I less than four minutes a crook can steal your check, selectively erase your writing, and make the check out to himself for any amount. That's checkwashing and it's preventable.

Most pens use dye, not pigmented ink. The uni-ball® 207™ uses ink with certain color pigments that bond with the paper fibers in checks making it very hard to "wash" the ink off. This pen, and others like it, could be a simple defense against the threat of checkwashing, which is simple and fast to do. The use of a pen like this, combined with the habit of properly filling in all the blanks on each check, and routine audits of bank statements will help you defend against checkwashing.

Greylisting is "method of defending e-mail users against spam. A mail transfer agent (MTA) using greylisting will "temporarily reject" any email from a sender it does not recognize. If the mail is legitimate, the originating server will try again and the email is accepted. If the mail is from a spammer it will probably not be retried since a spammer goes through thousands of email addresses and can not afford the time delay to retry."

Why not apply a similar technique to your telephone? It could be done without much effort in this day of caller-id. Imagine if you had a device that, when plugged into your telephone line, would allow you to automatically answer the phone for unknown numbers and give the caller a message. The message could be generic or it could be instructions to do something specific. You could be program the device with a list of white listed (allowed) telephone numbers as well as blacklisted (denied) numbers. The device could give a different message based on whether the number is in the blacklist or simply unknown. If the calling number is on the white list the device does nothing, allowing standard telephonic devices to continue operating.

You are probably reading this post because you are an Outlook or Outlook Express user and you tried to reply to a digitally signed e-mail from me. The result was a warning/error notice stating, "You cannot send digitally signed messages because you do not have a digital ID for this account." or some such thing. You are receiving this notice because Microsoft made a mistake in the default configuration settings when it packaged Outlook and Outlook Express for distribution.