Timeline for Tenant wants to pay rent with EFT
Current License: CC BY-SA 3.0
17 events
| when toggle format | what | by | license | comment | |
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| Aug 12, 2015 at 14:39 | comment | added | JTP - Apologise to Monica♦ | @Voo - The "danger everywhere" was tied to the paper cut anecdote, that even a piece of paper could kill unintentionally, assuming the infection went septic. It was not a cop out to accept any security flaws. I'd love to get to 100%, from the 99.999..... | |
| Aug 12, 2015 at 14:35 | comment | added | Voo | @JoeTaxpayer Actually your single experience would absolutely disprove the claim that paper cuts were not dangerous at all. And "there's danger everywhere" is a copout - I guarantee you that if you find a single inherent flaw (not in the implementation, although that's also a big deal and not something to shrug at) in public key cryptography the general tenor won't be "well nothing is safe anyhow".. people just accept the inherent security flaws of writing checks. | |
| Aug 12, 2015 at 0:28 | history | edited | keshlam | CC BY-SA 3.0 |
added 266 characters in body
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| Aug 11, 2015 at 23:11 | comment | added | JTP - Apologise to Monica♦ | @Voo - I never said anything was safe. There's danger everywhere. But (true story) just because I got a paper cut, which later became infected, from opening an envelope, I don't run around claiming they are inherently dangerous. In 2014, 63 million checks were processed by the federal reserve. One man's bad experience and claim of "it is no longer safe to write personal checks," doesn't quite make it so. | |
| Aug 11, 2015 at 22:01 | comment | added | user32155 | @Almo those would be the Knuth reward check (which has a scan with numbers). The article says "Initially, Knuth sent real checks to recipients. He stopped doing so in October 2008 because of problems with check fraud." | |
| Aug 11, 2015 at 19:40 | comment | added | Voo | @JoeTaxpayer While it's true that you cannot prove a negative by testing (you cannot say something is safe just because you haven't heard of any counterexamples) the opposite is obviously not true (or said another way: You only need a single counterexample to disprove a hypothesis). | |
| Aug 10, 2015 at 18:45 | comment | added | Steve Jessop | @JoeTaxpayer: I think Donald Knuth is just reporting what his own bank told him following incidents relating to his accounts. So he doesn't have to be an expert, merely an honest and reasonably accurate interpreter of statements made to him privately by his bank. | |
| Aug 10, 2015 at 18:00 | comment | added | Almo | Moreover, people who get Knuth's checks often post scans online since getting one is worth serious bragging rights. So way more than a few hundred people have seen his numbers. | |
| Aug 10, 2015 at 17:02 | comment | added | Engineer Toast | I had the same thought but I was thrown when my bank said that the information would allow someone to make withdraws as well. | |
| Aug 10, 2015 at 16:44 | comment | added | Kevin | Sure, but Knuth's been doing this for forty, and the ~275 is just 2006-08. He's only had problems recently. | |
| Aug 10, 2015 at 16:34 | comment | added | JTP - Apologise to Monica♦ | Over the same period of time, nearly everyone who regularly writes checks would have hit the same 275 number. Even just 5/mo is 300 over a 5 year period. | |
| Aug 10, 2015 at 16:31 | comment | added | Kevin | @JoeTaxpayer: By the point one reaches the ~275 mark, I don't think it's an "anecdote" any longer. It's an (admittedly uncontrolled) experiment. | |
| Aug 10, 2015 at 16:30 | comment | added | JTP - Apologise to Monica♦ | I understand. One person's anecdote doesn't make a system handling many billions of checks inherently unsafe. | |
| Aug 10, 2015 at 16:26 | comment | added | Kevin | @JoeTaxpayer: According to my link, he has written at least 275 checks to (largely) random strangers for small amounts of money. He concluded it is no longer safe to do so after having to close three checking accounts, and now writes checks from the fictitious "Bank of San Serriffe" (since most of the real ones had not been cashed anyway). | |
| Aug 10, 2015 at 16:25 | comment | added | JTP - Apologise to Monica♦ | @Kevin - what makes Donald an expert to be quoted? | |
| Aug 10, 2015 at 15:24 | comment | added | Kevin | Note that writing personal checks is itself unsafe, at least according to Donald Knuth. | |
| Aug 10, 2015 at 14:36 | history | answered | keshlam | CC BY-SA 3.0 |