Coming soon: Equifax Part 3
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@xaade said in Coming soon: Equifax Part 3:
They just get a small bonus if you pay cash.
Not that cash handling is free either. Cash registers, safes, armoured cars for moving it to the bank, all that sort of thing doesn't just happen by magic. Yes, businesses have to eat those costs (especially if they handle a lot of cash) but they're very real.
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@dkf said in Coming soon: Equifax Part 3:
@xaade said in Coming soon: Equifax Part 3:
They just get a small bonus if you pay cash.
Not that cash handling is free either. Cash registers, safes, armoured cars for moving it to the bank, all that sort of thing doesn't just happen by magic. Yes, businesses have to eat those costs (especially if they handle a lot of cash) but they're very real.
This is why I find it weird that small shops charge extra on small card transactions. Doesn't the cash handling cost more than the card fee?
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@jaloopa not really. Most payment processors charge a percentage plus a per transaction fee.
For instance, ours is $0.30 + 2.9%. If they have a similar arrangement then that $0.30 can be a large chunk on a small dollar transaction. Our very smallest transactions are $100 so $0.30 is a rounding error.
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mPjgRKW_Jmk
four five seven
five five
five four six two
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@ben_lubar said in Coming soon: Equifax Part 3:
four five seven
five five
five four six two
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@pjh said in Coming soon: Equifax Part 3:
@ben_lubar said in Coming soon: Equifax Part 3:
four five seven
five five
five four six twoWell, at least you know the social security number of Todd Davis:
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@ben_lubar That's hilarious.
BRB, getting a loan
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@jaloopa said in Coming soon: Equifax Part 3:
@ben_lubar That's hilarious.
BRB, getting a loan
To show how secure WTDWTF is, I'm posting my password:
QKXKQAyDbfRMWA6Zw4MesG6T2AcCdqMEp5t3Hoqh23zNSEK2Me6NcZftoIpmExY
It's not a password for anything, but it is mine. You can use it if you want, but I don't recommend it because it's on a public forum now.
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@ben_lubar To show how good the hashing is, please post my password hash
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@xaade said in Coming soon: Equifax Part 3:
@polygeekery said in Coming soon: Equifax Part 3:
I see credit bureaus as Super Double Cyborg Hitler.
Maybe.
I don't see the idea of businesses being able to find out about you as bad, but more the way they've handled it.
It should be treated as a background check, as in they have to actively go out and call businesses, rather than just hold data in one place.
That way people don't get to have your information for cheap and for just any old reason.
That's a great way to make the process of buying a home a 10-fold greater headache than it already is.
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@jaloopa said in Coming soon: Equifax Part 3:
@ben_lubar To show how good the hashing is, please post my password hash
I don't have access to the database right now, but here's a hash: #
NodeBB uses bcrypt with a cost factor of 12 by default, by the way.
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@the_quiet_one said in Coming soon: Equifax Part 3:
@xaade said in Coming soon: Equifax Part 3:
@polygeekery said in Coming soon: Equifax Part 3:
I see credit bureaus as Super Double Cyborg Hitler.
Maybe.
I don't see the idea of businesses being able to find out about you as bad, but more the way they've handled it.
It should be treated as a background check, as in they have to actively go out and call businesses, rather than just hold data in one place.
That way people don't get to have your information for cheap and for just any old reason.
That's a great way to make the process of buying a home a 10-fold greater headache than it already is.
Yes. We have traded convenience on a one time purchase, for a shit ton of insecurity.
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@xaade said in Coming soon: Equifax Part 3:
@the_quiet_one said in Coming soon: Equifax Part 3:
@xaade said in Coming soon: Equifax Part 3:
@polygeekery said in Coming soon: Equifax Part 3:
I see credit bureaus as Super Double Cyborg Hitler.
Maybe.
I don't see the idea of businesses being able to find out about you as bad, but more the way they've handled it.
It should be treated as a background check, as in they have to actively go out and call businesses, rather than just hold data in one place.
That way people don't get to have your information for cheap and for just any old reason.
That's a great way to make the process of buying a home a 10-fold greater headache than it already is.
Yes. We have traded convenience on a one time purchase, for a shit ton of insecurity.
Not a one time purchase. Growing up, my family purchased a house 3 times. One of those times due to complications we nearly had to live in a temporary shelter because of a delay in the purchasing process. We're talking about a purchase that affects the ability to have a roof over one's head, after all, not just "convenience".
I sympathize with the insecurity problem with these centralized systems, but abolishing the entire thing as a solution is overkill, IMO. Plus it does jack shit to prevent identity theft because all I'd have to do to get a loan under someone else's name is the same thing anyone did before, only instead of using their identity to get a credit report, they just have to call banks for history.
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@the_quiet_one said in Coming soon: Equifax Part 3:
Growing up, my family purchased a house 3 times. One of those times due to complications we nearly had to live in a temporary shelter because of a delay in the purchasing process.
Why not a hotel?
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@polygeekery said in Coming soon: Equifax Part 3:
@the_quiet_one said in Coming soon: Equifax Part 3:
Growing up, my family purchased a house 3 times. One of those times due to complications we nearly had to live in a temporary shelter because of a delay in the purchasing process.
Why not a hotel?
They're buying something that costs 1000x the price, they can't afford a room.
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@the_quiet_one said in Coming soon: Equifax Part 3:
We're talking about a purchase that affects the ability to have a roof over one's head, after all, not just "convenience".
I didn't eliminate your ability to buy a house for crying out loud.
I merely pointed out that you gain a little bit of convenience in a really long process for a high security cost.
Is it worth it? I don't know, I'm not you.
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@polygeekery said in Coming soon: Equifax Part 3:
@the_quiet_one said in Coming soon: Equifax Part 3:
Growing up, my family purchased a house 3 times. One of those times due to complications we nearly had to live in a temporary shelter because of a delay in the purchasing process.
Why not a hotel?
Because spending $900 a week for a hotel that doesn't give you syphilis while the banks determine if you're worth the risk of defaulting while already having funds set aside for closing costs tightens your budget even more than it already does when purchasing a home?
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@the_quiet_one said in Coming soon: Equifax Part 3:
@polygeekery said in Coming soon: Equifax Part 3:
@the_quiet_one said in Coming soon: Equifax Part 3:
Growing up, my family purchased a house 3 times. One of those times due to complications we nearly had to live in a temporary shelter because of a delay in the purchasing process.
Why not a hotel?
Because spending $900 a week for a hotel that doesn't give you syphilis while the banks determine if you're worth the risk of defaulting while already having funds set aside for closing costs tightens your budget even more than it already does when purchasing a home?
Just wait till you sell the house. I spent 10k pre contract to get the house to sell. The costs of the contract were another 10k.
Buying and selling houses on a tight budget is a lie.
FHA is only making it worse.
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@xaade said in Coming soon: Equifax Part 3:
@the_quiet_one said in Coming soon: Equifax Part 3:
@polygeekery said in Coming soon: Equifax Part 3:
@the_quiet_one said in Coming soon: Equifax Part 3:
Growing up, my family purchased a house 3 times. One of those times due to complications we nearly had to live in a temporary shelter because of a delay in the purchasing process.
Why not a hotel?
Because spending $900 a week for a hotel that doesn't give you syphilis while the banks determine if you're worth the risk of defaulting while already having funds set aside for closing costs tightens your budget even more than it already does when purchasing a home?
Just wait till you sell the house. I spent 10k pre contract to get the house to sell. The costs of the contract were another 10k.
Buying and selling houses on a tight budget is a lie.
FHA is only making it worse.
You can have a vast budget all you like, Murphy's Law will do everything to make it tight enough to make you lose sleep for the entire process.
I've personally been through the process twice. Delaying any part of the process has a domino effect on both parties. Making the process even longer than it already is will have a clusterfuck of bad results. If we want to abolish credit bureaus and mitigate identity theft, we have to do it in such a way that doesn't make mortgages more time-consuming to obtain than it already is.
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@the_quiet_one said in Coming soon: Equifax Part 3:
You can have a vast budget all you like, Murphy's Law will do everything to make it tight enough to make you lose sleep for the entire process.
I've personally been through the process twice. Delaying any part of the process has a domino effect on both parties. Making the process even longer than it already is will have a clusterfuck of bad results. If we want to abolish credit bureaus and mitigate identity theft, we have to do it in such a way that doesn't make mortgages more time-consuming to obtain than it already is.The house we are currently in we bought with manual underwriting as I had essentially no credit score. From my perspective as compared to a previous home purchase it seemed like there was more effort up front, but closing was pretty painless. When you are manually underwritten, you have a letter of credit and not just a pre-approval.
With a pre-approval via a credit score my guess is that they still have to do some (or most/all) of the manual underwriting steps that I had to go through. I just had to go through them up front and got it out of the way. Closing was simple. Just a hell of a lot of signatures.
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@polygeekery said in Coming soon: Equifax Part 3:
@the_quiet_one said in Coming soon: Equifax Part 3:
You can have a vast budget all you like, Murphy's Law will do everything to make it tight enough to make you lose sleep for the entire process.
I've personally been through the process twice. Delaying any part of the process has a domino effect on both parties. Making the process even longer than it already is will have a clusterfuck of bad results. If we want to abolish credit bureaus and mitigate identity theft, we have to do it in such a way that doesn't make mortgages more time-consuming to obtain than it already is.The house we are currently in we bought with manual underwriting as I had essentially no credit score. From my perspective as compared to a previous home purchase it seemed like there was more effort up front, but closing was pretty painless. When you are manually underwritten, you have a letter of credit and not just a pre-approval.
Pre-approval definitely streamlines the process a lot. Once you get the golden ticket, the only thing in your way is how the bank assesses the house you're purchasing, which is itself a tedious process. I had a manual underwriting for my first home purchase for similar reasons, and it took roughly 3 months to get it done, most of the process being having the mortgage broker simply find a bank willing to approve me. This was pre-recession, though, and with 20% down. There's no fucking way I would have pulled that off after 2008.
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@the_quiet_one said in Coming soon: Equifax Part 3:
we have to do it in such a way that doesn't make mortgages more time-consuming to obtain than it already is.
statements of credit from other banks, or from an account with the bank you're borrowing from.
All they want to know is if you pay your bills.
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@xaade said in Coming soon: Equifax Part 3:
@the_quiet_one said in Coming soon: Equifax Part 3:
we have to do it in such a way that doesn't make mortgages more time-consuming to obtain than it already is.
statements of credit from other banks, or from an account with the bank you're borrowing from.
All they want to know is if you pay your bills.
And how do you prevent people from simply showing all the bills they do pay, while omitting the serious bills they don't?
Part of the approval process is also determining if you can pay your mortgage. That involves determining your existing debts and other obligations. If you have $20,000 in credit card debt that results in $600 of monthly interest and a $1,000 minimum payment, that's something a bank needs to know before offering them a $Thousands monthly payment on their mortgage.
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@the_quiet_one said in Coming soon: Equifax Part 3:
I had a manual underwriting for my first home purchase for similar reasons, and it took roughly 3 months to get it done, most of the process being having the mortgage broker simply find a bank willing to approve me.
That's because most brokers will never touch one. It is foreign to them. Like handing a millenial a $2 bill.
@the_quiet_one said in Coming soon: Equifax Part 3:
This was pre-recession, though, and with 20% down. There's no fucking way I would have pulled that off after 2008.
Funny. We bought this house in 2008 or 2009. So yes, it can be done.
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@the_quiet_one said in Coming soon: Equifax Part 3:
And how do you prevent people from simply showing all the bills they do pay, while omitting the serious bills they don't?
Oh, whine whine whine.
Before the housing market collapse they said I could afford a house 3x as much as the one I bought.
Now you're going to pretend they actually care if it gets paid. They're going to sell that loan and move on to the next one.
If that bites them in the ass, they'll bitch to the government that they're too big to fail.
Seriously, we don't need credit bureaus.
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@xaade said in Coming soon: Equifax Part 3:
Before the housing market collapse they said I could afford a house 3x as much as the one I bought.
Likewise. I think it was 4X though.
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@polygeekery said in Coming soon: Equifax Part 3:
@xaade said in Coming soon: Equifax Part 3:
Before the housing market collapse they said I could afford a house 3x as much as the one I bought.
Likewise. I think it was 4X though.
I have no idea how they calculated that much.
I think they ignored our need for food.
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@xaade said in Coming soon: Equifax Part 3:
@the_quiet_one said in Coming soon: Equifax Part 3:
And how do you prevent people from simply showing all the bills they do pay, while omitting the serious bills they don't?
Oh, whine whine whine.
Before the housing market collapse they said I could afford a house 3x as much as the one I bought.
...and it was a huge part of the cause of the collapse in the first place.
@xaade said in Coming soon: Equifax Part 3:
If that bites them in the ass, they'll bitch to the government that they're too big to fail.
And look at what good that mentality did for us.
Look, I don't like the state of the banking industry as it stands now. That doesn't mean we should just allow more abuse of it to further fuck over the economy.
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@the_quiet_one said in Coming soon: Equifax Part 3:
Look, I don't like the state of the banking industry as it stands now. That doesn't mean we should just allow more abuse of it to further fuck over the economy.
Didn't say that.
My point was that the argument of keeping the credit bureaus because it's the way banks can determine whether to loan is dubious, because that didn't prevent the collapse. It's almost as if banks use them for another reason. Not whether to loan, but whether they want an excuse not to.
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@aapis said in Coming soon: Equifax Part 3:
@polygeekery The last 2, yes. But I'm not American (or British), so the chances are lower. I don't even know if they operate in my country.
And yes I can, as I had never heard of Equifax before this breach yet you're still claiming that I gave them permission. I gave no such explicit permission to Equifax, ever. Promise. You're trying to make the argument that because some other company says "we may check your credit..." in one of their many long form fine print documents that I have given them permission to know everything about me, but this argument is wrong. You're arguing from a legal perspective (which I don't care about, obviously this company was operating legally - my point has nothing to do with that) while I am arguing from the POV of the average consumer.
If my data ends up on the dark web because this company did not protect it properly, that is wrong. If they got that data without asking me personally for my explicit permission, that is wrong squared. Yes, it may be legal. Lots of things are legal right now. Your pedantry is irrelevant.
YMBNH
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@aapis said in Coming soon: Equifax Part 3:
If my data ends up on the dark web because this company did not protect it properly, that is wrong.
Yes.
@aapis said in Coming soon: Equifax Part 3:
. If they got that data without asking me personally for my explicit permission, that is wrong squared.
They didn't.
You just don't read what you sign.
@aapis said in Coming soon: Equifax Part 3:
yet you're still claiming that I gave them permission. I gave no such explicit permission to Equifax, ever.
Wrong.
I think I've made a clear point that I think this collection of data is unjust, but it's injustice that I personally agreed to when I bought this house.
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This reminds me of all the complaints of privacy on the internet, meanwhile people end up publicly, and knowingly publicly, posting everything about themselves and their dog.
Read the damn contracts. You are signing to allowing banks and creditors, and billing companies, to report to credit bureaus.
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@xaade said in Coming soon: Equifax Part 3:
@the_quiet_one said in Coming soon: Equifax Part 3:
Look, I don't like the state of the banking industry as it stands now. That doesn't mean we should just allow more abuse of it to further fuck over the economy.
Didn't say that.
My point was that the argument of keeping the credit bureaus because it's the way banks can determine whether to loan is dubious, because that didn't prevent the collapse. It's almost as if banks use them for another reason. Not whether to loan, but whether they want an excuse not to.
The collapse was due to banks ignoring the red flags credit bureaus had for the people they were issuing loans for, partly because of bullshit programs from the FHA. Your argument that this is why we should abolish credit bureaus is like saying we should abolish due dates on food packaging because people sometimes ignore them and get sick anyways. If anything, the subprime mortgage crisis proves the need for dotting the i's and crossing the t's when approving loans.
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@the_quiet_one said in Coming soon: Equifax Part 3:
Your argument that this is why we should abolish credit bureaus
I didn't say that.
I said that banks don't use them for this reason. They use credit bureaus to have an excuse to decline a loan.
Banks already don't use them to determine who to loan to, which is why millionaires can be bankrupt and keep getting loans.
Therefore, they aren't being used for their purpose, and they are harming people.
I'm not saying the idea should never be used with this argument (I made another argument for that purpose), but that the people in charge are using them irresponsibly, so the argument that they serve a purpose is invalid.
I'm not saying we should abolish the idea of credit bureaus with this argument. I'm saying we should abolish THE existing credit bureaus. Or at least Equifax.
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IOW, idealistic credit bureaus serve this purpose, but actual ones do not.
I feel like I'm fighting the "we can do it better this time" argument.
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@the_quiet_one said in Coming soon: Equifax Part 3:
Your argument that this is why we should abolish credit bureaus
I didn't say that.
@xaade said in Coming soon: Equifax Part 3:
Seriously, we don't need credit bureaus.
I agree that the existing credit bureaus, if they aren't dismantled, should be heavily restructured, as should the loan system as a whole. Just don't pretend you're not confusing the discussion by contradicting your own posts.
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@the_quiet_one said in Coming soon: Equifax Part 3:
@the_quiet_one said in Coming soon: Equifax Part 3:
Your argument that this is why we should abolish credit bureaus
I didn't say that.
@xaade said in Coming soon: Equifax Part 3:
Seriously, we don't need credit bureaus.
I agree that the existing credit bureaus, if they aren't dismantled, should be heavily restructured, as should the loan system as a whole. Just don't pretend you're not confusing the discussion by contradicting your own posts.
I'm not. I gave different reasons for each argument.
"I didn't say that" => "Your argument that this is why we should abolish credit bureaus".
Also, "we don't need" != "abolish".
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@the_quiet_one said in Coming soon: Equifax Part 3:
The collapse was due to banks ignoring the red flags credit bureaus had for the people they were issuing loans for
The banks thought they'd found a magical way to avoid the risk by packaging mechanisms for the credit so that statistical mechanisms applied meaning that random failures to pay on a part of the loan wouldn't cause too much trouble. The problem was that the mechanisms ignored the possibility of correlated risk (e.g., due to an economic downturn) meaning that the actual compound risk was higher than was stated by the credit bureaux.
It was a hack. It was a hack of the statistics that didn't hold once there was a confidence hiccup, and that in turn brought down the whole calamity.
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@dcon said in Coming soon: Equifax Part 3:
@aapis said in Coming soon: Equifax Part 3:
The only reason they haven't yet is because they don't really have customers,
Yes they do. The US Government. Unless that contract was cancelled?
It was:
Reading that story, it seems that the original reporting was incorrect. The new contract had been awarded to Experian, but Equifax protested, so a temporary bridge contract was awarded while the protest was adjudicated.
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@boomzilla Cool!
SPANKSPANK No contract for you!
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One particular website allowed them to access the personal data of every American, including social security numbers, full names, birthdates, and city and state of residence, the researcher told Motherboard.
The site looked like a portal made only for employees, but was completely exposed to anyone on the internet. It displayed several search fields, and anyone—with no authentication whatsoever—could force the site to display the personal data of Equifax's customers, according to the researcher. Motherboard saw multiple sets of the data they were able to access.
"I didn't have to do anything fancy," the researcher told Motherboard, explaining that the site was vulnerable to a basic "forced browsing" bug. The researcher requested anonymity out of professional concerns.
"All you had to do was put in a search term and get millions of results, just instantly—in cleartext, through a web app," they said.
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@lolwhat it just doesn't stop
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@lolwhat You mean those executives that sold stock didn't just have impeccably lucky timing!? Shocking revelation.
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@masonwheeler said in Coming soon: Equifax Part 3:
Once again, rule #1 of data breaches: It's always worse than they admit at first. (It's usually worse than they know about at first. These two are frequently not the same thing.)
See what I mean?
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@blakeyrat Wasn't that just a month before it? The article is about what happened last year.
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@blakeyrat said in Coming soon: Equifax Part 3:
@lolwhat You mean those executives that sold stock didn't just have impeccably lucky timing!? Shocking revelation.
Yeah, that was my first reaction. Then I read it more closely and saw this was actually something new:
Not only did they know about the breach for months before they disclosed it, they knew about the vulnerabilities (and did nothing to patch them) for months before the breach occurred.
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@masonwheeler said in Coming soon: Equifax Part 3:
Not only did they know about the breach for months before they disclosed it, they knew about the vulnerabilities (and did nothing to patch them) for months before the breach occurred.
Well, of course. It takes time to fully ramp up operation CYA