License to Spill

So we had a bit of difficulty this week, I think, working out what stories we wanted to cover.

It's been quite a fragmented Newsweek, I would say, compared to last week when we had the metal settlement.

And it was very clear that that was the big topic of the week.

But we think there's a lot to say about these stories and we expect listeners won't necessarily be fully up to speed on them.

So you're going to start us off, Mike, with one that's like fantastic.

fairly fairly niche or perhaps maybe hasn't broken out into the mainstream news as certainly the meta settlement did last week

Yeah, this one, but I think is actually a really big and important story.

And it comes from Brian Krebs, who has been a long-term cybersecurity reporter.

I think he worked for the Washington Post many years ago before striking out on his own, has been very successful, has his own website, Krebs on Security, which does incredible work.

He's breaking really interesting stories all the time.

But this week, he broke a massive story about a leak- apparently a real time leak of scanned IDs from a company called IDscan.net, which is apparently one of the bigger ones that is mainly focused on like real world ID scanning.

So Within the leak, there were 153 million driver's licenses.

There were a number of millions of other kinds of IDs as well.

And he found his own driver's license in there and then figured out the date that it had been added and realized that he had rented a car from Hertz Rent-A-Car that day.

and then found some other people in the database who he knew and asked them to check what they were doing on the day that it was added to the database.

And a lot of them were renting cars.

So it appears that a lot of it was from scanning your ID at a rental car place.

But there were other things where like there were some pot dispensaries and I think maybe Target used them as well.

So there are a number of different offline places that When they would verify your identity, they would scan your ID and that would go into this database.

And apparently hackers had access to it for over a year.

And basically every day we're adding, you know, maybe a few hundred thousand different records to this, which is incredible.

pretty incredible and pretty scary.

The point that ties it back, there are a few different ways that this ties back to the internet world, one of which is the ongoing debates and discussions that we've been a part of as well about age verification online.

And as I've said, and other people have said, is that age verification is really identity verification.

And in fact, if you look at this company, IDScan, they're very much also in the age verification world.