I was tearing up some old credit card receipts recently - after all these years, enough vendors continue to print full CC numbers on receipts that I'm hesitant to just toss them as is, though I doubt there are many dumpster divers looking for this stuff any more - when I found a great example of why you don't want people applying their "creativity" to security problems, at least not without a great deal of review.
You see, most vendors these days replace all but the last 4 digits of the CC number on a receipt with X's. But it must be boring to do the same as everyone else, so some bright person at one vendor(*) decided they were going to do it differently: They X'd out *just the last four digits*. After all, who could guess the number from the 10,000 possibilities? Ahem. -- Jerry (*) It was Build-A-Bear. The receipt was at least a year old, so for all I know they've long since fixed this. --------------------------------------------------------------------- The Cryptography Mailing List Unsubscribe by sending "unsubscribe cryptography" to [EMAIL PROTECTED]