Graphics Programs Uncover Secret PINs

Posted by Zonk on Friday August 26, 2005 @01:44AM from the not-so-secret-then dept.

Errtu76 writes "The BBC is running a story stating that, among other programs, The Gimp and Photoshop have been identified as possible tools for uncovering PINs via the mail." From the article: "The researchers collected lots of so-called Pin mailers and then tested how secure they were. Many were defeated using bright lights shone at an angle on to the paper. Other Pins could be read by scanning the letter and then adjusting some of the image qualities in popular programs such as GIMP, Adobe Photoshop and Paintshop Pro."

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Trademarks are adjectives by tepples · 2005-08-26 05:53 · Score: 1, Offtopic

Every single time there's a story about cash machines or numeric passcodes, somebody repeats this old complaint about redundancy. Thing is that these suffixed generic nouns are not completely redundant, as they help to disambiguate different meanings of a given abbreviation (for example, Automated Teller Machine vs. Asynchronous Transfer Mode). In addition, trademarks should be used as adjectives, with a suffixed generic noun. The canonical example here is "SPAM luncheon meat" even though 'M' stands for meat.