Fraud Threat Halts Knuth's Hexadecimal-Dollar Checks

Barence writes "You may be aware of Donald Knuth, the creator of TeX and author of The Art of Computer Programming, who used to post checks to anyone who spotted an error in one of his books — one hexadecimal dollar, or $2.56. No one cashed them though. This blogger has two of them proudly on his wall, but the sad news is that modern day bank fraud has put a stop to Knuth's much-loved way of keeping his books free of errors." (Here's Knuth's own post about the sad change.)

Comments

Forgive me

[Anonymous Coward]

But wouldn't one "hexadecimal dollar" be... wait for it... exactly one "regular dollar?"

0x1 == 1

Re:Forgive me

[gnick]

A hundred pennies is still $1. 0x100 pennies == $2.56. I'm not sure that 'hundred' is really defined in the hex world. It's like the old "There are 10 kinds of people in the world - Those who understand binary and those that don't" gag falling apart outside print because the word 'ten' blows it.

IANA mathemagician - Feel free to correct me if I'm full of shit.

Re:Forgive me

[Minwee]

Because there are 900 pennies in a base ten dollar?

Re:Forgive me

[adonoman]

Also not a math pro, but the problem comes in that we have two things that are defined by the word "ten" - the abstract point on the number line that is eqivalent is also represented by the symbols: '0x0A' in hex; '012' in octal; '10' in dec; and '1010' in binary.
But it's also a name for the symbol '10' itself, just as one hundred is a name for the symbol '100', as well as a name for the abstract value represented by the symbol '100'.

Re:Forgive me

[Anonymous Coward]

AAAAAAAAAAAAAH!!!!!
It's a joke dollar and Knuth gets to designate what a hexidecimal dollar is since HE's writing the checks!!!

Leave it alone already!!!

This is getting old.

[SatanicPuppy]

Checks and credit cards are absurdly easy to fake in the modern world. Banks need to get off their asses and roll out a new system...With the billion dollar bonuses that they keep giving themselves, I'm not too sympathetic of the cost.

Re:This is getting old.

[rubycodez]

any piece of stationary with mag ink at the bottom with bank a.b.a., account number, check number, will be accepted as check

Re:This is getting old.

[rcw-home]

Regarding checks, with their watermarks, UV-readable text,and what not, I don't think they would fall under the category of 'absurdly easy to fake'.

Considering that you don't need to pass off a watermarked check to someone in real life to drain money from someone's account (you only need the account number and routing number off the check), yes, they absolutely are absurdly easy to fake.

Also, there's no guarantee that when someone writes you a check that they have the funds to cover it, because it isn't processed right then and there. These two factors put together have led the vast majority of merchants to simply refuse checks today.

There's absolutely no excuse for banks to not have rolled out a checking system that uses much larger one-time-use account numbers and allows merchants to verify that the check won't bounce. They've been twiddling their thumbs.

Re:This is getting old.

[Tmack]

There's absolutely no excuse for banks to not have rolled out a checking system that uses much larger one-time-use account numbers and allows merchants to verify that the check won't bounce. They've been twiddling their thumbs.

... and raking in the $$. They wont change their ways because each bounced check is an opportunity for them to collect lots of fees. At least $20 from the person trying to pass off the bad check, and another $20-30 from the account that got overdrawn. To top it off, once that account is overdrawn, they get those fees on Every withdrawal until they stop coming in. For fake checks, they will still charge your account for trying to pass off the bad check. To them, its not broken, its a source of revenue.

tm

Re:This is getting old.

[Anonymous Coward]

You know... I can't even recall seeing checks outside America since the 80ths. The rest of the world uses cash, bank transfers and credit/debit cards. And we survive, without the costs and problems associated with a ridiculously broken check system.

The question is not the cost of implementing chip-and-pin or smartcards worldwide, the question is the cost of getting America to upgrade from a payment system that was modern around 1800.

Re:This is getting old.

[Belial6]

Of course, this is also part of why banks are so hip on 'check cards'. 'Check cards' offer no benifites to the account holder over a standard credit card. They do offer serious down sides given that they allow anyone with access to the card to withdraw funds directly from your account with no pin or identification. Then VISA advertises on TV how easy it is to commit fraud with those cards.

The fact that most banks are replacing their ATM cards that do require pins to access funds with 'check cards' that do not require pins is pretty convincing evidence that banks are not trying real hard to prevent fraud that can lead to fee collection.

Re:This is getting old.

[rcw-home]

The point and purpose of Visa was not to create a way for banks to lend small sums of money (banks were spectacularly uninterested in this at the time, to the point where Visa almost didn't happen), but to create a better system of paying for things.

Great. I'm sure Dee feels his system is better for him too. Let me know when Dee gets off his butt and creates a new system that doesn't require a central clearing house, doesn't skim a few percent off the top, and can be used by any two ordinary people to pay each other in a theft-resistant manner, even via insecure postal mail. Until then, I'll presume he's still part of the problem.

Re:New Bill

[Mr. Slippery]

didn't you know the USPS recomends you not send cash through the mail

If Knuth is right, it's safer to send cash than a check. Intercept cash, you only get that amount; intercept a check, and you can drain my whole checking account.

Re:paranoia much

[marcosdumay]

"It is odd that he's had multiple attacks while I've had zero..."

No, it's not odd at all. I guess that if people did go around showing your checks to everybody they meet or maybe even posting them to the web, you'd have plenty of atacks too. Instead, people probably choose to cash your checks, so you don't have this problem.

Re:Well, checks may be out..

[whoever57]

You're referring to the "Bank of San Serriffe"? The one with branches in in Elbonia and Blefuscu?

I think it is this San Seriffe. Perhaps Donald Knuth is a Grauniad reader?

The retardation of the financial sector

[0xdeadbeef]

We should make every suit at every financial institution in this country write a thousand times on a blackboard:

An identifier is not a shared secret key.

This applies to account numbers, credit card numbers, social security numbers, drivers license numbers, everything.

The symbol that represents you is not the thing that proves who you are. Otherwise, your name itself would be all you need to verify your identity, and we all know how absurd that is.

Of course, the real problem is that they aren't held adequately liable for the fraud that occurs. They blame it on the customer and wash their hands of it. If we made them always eat that cost, I guarantee we'd see real progress against identity theft.

Re:The retardation of the financial sector

[cdrguru]

The difficulty with making banks liable for fraud is most of the attempted fraud is the other way around - people trying to get stuff from banks. Think about it. Wouldn't you claim that your account was incorrectly debited $500 from an ATM transaction that you didn't make if you could get away with it? Sure you would. So would everyone else in your city.

There is no way to prove the difference between "identity theft" on the scale where a bank is defrauded and outright dishonesty by the customer.

Now in reality most "identity theft" is accounted for because the FBI changed their reporting rules. Credit card fraud - using someone's credit card number - is now counted as identity theft. My guess is 90% of the "identity theft" that is reported is in reality simply credit card fraud. And people do not lose because of credit card fraud - merchants do.

Why aren't merchants up in arms because of credit card fraud? Simple, they have insurance. They don't really lose out either. In effect, it is a vicimless crime.

Re:The retardation of the financial sector

[steelfood]

Currently, the technology required to make secure authentication ubiquitous is prohibitively expensive. Banks continue to employ a lot of legacy systems the for reliability purposes, because any downtime is simply unacceptable.

Unless you want everyone to go around doing authentication with shared secret-codes like they do in spy movies, or calculating in their heads their own public key for every transaction that requires authentication, some form of picture ID is the most practical method. Remember that while you might do everything online, in the real world, only a very small percentage of transactions in the world are done through computers. In fact, most things are done through cash, where the only authentication exists to confirm the veracity of the actuall bill.