(for those who don't know, PyCon) -- it is, so far, made of win.

Dammit...

Er, what? SQL injection is a complicated technique these days?

Come on, it's in XKCD, for heaven's sake, it's not that bloody complicated...

(In other news, remind me never to use my credit card in the US again; if that many payment providers don't sanitize their database inputs, there is little hope for the web development world...)

I was in the queue at the supermarket -- the express, fifteen-items-or-less queue, no less -- and it was still taking longer than I wanted it to. So I was looking around, as you do, and out of sheer curiosity I picked up the issue of Marie Claire that was perched precisely at eye level. And I came across this article, which points out the top 20 cities in the US to "snag a great guy". They started, they say, with census data -- finding the cities with the highest ratio of available men to women. And, to quote them...

(The winner: tech mecca San Jose, where it's like shooting fish in a barrel.)

Great. How the hell am I supposed to compete with all the other fish?

In other news, I spent a lovely afternoon / evening coding with aidansean, as a result of which FerretBrain has a new feature, I have a complete program that multiplies numbers like a Russian peasant, and my general loneliness and missing-of-England has been shoved back for a few days. Good stuff :-)

Mental note: make tinfoil holder for passport.

So the actual algorithm for generating Social Security Numbers has been reverse-engineered. For those who don't know, a Social Security Number was originally used to identify government benefit accounts, but the US government has recently been using it more and more as a personal ID number (e.g. on tax returns) and many institutions have followed suit.

So, in other words, ID theft in the US just became a whole lot easier. According to the article, because of changes in government policy in the late 80s and early 90s, the algorithm becomes a lot more reliable for people born after 1988 -- so I'm not instantly screwed, but pretty close.

Thank you, America. Thank you very much.