3 expanded posts ยท every known parent and child
>Odd. When I first got a card with the stripe, I was a little paranoid so >I took a bar magnet and erased it. Actually, I don't know whether my >eraser worked because nobody has ever asked to swipe my card thru a >reader. I got a wallet with a plastic fold-out so if someone asks to see >my id, I open my wallet and show it to them, then put it away. How many of us have done this? I nuked mine in the parking lot of the DMV.
I used to work in a lab with an MRI. Erased my credit cards regularly. I visit from time to time. :) Adam Anonymous wrote: | >Odd. When I first got a card with the stripe, I was a little paranoid so | >I took a bar magnet and erased it. Actually, I don't know whether my | >eraser worked because nobody has ever asked to swipe my card thru a | >reader. I got a wallet with a plastic fold-out so if someone asks to see | >my id, I open my wallet and show it to them, then put it away. | | How many of us have done this? I nuked mine in the parking lot of the DMV. | -- "It is seldom that liberty of any kind is lost all at once." -Hume
>I used to work in a lab with an MRI. Erased my credit cards >regularly. I visit from time to time. :) Don't you just hate it when that happens :-) In particular, unlike scratching the mag strip off or ironing, if the mag strip doesn't work, you can just look ignorant. I have enough trouble with my real credit cards being non-scannable. The issue of driver's license mag strip technology has been discussed here in the past, and probably also on some of the privacy newsgroups. You could grunge around the archives and see what you find. If memory serves me correctly, most of them use a common magstripe format used for credit cards, which gives three stripes of up to about 80 bytes each. (It's been suggested that some states use a higher magnetization level, either to reduce forgery or probability of damage.) Typically they'll have the DL#, name, height, weight, eye color, race, Jew bit, Commie bit, etc., so the cops can not only scan the information conveniently, but also can compare it to the information on the front to see if it's forged. Thanks! Bill Bill Stewart, bill.stewart@pobox.com PGP Fingerprint D454 E202 CBC8 40BF 3C85 B884 0ABE 4639