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Pay Dirt in Scanned Driver's Licenses
The New York Times has a good article explaining why handing over your national ID card to be scanned may not be such a good idea.
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My drinking habits...are my own. Any bar that is scanning my ID and keeping a record or pulling other data is not getting my business. Then again, when I buy beer at the grocery store and put it on my debit card, it is doing the same thing.
Not in the state of Utah. Out here bars are 'Private Clubs for Members'. They have to maintain a membership roster, and keep records of who visits the club. You have to provide an ID to get in, not to prove you're of age, but for record-keeping.
Most likely old news to many here but state Department of Moter Vehicles used to, as a general practice, sell personal information collected from people's driver's licences to marketing organizations. That was pretty lame, as the DMV has a monopoly on driver's licences, of course.
I say used to, as the US Supreme Court unanimously ruled it to be wrong in early 2000.
If Slashdot is where the spelling-challenged go when they die, I'm in heaven.
dont have to....
Go home, take a nice fridge magnet... that pizza place magnet will do..
set the magnet on the strip, rub a few times... Voila
Then they have to type it in.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Hate to break it to you, but the US isn't the only country that has idiot bouncers who won't let you in with out their countries form of ID.
A bunch of friends and I went to Canada and were refused entry into a few bars because we didn't have Canadian Drivers licenses. I did have a passport and they still refused me. Worse thing about it is we were in our mid to late twenties, and well over their drinking age.
Throw off the chains of Mad Deadly Worldwide Gangster Communist Frankenstein Radio Earphone Slavery and depolarize your driver's licence stripe! Buy an ell-skin wallet. Abrade the back with sandpaper. Better yet, re-encode the stripe with the word VOID for each piece of information you don't want to be public.
I didn't see anything obvious in the barcode that did not already appear on the front. I asked that my SSN not appear on the front, and I also did not see it in the barcoded data.
There were around 20 bytes of extra binary data which I didn't put much effort into further decoding. I compared the data on my license with the data from the license of friends and family, some bytes matched, some did not.
No special equipment is needed, any good scanner will work, you do need to make sure that the ID card is aligned at right angles to the scanner, and turn off any anti-speckle features in your software.
Most of the barcode data extraction software for Windows will accept a TIFF file, I haven't found any good free software that directly supports a TWAIN or other scanner plug-in.
The free demo software I found will also generate 2-D barcodes as TIFF files...
I do not deploy Linux. Ever.
While it is opt out rather than the Right Way to do it, you can stop junk (snail) mail in the U.S.
Some places can be dealt with by a simple phone call. Why send a catalog or such to someone who asks not to get it? It's just wasteful. Other places aren't as clueful, but if they are trying to sell soemthing, you can use USPS Form 1500 on them.
Form 1500 needs to be filled out, the offending mailed item opened (so that USPS personel don't break the 'never open anything' rule. Yes, they do take it seriously) and given to a clerk, though there it may help to see the postmaster, since s/he might be a bit more clueful. The form says it's about 'offensive' or 'adult' material, but it has been ruled (Supreme court case, late 1960s) that the recipient has "sole discretion" in deciding what is considered offensive. Don't like ads for socks? Fine, fill in the form. Once submitted, that party should no longer send any mail to you. If they do, they can explain why they broke the law... to someone who will be very interested, and unimpressed.
I don't subscribe to RMS's GNUtopian vision.