Silk Road forums
Market => Rumor mill => Topic started by: sharetheroad on January 07, 2012, 12:26 am
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i'm not going to put a name to this order, yet. he/she has just been made aware of the problem. i'm just wanting some input on what other sellers have done in the past or what you felt was an appropriate response.
i'm pretty pissed though, not so much that they were crushed into oblivion but because the envelope had indentations on the back of it that made it pretty clear what was inside. i take security pretty fucking seriously and for this guy to risk my safety really chaps my ass.
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Naw, his sending you didn't compromise your safety.
Well, not NEARLY as much as you posting those pictures.
You do realize, don't you, that the little orangey-red series of 8 vertical dots printed in a bar-code like pattern on your envelope have your complete address, right down to house or unit number, coded in to them, don't you. That they are used to sort, route, and finally deliver your mail. That they are unique, even having a processing date and time and unique identifier, plus address, encoded into them.
I mean, put another way, you've just posted your own address on the internet for all to see.
Pretty fucking stupid.
PS - I've reported your post and if you're lucky a mod will edit out the links, but those pictures are still going to be out there.
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Variety Jones, reference, please?
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VJ: from yahoo answers
That's a FIM, or facing identification mark. It is used to help the USPS mail processing machinery get every letter oriented correctly. They need to separate stamped mail, metered mail, and business reply mail, and the FIM helps them do this.
No worry, it does not contain any address information.
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Variety Jones, reference, please?
Here's a good overview from http://www.wonderquest.com/envelope-lichen-caribou.htm second item down.
Q: What are those little orange marks on the back of the envelopes I get in the mail? If they encode my address I'd expect to see the same marks on all letters, but they always seem to be different.
A: You're right: the marks are different because they merely name the letter, like "Joe". Each letter gets a different name. That way, the system can find a particular letter, Joe, again if it needs to. Why should it? Ah, we're getting to the real problem: envelopes must have a zip code that machines can read: the black bar code. Our automated mail system produces the bar code by an intricate procedure.
I called the bar code expert at the Albuquerque post office, Anthony Baca, to find out what's going on.
"A machine reads your address and (if it can decipher the zip code) prints a corresponding bar code on the envelope but prints the orange code first in case the machine fails to read the address," he said.
"What?!!" I got a tour of the post office to find out.
The envelopes, on a conveyor belt, approach an incredibly fast reader machine, called an advanced Optical Character Recognition (OCR) machine. The letters zip into this machine in a white blur-- 9 envelopes a second, 33,000 envelopes an hour. Once there, the machine reads the characters of each address, takes a picture of the address, sprays each envelope with its orange-mark name tag, and sends the letter out on the belt a certain distance to give itself time to finish its job.
The letter goes that distance and returns while the machine determines if it can recognize the characters in the envelope's address. If it succeeds for a given letter, the machine puts the correct bar code on the envelope. If it fails, that letter gets special treatment. The smart machine does not fail often since it can decipher even hand printed letters if the printing is in all caps.
When the OCR machine fails, it needs a human to read the address. All the address-reading humans are in central locations to save money. It costs time and money to send the physical letter. So the system does the operation by phone and refers to the letter by its orange marks, Joe, in our example.
The machine sends Joe's picture (showing the address) and Joe's name to a regional office, perhaps Utah, via dedicated phone lines. The Salt Lake City office employs 800 people to read addresses when the local OCR machines fail.
A Utah computer answers the phone, receives the picture, and displays it to a human. The human reads your address and types it into the computer. The machine looks up the corresponding zip code--complete with a 4-digit route code, and the last two numbers of your street address--and determines the correct bar code.
Utah phones the data back to the original post office. The OCR machine there reads the orange name tags of pending letters, finds Joe again, and prints the bar code on the envelope. Done.
No worry, it does not contain any address information.
It uniquely identifies a piece of mail, and matches it with both an image of the piece, and the OCR'd data from the image, as well as any sourcing data. A warrant is not needed to obtain this information. Worry.
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That article say that letter in question is "marked" with orange code if failed to OCR barcode (black), then that letter goes to human recognition and they put "new" black barcode.
That orange code simple name the letter and route it to human recognition but orange code itself does not contain address.
Or have I understand article wrong (No so good in english) :'(
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mseller,
It sprays a unique orange code on each piece, takes its picture, and attempts Optical Character Recognition to try and read the address. The orange code, the picture of the piece, and the address are all stored.
If it can't figure out the address, that piece of mail is recalled by it's orange code, and the image is sent to a human to verify and enter the address.
EVERY piece of mail is uniquely identified by one of those orange codes.
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OK I find and this. But yes, that unique orange code is "flag" for human recognition who input new data in sorting machine.
But I am not sure is that orange hold zipcode or just some code how to call that particular letter in sorting machine.
The 2001 USPS press release:
One is the orange Identification Code placed on the back of letters for Remote ZIP Encoding. Similar to a license tag, the unique code identifies individual mail pieces and is applied to letter mail when high-speed sorters cannot correctly read address image information necessary to apply barcodes. In this case, the physical mailpiece bearing the orange bar code on the back remains at the mail processing center. The scanned address image is "e-mailed" off-site to a Remote Encoding Center where human operators read the scanned image, key in the correct ZIP Code information, and then "e-mail" the data back to the mail processing plant. There the correct barcode is matched to the physical envelope bearing the unique orange license tag so the mail piece can continue automated processing.
And I found answer that this code is only sorting machine unique code for the letter.
I'm not talking about the codes described here: http://bulkmail.info/barcode.html
On the back side of delivered mail, you get these fluorescent bars
that look very much like this, in bright orange ink, with 2mm gaps
between each bar:
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(And yes, that's an actual transliteration.)
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Request for Question Clarification by hammer-ga on 16 Feb 2005 10:48 PST
Generica,
The barcode you describe is sprayed onto the piece of mail when the
automated sorting equipment cannot decipher the address. It is an
internal identifier for the piece that corresponds to an image of the
address that a human will read to assign the correct ZIP. The code
does contain other purely internal information such as the machine
number and timestamp.
I found a newsgroup thread which describes how to decode these
barcodes, however, since the information contained in the barcode does
not appear to be generally useful, I wanted to check with you before
posting an official answer. I called USPS, and they confirm that it
is just an internal sorting code.
Data of orange code itself contain following:
The ID tag (image record descriptor) is made of the following information.
Machine ID - 4 digit # that relates to the image lift equipment and plant
Mailpiece # - 1 to 24999
Time stamp - in 1/2 hour increments
Date
and lastly, mail class
Unfortunately, there is no simple decode process as with postnet barcodes.
Read whole page
http://answers.google.com/answers/threadview/id/475442.html
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Either way we should be careful what we post and submit on the net. Always mask all sensitive details and barcodes.
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The vendor should be held responsible for the mispackaging of your order.
:)
nomad bloodbath