Archive: 2009-10
A proposal for idiot-proofing bank account details
Take a valid credit card number, such as
4111-1111-1111-1111, change it slightly, to4111-2111-1111-1111, and it ceases to be valid. This is because the last digit of the number is a checksum calculated from the preceding digits via the Luhn algorithm. It’s not particularly clever; it’s not cryptographically secure. It’s not meant to be. What it’s intended to do is to protect against accidental data entry errors, and it does that very well.Why do we want newspapers to survive, again?
When I saw this Daily Express front page online, I thought it must be a parody. It wasn’t until I saw a physical copy of the paper the next day that I really believed that they had actually printed something so inflammatory and xenophobic:
Defying monoculture
It may surprise many people, but Microsoft is fairly irrelevant to my daily life. I don’t use Microsoft Windows. In fact, no one in my office uses Windows. I don’t use Microsoft Office. At work, I have a Mac; at home, I run Linux.
iPlayer Downloader fixed again
I’m back from holiday, I’ve slept, and I’ve fixed the latest round of problems with the downloader.