlink.net> wrote:
[..]
> Hello Joe:
>
> I'd be an idiot to question anything above, but I will make a comment
about
> SSN's. Here in Canada, a SIN. There are many situations where one needs to
> store information about people where one has no right to ask for and the
> person has no obligation to deliver, their SSN. Also, is not the SSN
simply
> an artificial key, generated by the government? As such, how does it
differ
> from the lovely primary key or 'identity' that Access is so generous to
> provide? In principle, rather than in scale.

There is no difference in its genesis - only in the interest that we attach to it after it is created!

Errr, Access - shudders violently - surely the single most damaging product ever to be foisted on an unsuspecting world when measured in terms of promoting the bad bad practices Joe is railing against. BTW (before I get flamed) I will declare that I have developed a few Access based apps that were quite viable outcomes - but it required lots of experience and discipline to get to achieve those results. Not exactly the skillset of the targeted market.

It does remind me of a recent experience with one of my internet banking facilities (sniggers at the memory). The account was suddenly locked because of 3 failed logins. Suspecting a keylogger hack I quickly rang the help desk to get some forensic info so I could start to id (sic) the affected PC. Oh no she said "its probably a customer who transposed a few digits, didn't notice and then used their password to get your account locked! We used to allocate the numbers sequentially but found it was causing too many problems, so we now use random numbers to avoid typo collisions". My paranoia faded instantly and my evil twin contemplated the DOS from hell - imagine the help desk meltdown trying to reset irate customer passwords if you started pounding from 1 onwards, and then did it again a day later! Simple decisions made by simpletons - BIG headaches later!

Cheers, Frank. Received on Fri Aug 19 2005 - 15:21:09 CEST