It's hard to figure out what he's talking about , when he says the "whole social security database". Like in which tables are they duplicated? Does it mean the entire row is duplicated or just the SSN, it might make sense to be duplicated depending on the schema. Is it an append only db, so there might be updated columns on the same ssn and you need to filter by the latest update timestamp? Who knows.

But also, saying that there's a "social security database" and then following that up by the govt "doesn't use SQL" so.. the db is actually just a spreadsheet? A .txt file? The SSNs are just written down in someone's notebook? Lol

[–] lightnsfw@reddthat.com 6 points 1 hour ago (1 children)

He looked over the shoulder of one of the script kiddies he hired and saw 2 lines with the same SSN, freaked out, remembered some database words he picked up somewhere and hopped on twitter.

[–] mnemonicmonkeys@sh.itjust.works 1 points 16 minutes ago

Muskrat grew up as a trust fund baby on money from his dad's apartheid emerald mines. He's essentially clueless regarding technical skills and got where he is from just hiring people who knew what they were doing.

Unfortunately there's been a bunch of propaganda over the years making him out to be some super genius that's the lead engineer for all of his companies, and he's since bought into all of it

[–] frezik@midwest.social 28 points 4 hours ago (2 children)

SSNs are reused. Someone dies and their number gets reassigned. The database could easily be keeping track of all previous assignments for any given SSN.

Remember, SSNs are designed for social security and nothing else. They got picked up as a unique ID by private interests as a hack. They were never supposed to be as widespread in use as they are. The federal government using it this way is the specific, designed use case.

[–] Schadrach@lemmy.sdf.org 1 points 16 minutes ago

SSNs are reused. Someone dies and their number gets reassigned.

Not even that. If you were born before 2014 or so and you're from somewhere relatively populous theres a pretty good chance there's more than one living human with your SSN right now. SSN were never meant to be unique, the pairing of SSN and name was meant to be unique but no one really checked for that for most of the history of the program so it really wasn't either. The combination of SSN, name and age/birthdate should actually be unique though because of how they were assigned even back in the day.

[–] captainlezbian@lemmy.world 8 points 3 hours ago

Yep, and any attempt to replace them with a purpose designed government ID has gotten conspiracy nuts to shut it down

[–] some_designer_dude@lemmy.world 11 points 4 hours ago

It’s LotusNotes all the way down

[–] iii@mander.xyz 11 points 5 hours ago (1 children)

Or mongoDB 🙄

Probably something bespoke/legacy.

[–] enumerator4829@sh.itjust.works 2 points 1 hour ago

Have you met out lord and saviour COBOL?