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

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.

[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: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: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!!!

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.