I found out that someone within a friend group completely faked being a student at a relatively prestigious university in the area. Nobody had a clue. He basically came and hung out with people and pretended that he also attended classes. He had actually dropped out of school years ago. He'd even pretended that he graduated and had attended the ceremony.
The internet was built to connect machines, not people. Its basic architecture maps servers to domain names and uses cryptographic certificates to prove websites are authentic. Yet it lacks a built-in way to bridge the gap between our offline identities - citizen, taxpayer, patient, employee, student - and the digital systems on which we increasingly rely to conduct our economic, civic, and personal lives.
A former U.S. Postal Service letter carrier was sentenced on Monday, Sept. 8, to five and a half years in federal prison for stealing over $10 million in checks from the mail, according to the U.S. Department of Justice. Rashad Deon Stolden, a 34-year-old Huntington Beach man, worked in the Fairfax area of Los Angeles. From 2020 to 2024, he stole mail with high-value checks and debit cards from the California Employment Development Department, the agency that handles unemployment and disability benefits, according to the DOJ.
The digital ID systems currently being introduced potentially solve problems like identity fraud for business and government services, but leave the holder of the digital ID vulnerable to the needs of the companies collecting such information.