black@ll-null (Jerry Glomph Black) (04/27/89)
Patrick, the combination Mastercard/Calling Card/ATM card doesn't HAVE to be a disaster! It only has to have the Mastercard number printed on it. There have been combo Master/ATM cards for years now, OK so long as the PIN (password number for the uninitiated) isn't on the card (which amazingly, many customers who can't remember a 4-digit number, add). AT&T/BOC cards always struck me as being both dangerous and stupid for that reason, the whole misusable number u!is right there for the stealing, when again a 4-digit # is all you need to memorize. The same people who claim that they are baffled by all these numbers are the ones who could tell you what was on channel 7 thursday at 7:30, three weeks ago. For those who just *can't* hack it, you can write your PIN on the appropriate card in some personal encoding, like 10's complement, add 5, etc. All this ranting from me, a guy who just memorized his 13-digit Sprint card!!! Jerry G Black, MIT Lincoln Laboratory, 244 Wood St. C-120, Lexington MA 02173 Phone (617) 981-4721 Fax (617) 862-9057 black@MICRO.LL.MIT.EDU
trebor@biar.UUCP (Robert J Woodhead) (04/28/89)
In article <telecom-v09i0148m07@vector.dallas.tx.us> black@null.ll.mit.edu writes: >X-TELECOM-Digest: volume 9, issue 148, message 7 of 11 [Jerry writes about remembering PIN's and somesuch] In my daily life, there are two types of PIN's I have to remember. The first is a bank money card 4 digit PIN, and the second are my telephone credit cards, where the PIN is on the card and I have to remember which phone # goes with which card. In the former case, I find the best PINs to use are 1) the first 4 digits of my old zipcode, or 2) the last four digits of a phone number I won't forget (not my phone number, of course; Mom's, for example). Such numbers are hard to forget; ask youself what your old college zipcode was! In the latter case, I just write a cryptic code, like "HN" for home number, "O1" for "Office Number #1", etc. Security for the latter cards can be more lax because they are likely to get lost when I am away from home, so there is little danger of abuse because the phone number is not on them. And in the case of my bank card, even if someone who know's it is my card tries to use it, the PIN is not anything they would be able to easily glean by researching me. -- Robert J Woodhead, Biar Games, Inc. ...!uunet!biar!trebor | trebor@biar.UUCP "The NY Times is read by the people who run the country. The Washington Post is read by the people who think they run the country. The National Enquirer is read by the people who think Elvis is alive and running the country..."