“Many media outlets mistakenly reported that the National Public data breach affects 2.9 billion people (that figure actually refers to the number of rows in the leaked data sets.)”
It's hilarious, 2.9 billion social security numbers (US concept) but wait... there aren't that many people in the US.
The data is pretty uninteresting and has a lot of duplicate records with slight variations in the street address. SSNs are essentially public data at this point, just freeze your credit.
(should be frozen by default but that's another conversation)
272,535,129 unique SSNs in the leak, so like 82% of the US population. Somehow I'm not in it, but lots of people that I know are.
Also, super important, but address history is in the leak, so all those sites that ask you about your address history to authenticate you need to knock it TF off right now.
The news I watched this evening said "2.9 billion records" and "potentially billions of people" which is a fairly accurate conclusion without having run any sort of query on the data. Null values are a thing too.
it's a dataset of information about people in the US (given it comes from US public records), of which there are far less than a billion. There's no possible way it could be "billions of people". That conclusion requires no querying of the data.
A little over two months ago, I also suffered a serious accident. I dislocated and broke my ankle in three places (a trimalleolar fracture). I was out of work from five weeks, ended up with blood blisters all over my ankle, had two surgeries, mountains of painkillers, and I still can't walk. I probably won't be able to walk unassisted without an ortho boot until sometime in September, and that's assuming everything goes well.
The villain in my story? An oily little puddle that I went through on my bike. Maybe the new tires I'd put on that didn't have quite as much grip as I expected.
Per the article 0.2% of .com domains are phishing vs 4.2% of .top. Or put another way, if you have a .top domain it's about 17 times as likely to be phishing than a .com domain.
.com has the most phishing domains by virtue of by far being the biggest, not because they have looser controls or are less reliable.
Only if you select a random domain from a list of all .com or .top domains. No one does that of course. The chance a random .top (or .com) you encounter is a phishing domain isn't so easily calculated, depends on where you see it, etc.
The media is kind of dumb, eh?
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