(FYI, the most useful definition I've heard is that rap refers to the musical form, hip hop to the culture, which also includes breakdance and grafiti art)
Rap is a drum machine and a rhyme dictionary in the same way that blues is four chords and a gravelly voice, or jazz is hitting the wrong keys and pretending you did it on purpose, or rock is two power chords and a stage show, or classical is machine-like repetition of a score. There are recordings that fit those descriptions, and before you get used to the form it might all sound like that. There's also a hell of a lot more to it -- but if you don't care to learn, more power to you, it's probably not for you anyway.
If you like rock, or blues, or jazz, or classical, though, you are hereby prohibited from making stupid generalizations about rap.
That article explains why you shouldn't throw away an entire codebase and start over, which would be analogous to scrapping this whole America thing and having another constitutional convention. We can't do that, practically, for reasons that are well-described.
The article in fact encourages you to refactor, optimize, and prettify an existing code base, instead of throwing it out -- and I think that's exactly what the grandparent suggested.
The answer, by the way, to why we can't refactor our legal code, is that the constitution makes updating the laws as hard as it could possibly be. We can't run the new changes in an unstable branch and see how they work out (unless you count, say, Nevada or Vermont).
You can indeed have database interaction through javascript, though it's not for beginners. You need a hidden frame which can load a server-side application to fetch or write the data and load feedback. Something like
I would argue that you don't learn about English grammar because it's not relevant. Your first language is different from every following language, because you learned it using the jello-brain of a baby instead of the educated-brain of an adult. Brilliant writers aren't the ones who know better grammar than the rest of us -- they're the ones who have absorbed a gift for language by listening, speaking, and reading.
Why do we say "the big, fat, lazy dog" instead of "the lazy, fat, big dog"? It turns out there are grammatical reasons... but I don't care what they are, and it doesn't impact my writing.
I'm not cryptowise enough to know how to implement this, but since the goal is to foil portscanning, it's fair to assume that the attacker does not know a valid username on the machine. Suppose you built this into the ssh client, such that it would generate the portknock key as a one-way hash of your username? The server then has to check the portknock against valid knocks based on the login accounts on that machine. The whole process becomes entirely transparent to the user, while still utterly foiling portscans. Are we happy?
The more direct path would just be to add that username hash as the initial connect string, so the ssh server doesn't respond unless it's valid. That skips the whole complicated portknock thing, which is kind of clunky, as cool as it is.
Re: insecure IP voice -- you mean, not anytime soon, as long as no one deploys the pgp voice technology that's been available for years? VOIP is already the only really secure way to have voice conversations, it's just not secure and convenient in the same package yet.
Suppose software has been installed without my consent on my computer, and made itself hard to remove. I could go through the trouble of finding a program to root it out and get rid of it. What if, instead, I installed a program that sent an email at every popup - no, two. It follows the link in the ad, and also sends an email to [normal admin stuff]@advertiser.com. The email says, yo, you just displayed a popup on my computer, you better stop. It employs the latest filter-busters and random stuff so they can't block them, and asks in a nice way that no more popups are displayed on my computer. Five minutes later, it does it again... and again... and again...
The result is, spammers are DOSed in a completely polite and legal way, as are their advertisers. At the same time, the advertisers who pay by click get raped with thousands of computer-generated clicks.
I'm sure there's problems with this -- the biggest one being working out the right email addresses -- but it's an amusing thought.
Re:Don't forget the ad CBS is refusing to air.
on
Superbowling
·
· Score: 1
"Bill O'Reily is the living personification of incendiary rhetoric."
I'm not sure if this was in reply to my post, but what the hell...
"Even Bill O'Reilly said he was surprised they refused to play it" was a reference to O'Reilly's well-documented rightwing leanings, not his trustworthiness as a commentator. When he says that an ad criticising the Bush administration is non-inflammatory, you know it's pretty damn mild.
I'd generate keys randomly, and cross each one off the list when it was used. Algorithm-based keys are only useful when there's no guaranteed communication with a central server.
Re:Don't forget the ad CBS is refusing to air.
on
Superbowling
·
· Score: 1
Mmm, I thought of that angle, but decided to leave the wording as it was. Just my way of giving back to you, the AC community.
Re:Don't forget the ad CBS is refusing to air.
on
Superbowling
·
· Score: 1
Presentation can be a form of censorship. Covering a topic on the 1 AM news instead of the 5 o'clock news -- because you don't want people paying attention to that topic -- is a way of censoring it. Summarizing one side's ideas while extensively quoting the other can be censorship. If your message is actively prevented from reaching an audience because of its content, you've been censored.
In this case, CBS is censoring this ad from its Superbowl audience. It's not as bad as censoring it from all of their audiences, but that doesn't change what it is.
Re:Don't forget the ad CBS is refusing to air.
on
Superbowling
·
· Score: 1
Well, first of all, it's the public airwaves and all that... so long as the government tells me that I am *not* allowed to broadcast a signal that can be picked up by a TV, I don't think it's out of the question for the government to require certain kinds of speech to be broadcast -- as, for example, CBS would be forced to broadcast a commercial by a Presidential candidate during the superbowl if requested.
Second of all, no, I don't think we should call for the government to step in here. Neither does MoveOn -- what they're calling for is individuals to demand better from CBS. Tens of thousands of people, and dozens of Congressfolk, have done just that. If you want to help -- and I take from the tone of your comment that you support self-regulation as opposed to government regulation -- support the MoveOn one-minute boycott by switching to CNN at 8:10 and 8:35 to watch the ad CBS doesn't want to show you.
Thanks for your anonymous question. I found it thought-provoking. Mmm, thoughts.
They're cool for the same reason that the guy in Catch Me If You Can is cool. It's an impressive display of skill. The cleverness is entertaining. It's also immoral and illegal, and ultimately isolating. I wouldn't do it.
They're still cool.
Re:Don't forget the ad CBS is refusing to air.
on
Superbowling
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
A few notes on this... if you haven't seen the MoveOn Child's Pay ad, it's not exactly incendiary rhetoric. Even Bill O'Reilly said he was surprised they refused to play it.
CBS defends the policy by saying that if they allowed issue ads, large corporations could buy time to push their favorite issues and it would disenfranchise us folks with smaller ad budgets. Eli Pariser of MoveOn responded by pointing out that this creates an awfully friendly environment for the status quo, and those same corporations. We have oil company ads but no anti-oil ads, shoe company ads but no sweatshop ads, drug war ads but no decriminalization ads.
What we're really getting here is a one-sided agenda, and, yes, censorship, in the guise of fairness.
Nah... the challenge response is being sent by the same user that generated your pic in the first place -- the spammer. The porn viewer only talks to them, and only they talk to you. As far as you know, they're a completely legitimate user.
The only way to limit the effectiveness of this thing is to require that the response come in a given period of time, such that the spammer does not have time to find a human to generate the response, but even the slowest of actual users will. I suspect that anything less than 5 minutes or so will shut out legitimate users. Will that be enough to deter spammers? I guess it depends on their pornmaster skills.
I'm sure you realize this, but the technique described would work to break virtually any system, including yours. The spammer loads your page, and downloads your dynamically generated image to a file. They show their copy of the image to a porn-wannabe, five seconds later, who tells them the string. They then submit your form, along with that string.
Dynamically generating the image simply means that they need one porn-seeker per captcha bypass. Somehow, I don't think that will be a problem.
My grandfather, who was a high-up army type, would sleep with 5 two-way radios playing all the time. He'd sleep just fine until he heard tension in people's voices, then he'd wake up and find out what was going on.
My guess is, you could train your brain to wake up only after a certain morse code sequence, or to the smell of tangerines, or following a Fibanacci sequence, if it was important enough. That's why humans make the baddest asses of all -- adaptation.
I don't remember lobbing bombs into Iraq, but FWIW, that big 'Wag The Dog' cruise missile attack in 1998 missed Osama Bin Laden by half an hour. Based on quotes from people who watched him make the decision, Clinton knew it would look like an attempted distraction from his scandals but did it anyway -- and came damn close to preventing 9/11 as a result.
If you check out the (lazily not-linked) article I originally posted, it seems that many manufacturers themselves don't have a choice. Walmart owns 12% of the retail market in the US, period. They're often the same size as the next 9 accounts for a given manufacturer combined, (much like the US military compared to other militaries), and like the US, they get to write their own rules. That means they can tighten the screws until the manufacturer has no choice but to go overseas, or lose that single precious account to someone who will. If no one will, Walmart is big enough that they can do it themselves.
The upshot is, the situation isn't controlled by that small number of people you mentioned -- it's controlled by the upper management of a single company. There's three or four people, I wish I had their names, who have a greater impact on every vital statistic of our economy than any person in the government. If they were smokestacks spewing fumes, it would be known as point-source pollution. As it is, they're capitalists pushing jobs overseas without care for the effect this has either here or there, and they represent point-source exploitation. Write that phrase down, I just coined it.:)
In environmentalism, point-source pollution is better than the other kind -- much easier to upgrade, fix and control. I almost think the same situation might apply with WalMart -- finding a way to apply pressure to those couple of people will be a great deal easier than applying pressure to, you know, the great general mishmash of the global economy. Let's get started, shall we?
The quote about what workers in the US cost reminds me of this article from Fast Company:
http://fastcompany.com/magazine/77/walmart.html
The article makes a believable case that WalMart is singlehandedly, drastically, speeding up the move of manufacturing jobs overseas. Towards the end, they have this quote:
'Ever-cheaper prices have consequences. Says Steve Dobbins, president of thread maker Carolina Mills: "We want clean air, clear water, good living conditions, the best health care in the world--yet we aren't willing to pay for anything manufactured under those restrictions."'
That's exactly what's going on here. 'Middle class' in the US costs a hell of a lot more than 'middle class' elsewhere, and if consumers here have a choice, they will buy the things that were not made under those expensive conditions. Of course, by making that choice, we push our own jobs overseas...
I can't predict how this will end up, but it's going to be a trip finding out. What do you all think? I want to see I Am An Economist in the replies.:)
At least, mine does. So does anyone else who has a recent Mac. She might well wind up in such a place, if she was travelling with her laptop, which of course she does -- and in that case, she would surely be able to handle a simple web proxy form, but not a WEP password.
"Like him or not, Bush is the man right now. He accomplished his goal, and a grand victory is always embraced by a leader's people."
I'm not trying to insult your intelligence:), but just to spell it out -- this news means it is now easy to say that Bush has accomplished his goal, and that this is a great victory. It is, against a dictator who abused his people. It's not at all, in terms of the War on Terror or destruction of chemical and biological weapons. Since the invasion was justified via the second, not the first, means, I feel that the quoted statement above is incorrect -- and it's important to remember why.
In the coming months, this event we're discussing right now will be used to support the statement "we won." It will play a key role in who my next president is, and wherever you live, you now know that president can reach out and touch you. I think it's damn important to be reminded that when they say "we won," they mean "we combined lies, half-truths, and incompetence to justify a course that failed to accomplish our stated goals, and is considered by many to be both illegal and immoral. We did, however, destroy a dictator who had been successfully confined within his country for over a decade."
Can you see why these reminders seem both relevant and important to some of us?
"I find it a bit ironic that Western culture embraces democracy and distribution of control (in theory), but tends to use an autocratic structure when things are critical."
From my 7th grade history class -- what we've got here in America is a system of checks and balances. For example, the House, the Senate, the President, and the Supreme Court each get a chance to cancel any bill becoming law. Only if all four of them approve will it stay in the books. Any sane manager would look at this system and say, hey, you've made it impossible to get anything done -- and that, of course, is exactly the point. We give governments power over us is dangerous to give to anyone, and that power should be damn hard to use.
Once the decision is made, though, it should be carried out effeciently, and that bit is done by normal chain of command, not committee. What you're pointing out isn't irony. It's the right tool for the right job.
The point of the two-receipt system is that it's easily verifiable in the booth, but impossible to verify outside. That means that any random voter can look and, instead of a long number to verify, they just see the text of who they voted for.
The single receipt cannot be decoded as you suggest -- each pixel is utterly random. There will be no pattern to detect, within the limits of pseudorandom numbers.
That works because the two receipts basically perform an XOR. Each pixel is either
XO or OX OX XO
Call the first '1' and the second '0'. Then 0^0 = partially clear, and 1^1 = partially clear. 0^1 or 1^0 = fully black. When you're printing a pixel, then, you completely, utterly randomly select 1 or 0 for one receipt. You then print either the same, or the opposite, on the other. There is no pattern whatsoever from pixel to pixel, and once half the receipt is destroyed, it is quite impossible to read the other half.
The problem with the system you propose, by the way, is that anyone who had your SSN and MD5 hash could relatively quickly determine the choices you made just by trying all the combinations. If I was buying votes, I could tell you what choices to make, and then demand my money back if I couldn't reproduce your MD5.
Slashdot Mirror
(FYI, the most useful definition I've heard is that rap refers to the musical form, hip hop to the culture, which also includes breakdance and grafiti art)
Rap is a drum machine and a rhyme dictionary in the same way that blues is four chords and a gravelly voice, or jazz is hitting the wrong keys and pretending you did it on purpose, or rock is two power chords and a stage show, or classical is machine-like repetition of a score. There are recordings that fit those descriptions, and before you get used to the form it might all sound like that. There's also a hell of a lot more to it -- but if you don't care to learn, more power to you, it's probably not for you anyway.
If you like rock, or blues, or jazz, or classical, though, you are hereby prohibited from making stupid generalizations about rap.
That article explains why you shouldn't throw away an entire codebase and start over, which would be analogous to scrapping this whole America thing and having another constitutional convention. We can't do that, practically, for reasons that are well-described.
The article in fact encourages you to refactor, optimize, and prettify an existing code base, instead of throwing it out -- and I think that's exactly what the grandparent suggested.
The answer, by the way, to why we can't refactor our legal code, is that the constitution makes updating the laws as hard as it could possibly be. We can't run the new changes in an unstable branch and see how they work out (unless you count, say, Nevada or Vermont).
parent.hiddenframe.location='db.php?action=save& score=12';
where db.php saves the score, and writes out some new javascript like
onLoad='parent.bigframe.scoreSaved()'
You can see a nifty example of this at my web montage tool, here: http://www.unrendered.org/unrendered/imager/
I would argue that you don't learn about English grammar because it's not relevant. Your first language is different from every following language, because you learned it using the jello-brain of a baby instead of the educated-brain of an adult. Brilliant writers aren't the ones who know better grammar than the rest of us -- they're the ones who have absorbed a gift for language by listening, speaking, and reading.
... but I don't care what they are, and it doesn't impact my writing.
Why do we say "the big, fat, lazy dog" instead of "the lazy, fat, big dog"? It turns out there are grammatical reasons
I'm not cryptowise enough to know how to implement this, but since the goal is to foil portscanning, it's fair to assume that the attacker does not know a valid username on the machine. Suppose you built this into the ssh client, such that it would generate the portknock key as a one-way hash of your username? The server then has to check the portknock against valid knocks based on the login accounts on that machine. The whole process becomes entirely transparent to the user, while still utterly foiling portscans. Are we happy?
The more direct path would just be to add that username hash as the initial connect string, so the ssh server doesn't respond unless it's valid. That skips the whole complicated portknock thing, which is kind of clunky, as cool as it is.
Re: insecure IP voice -- you mean, not anytime soon, as long as no one deploys the pgp voice technology that's been available for years? VOIP is already the only really secure way to have voice conversations, it's just not secure and convenient in the same package yet.
Suppose software has been installed without my consent on my computer, and made itself hard to remove. I could go through the trouble of finding a program to root it out and get rid of it. What if, instead, I installed a program that sent an email at every popup - no, two. It follows the link in the ad, and also sends an email to [normal admin stuff]@advertiser.com. The email says, yo, you just displayed a popup on my computer, you better stop. It employs the latest filter-busters and random stuff so they can't block them, and asks in a nice way that no more popups are displayed on my computer. Five minutes later, it does it again ... and again ... and again ...
The result is, spammers are DOSed in a completely polite and legal way, as are their advertisers. At the same time, the advertisers who pay by click get raped with thousands of computer-generated clicks.
I'm sure there's problems with this -- the biggest one being working out the right email addresses -- but it's an amusing thought.
"Bill O'Reily is the living personification of incendiary rhetoric."
...
I'm not sure if this was in reply to my post, but what the hell
"Even Bill O'Reilly said he was surprised they refused to play it" was a reference to O'Reilly's well-documented rightwing leanings, not his trustworthiness as a commentator. When he says that an ad criticising the Bush administration is non-inflammatory, you know it's pretty damn mild.
I'd generate keys randomly, and cross each one off the list when it was used. Algorithm-based keys are only useful when there's no guaranteed communication with a central server.
Mmm, I thought of that angle, but decided to leave the wording as it was. Just my way of giving back to you, the AC community.
Presentation can be a form of censorship. Covering a topic on the 1 AM news instead of the 5 o'clock news -- because you don't want people paying attention to that topic -- is a way of censoring it. Summarizing one side's ideas while extensively quoting the other can be censorship. If your message is actively prevented from reaching an audience because of its content, you've been censored.
In this case, CBS is censoring this ad from its Superbowl audience. It's not as bad as censoring it from all of their audiences, but that doesn't change what it is.
Well, first of all, it's the public airwaves and all that ... so long as the government tells me that I am *not* allowed to broadcast a signal that can be picked up by a TV, I don't think it's out of the question for the government to require certain kinds of speech to be broadcast -- as, for example, CBS would be forced to broadcast a commercial by a Presidential candidate during the superbowl if requested.
Second of all, no, I don't think we should call for the government to step in here. Neither does MoveOn -- what they're calling for is individuals to demand better from CBS. Tens of thousands of people, and dozens of Congressfolk, have done just that. If you want to help -- and I take from the tone of your comment that you support self-regulation as opposed to government regulation -- support the MoveOn one-minute boycott by switching to CNN at 8:10 and 8:35 to watch the ad CBS doesn't want to show you.
Thanks for your anonymous question. I found it thought-provoking. Mmm, thoughts.
They're cool for the same reason that the guy in Catch Me If You Can is cool. It's an impressive display of skill. The cleverness is entertaining. It's also immoral and illegal, and ultimately isolating. I wouldn't do it.
They're still cool.
A few notes on this ... if you haven't seen the MoveOn Child's Pay ad, it's not exactly incendiary rhetoric. Even Bill O'Reilly said he was surprised they refused to play it.
CBS defends the policy by saying that if they allowed issue ads, large corporations could buy time to push their favorite issues and it would disenfranchise us folks with smaller ad budgets. Eli Pariser of MoveOn responded by pointing out that this creates an awfully friendly environment for the status quo, and those same corporations. We have oil company ads but no anti-oil ads, shoe company ads but no sweatshop ads, drug war ads but no decriminalization ads.
What we're really getting here is a one-sided agenda, and, yes, censorship, in the guise of fairness.
Nah ... the challenge response is being sent by the same user that generated your pic in the first place -- the spammer. The porn viewer only talks to them, and only they talk to you. As far as you know, they're a completely legitimate user.
The only way to limit the effectiveness of this thing is to require that the response come in a given period of time, such that the spammer does not have time to find a human to generate the response, but even the slowest of actual users will. I suspect that anything less than 5 minutes or so will shut out legitimate users. Will that be enough to deter spammers? I guess it depends on their pornmaster skills.
I'm sure you realize this, but the technique described would work to break virtually any system, including yours. The spammer loads your page, and downloads your dynamically generated image to a file. They show their copy of the image to a porn-wannabe, five seconds later, who tells them the string. They then submit your form, along with that string.
Dynamically generating the image simply means that they need one porn-seeker per captcha bypass. Somehow, I don't think that will be a problem.
My grandfather, who was a high-up army type, would sleep with 5 two-way radios playing all the time. He'd sleep just fine until he heard tension in people's voices, then he'd wake up and find out what was going on.
My guess is, you could train your brain to wake up only after a certain morse code sequence, or to the smell of tangerines, or following a Fibanacci sequence, if it was important enough. That's why humans make the baddest asses of all -- adaptation.
I don't remember lobbing bombs into Iraq, but FWIW, that big 'Wag The Dog' cruise missile attack in 1998 missed Osama Bin Laden by half an hour. Based on quotes from people who watched him make the decision, Clinton knew it would look like an attempted distraction from his scandals but did it anyway -- and came damn close to preventing 9/11 as a result.
perl -pi -e 's/\S+\@\S+/\[email_ommitted\]/g' comments_file.txt
Do I win the prize?
If you check out the (lazily not-linked) article I originally posted, it seems that many manufacturers themselves don't have a choice. Walmart owns 12% of the retail market in the US, period. They're often the same size as the next 9 accounts for a given manufacturer combined, (much like the US military compared to other militaries), and like the US, they get to write their own rules. That means they can tighten the screws until the manufacturer has no choice but to go overseas, or lose that single precious account to someone who will. If no one will, Walmart is big enough that they can do it themselves.
:)
The upshot is, the situation isn't controlled by that small number of people you mentioned -- it's controlled by the upper management of a single company. There's three or four people, I wish I had their names, who have a greater impact on every vital statistic of our economy than any person in the government. If they were smokestacks spewing fumes, it would be known as point-source pollution. As it is, they're capitalists pushing jobs overseas without care for the effect this has either here or there, and they represent point-source exploitation. Write that phrase down, I just coined it.
In environmentalism, point-source pollution is better than the other kind -- much easier to upgrade, fix and control. I almost think the same situation might apply with WalMart -- finding a way to apply pressure to those couple of people will be a great deal easier than applying pressure to, you know, the great general mishmash of the global economy. Let's get started, shall we?
The quote about what workers in the US cost reminds me of this article from Fast Company:
...
:)
http://fastcompany.com/magazine/77/walmart.html
The article makes a believable case that WalMart is singlehandedly, drastically, speeding up the move of manufacturing jobs overseas. Towards the end, they have this quote:
'Ever-cheaper prices have consequences. Says Steve Dobbins, president of thread maker Carolina Mills: "We want clean air, clear water, good living conditions, the best health care in the world--yet we aren't willing to pay for anything manufactured under those restrictions."'
That's exactly what's going on here. 'Middle class' in the US costs a hell of a lot more than 'middle class' elsewhere, and if consumers here have a choice, they will buy the things that were not made under those expensive conditions. Of course, by making that choice, we push our own jobs overseas
I can't predict how this will end up, but it's going to be a trip finding out. What do you all think? I want to see I Am An Economist in the replies.
Yo momma has a wireless laptop.
At least, mine does. So does anyone else who has a recent Mac. She might well wind up in such a place, if she was travelling with her laptop, which of course she does -- and in that case, she would surely be able to handle a simple web proxy form, but not a WEP password.
From another comment attached to this story:
:), but just to spell it out -- this news means it is now easy to say that Bush has accomplished his goal, and that this is a great victory. It is, against a dictator who abused his people. It's not at all, in terms of the War on Terror or destruction of chemical and biological weapons. Since the invasion was justified via the second, not the first, means, I feel that the quoted statement above is incorrect -- and it's important to remember why.
"Like him or not, Bush is the man right now. He accomplished his goal, and a grand victory is always embraced by a leader's people."
I'm not trying to insult your intelligence
In the coming months, this event we're discussing right now will be used to support the statement "we won." It will play a key role in who my next president is, and wherever you live, you now know that president can reach out and touch you. I think it's damn important to be reminded that when they say "we won," they mean "we combined lies, half-truths, and incompetence to justify a course that failed to accomplish our stated goals, and is considered by many to be both illegal and immoral. We did, however, destroy a dictator who had been successfully confined within his country for over a decade."
Can you see why these reminders seem both relevant and important to some of us?
"I find it a bit ironic that Western culture embraces democracy and distribution of control (in theory), but tends to use an autocratic structure when things are critical."
From my 7th grade history class -- what we've got here in America is a system of checks and balances. For example, the House, the Senate, the President, and the Supreme Court each get a chance to cancel any bill becoming law. Only if all four of them approve will it stay in the books. Any sane manager would look at this system and say, hey, you've made it impossible to get anything done -- and that, of course, is exactly the point. We give governments power over us is dangerous to give to anyone, and that power should be damn hard to use.
Once the decision is made, though, it should be carried out effeciently, and that bit is done by normal chain of command, not committee. What you're pointing out isn't irony. It's the right tool for the right job.
The point of the two-receipt system is that it's easily verifiable in the booth, but impossible to verify outside. That means that any random voter can look and, instead of a long number to verify, they just see the text of who they voted for.
The single receipt cannot be decoded as you suggest -- each pixel is utterly random. There will be no pattern to detect, within the limits of pseudorandom numbers.
That works because the two receipts basically perform an XOR. Each pixel is either
XO or OX
OX XO
Call the first '1' and the second '0'. Then 0^0 = partially clear, and 1^1 = partially clear. 0^1 or 1^0 = fully black. When you're printing a pixel, then, you completely, utterly randomly select 1 or 0 for one receipt. You then print either the same, or the opposite, on the other. There is no pattern whatsoever from pixel to pixel, and once half the receipt is destroyed, it is quite impossible to read the other half.
The problem with the system you propose, by the way, is that anyone who had your SSN and MD5 hash could relatively quickly determine the choices you made just by trying all the combinations. If I was buying votes, I could tell you what choices to make, and then demand my money back if I couldn't reproduce your MD5.