

Decoding the USPS barcode - halo
http://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3207804&userid=0&perpage=40&pagenumber=1

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Torn
Great thread, almost like a mini detective story but involving code!

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unalone
SomethingAwful is, hands-down, the best forum on the Internet. If you've got
time, this is probably the quintessential SA drama, and it's epic in scope:

[http://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?s=1a3f8a1a28...](http://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?s=1a3f8a1a286abce365091c9f32997535&threadid=1675856&perpage=40&pagenumber=1)

Also from SomethingAwful, though the original post is now archived, the P-P-P-
Powerbook prank:

<http://www.zug.com/pranks/powerbook/>

And, if your day hasn't been thoroughly wasted yet, this is my all-time
favorite product of SA:

<http://lparchive.org/LetsPlay/Animal%20Crossing/index.html>

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idm
I spent the last 6 hours reading about kswizzle. I'm angry at you and also
grateful. Or perhaps I don't know how to feel.

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pkrumins
I spent the last 3 hours. :)

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kevindication
I would love to read this, but I have a policy of not visiting SA while at
work.

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Torn
Ok, here's the ghist:

\- Guy's housing company provides backdated letter of deposit deductions,
which they are obligated to provide within 45 days else refund the entire
deposit no questions.

\- Mailing stamp doesn't have a visible date, instead has an encoded
datamatrix
[http://img.skitch.com/20090928-q76qg7y1w575ghbqn4t2uwx4eg.jp...](http://img.skitch.com/20090928-q76qg7y1w575ghbqn4t2uwx4eg.jpg)

\- Goons (SA users) tidy up the barcode image with photoshop, and do some
internet detectivery to track down the tech specs for the image encoding used:
<http://www.springerlink.com/content/l847l1357j811101/>

\- Date of mailing turns out to be encoded as 26 90 32 01. Little-endian so,
flip and to decimal and it becomes 2009-09-18. Letter is backdated!

~~~
mp3jeep01
haha, great executive summary Torn!

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jballanc
This article reminded me of two things:

1\. Bar codes are really, really hard to deal with! The complexity of encoding
types, physical representation, and in memory representation rivals that of
video. I once had to write a system to handle barcodes which included
programming the scanner, interpreting the results, and then generating
resulting barcodes of the appropriate encoding, correct length, and right
checksum. And that was hard with the old 1-D barcodes!

2\. Security deposits suck! I got screwed out of one once (not as much as the
guy in this thread, though) because, literally, my move-in inspection noted
"spots" on the carpet and on move-out the landlord said, "Those look more like
splotches to me." Unfortunately, I was moving 2000 miles away, and the cost of
pursuing through small claims court wouldn't have been worth it. That's when
an uncle taught me a lesson about security deposits: "You're probably going to
get screwed at the end, so negotiate like it's not a deposit but a sunk cost."

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jrockway
Ok, so you decoded the date -- how about finding the signing key for the data.
:)

