Aaron Parecki

@aaronpk When I worked at the phone company (SBC), we worked on this problem for YEARS. We were even more constrained than Amex -- I believe we had 13 characters to work with on the street address line. This was complicated by the fact that your phone service address and your USPS mailing address are a) not necessarily the same and b) even if they are "the same", the rules for abbreviating them are incompatible. This was resulting in 1000s of hours of manual labor by (very expensive) phone reps each month calling customers to ask them for their [mailing] address, plus risking regulatory fines for non-delivery of phone bills, plus lost revenue. In the end, we ended up standing up a SOAP-based middleware, connected to the mainframe phone billing systems, to validate the mailing addresses against the USPS address database. Under the covers, EBCDIC-encoded address data was being rendered into an XML doc and submitted over a web service to the address validation service. If there was a service address that this... thing couldn't map to a USPS address, I had a hotline to a wizard at USPS who could figure out the right address -- and if they couldn't, they would literally call the mail carrier on that route and find out from THEM what the right mailing address was. It was some strange combination of massive big data (before we used that term) systems talking to other massive big data systems... all backed up by mail carriers with bags of mail and Deep Knowledge about the addresses in their assigned area. Interesting project - wouldn't be even minimally surprised if it's still in use today, 20 years later.

@aaronpk does the website still limit you to eight character passwords? When I asked they told me it was for security

@erincandescent And also completely in alignment, unshockingly, with Erin that "I thought we were going to work on exactly these kinds of problems in the Social Web Working Group but instead we focused on dodging bullets as two camps sniped at each other"

And actually a correction: there were *three camps* in the group: the linked data, activitypub, and indieweb people, and two of three of those (activitypub and linked data) hit convergence but I think the indieweb and linked data sniping is just too embedded for ridiculous personal grudge reasons, cough tantek vs timbl cough). Gosh. That was unnecessary hell. Don't do another SocialWG, anyone who wants to re-charter. Do an ActivityPubWG and focus on solving the problems we have, stay focused.

The Indieweb vs Linked Data sniping things is one of the worst, most absurd fights in the entire standards space. Waste of time, energy, and years of peoples' lives. Certainly took a few off mine.