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Comment by sgarland | Hacker News Reader

I’ve heard this argument many times, but I’ve never seen anyone actually post a reference to it happening (as in, a company finding and using this information; not the German tank problem).

To me, it reeks of solving imaginary problems while causing new ones.

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Years ago I wrote a library that would exaggerate sequential IDs to make our SaaS platform appear more popular than it actually was to anyone trying to pay attention. Not sure if I’m proud of the hack or embarrassed. But of both I suppose.

but UUIDv7 isn’t sequential (unless I’m getting it mixed up). There’s just a time-based component which can make sorting really nice & some random bits at the end.

If you don’t let an attacker iterate your data, all they can tell is when the ID was created.

> If you don’t let an attacker iterate your data, all they can tell is when the ID was created.

The ordering means that you can reconstruct the sequence if you have enough of them, though.

I was responding in a sub-thread about risks/opportunities associated with sequential IDs with an anecdote on opportunities.

I vaguely remember somebody figuring out from photoshop activation IDs how many sales adobe was making and trading options around their earnings report with that information.

I don’t remember the details, so maybe it was something else and not photoshop/adobe.

It's perhaps embarrassing for a new startup to have a user ID of "10".

That's about the only problem I can discern.

Depends on how far you get, I suppose. Wozniak's apple employee badge has ID #1 on it, and that's cool as heck. I also remember ICQ users sorting themselves based on how many digits their identifier had.

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