Either should work...I'll bet that scratching the shit off with his keys worked too ;) I'll have to remember that when it's time to get mine done.
Shouldn't take much if all you need is to stop regular folks from scanning it -- if it's like some other systems, changing a couple bits will keep the checksum from checking and the reader will report the card as invalid.
That was a good question, though, does anyone know how much data those little stripes can hold?
It can (emphasis on can; most stripes don't) store 300 bytes according to some -- 1846 characters of English in theory, 600 in practice, 480 uncompressed, 300 ASCII. 300 bytes is six monochrome compressed mugshots or a 2400-pixel (about 50x50) uncompressed monochrome photo, or it could hold 33 military-grade biometric IDs. A study of el33t h@qu3r ph1|ez show that actual credit and ATM cards don't use nearly 300 bytes. That might be because error rates would be astronomical, or it might just be because they can't use all the extra space. [After writing this, I saw another web site with a figure of 226 bytes, not 300. Don't know who's right, so I'm going with the paranoid estimate...]
Scott R. Brower http://www.infowar.com http://www.efflorida.org
--------------------------------------------------------------------------- Randall Farmer rfarmer@hiwaay.net http://hiwaay.net/~rfarmer