The Personal Checksum

  • I've only ever had a dollar or so added on to a restaurant charge. I lose more money from items being double charged at the grocery store.

    Once upon a time, about 10 years ago or more, I had a domain and used a separate email address for every website I signed up for, with the full website name included. I received any email sent to anything at my domain. I started getting massive amounts of spam to one particular email address (the one I used when signing up to United Airlines). It seemed unlikely to be chance that only that email address was hit hard by spam, but knowing what company had lost my email address didn't help me at all. They advised I change my email address.

    Leonard
    Madison, WI

  • P Jones (8/31/2012)


    This was done by the base exchange and other stores when I stationed in England many years ago. We were in fact told NOT to bring US pennies with us to England as they were too close to the English half-penny.

    That must have been very many years ago as the half penny has been withdrawn for many years!

    The British/European system where you are handed the electronic card machine to check the amount and enter your pin number and the transaction is then completed on-line to the bank surely removes the opportunity for this fraud - as long as you wear your reading glasses:-D

    Yes, I was stationed in England from January 1979 to July 1981.

  • StephLocke (prev stephanie.sullivan) (8/30/2012)


    A waiter will get minimum wage in America irrespective of how crappy they are at their job. Don't be afraid to not tip!

    I fear you're missing the human element here. Any service industry person who needs to 'fill' their wages from the till instead of the jar will be let go for any one of a thousand imagined slights. It's on the books, but it's just not done. The assumption is if you're not getting tipped they don't want you in front of the customer ANYWAY.


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  • Evil Kraig F (9/4/2012)[I fear you're missing the human element here. Any service industry person who needs to 'fill' their wages from the till instead of the jar will be let go for any one of a thousand imagined slights. It's on the books, but it's just not done. The assumption is if you're not getting tipped they don't want you in front of the customer ANYWAY.

    Great, this ensures that people work harder, in a bid to deserve tips! Remove their complacency, up customer satisfaction, and make the area a meritocracy. I'm a firm believer in getting paid for how good you are, not who you know etc, so anywhere people who are bad at their jobs are subsidised by me to continue being bad at their jobs, rubs me the wrong way. It's why I have strong opinions about my taxes too, but that's another rant! 🙂

    As the 'human element', I believe in people getting what they deserve and I think they deserve minimum wage for showing up and doing the job adequately. They deserve bonuses for going beyond adequate. Obviously, with words of praise by his customer, an excellent waiter knows he does a good job, but why shouldn't he also have the independent metric of how much tip he gets. By everyone giving a standard tip amount irrespective of service quality, you distort that guy's market value. He has no independent measure that enables him to go to his boss, or a potential employer, and say 'I know I deserve something better in terms of wages, because I achieve this which is x% better than average'. My human element, only really cares about people with a strong work ethic!

  • P Jones (8/31/2012)


    The British/European system where you are handed the electronic card machine to check the amount and enter your pin number and the transaction is then completed on-line to the bank surely removes the opportunity for this fraud - as long as you wear your reading glasses:-D

    That's a somewhat optimistic view. The big card organisations and the banks would like us to believe that, but it certainly isn't true. The card machines are far from tamper-proof (see for example this paper) and the specifications surrounding the EMV protocol are full of holes (see for example this MitM attack on EMV and remember that the card machine is connected by radio to a router under the merchant's control which could contain the code for this attack - which has now been fixed by at least one UK bank, but certainly not be all banks everywhere). Those same big organisations and banks do thir best to suppress security research in case it damages the public's trust in their insecure rubbish (see Ross Anderson's robust response to the card processors when they attempted to get Cambridge University to suppress the MPhil thesis of one of his students, despite all the research having been published much earlier and having been made available to the card processors and banks even earlier).

    In fact if you read the Cambridge Security research group's blog (http://www.lightbluetouchpaper.org/) you'll find that the whole Chip and Pin thing is full of gaps and the banks etcetera are far more interested in hiding this from their customers than in fixing the problems. They have even intoduced systems which they claim enhances card-holder security while they actually render cardholders more vulnerable to phishing attacks (see Verified by Visa and MasterCard SecureCode: or, How Not to Design Authentication, which is a nice critique of the 3-D Secure nonsense that the banks are inflicting on us). Or look through Ross's home page[/url] for links to lots of stuff on these and related topics.

    Tom

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