We`ve been running a subscription drive for Brainstorm magazine. What has been interesting to note is that while people are keen to subscribe to the magazine, they are wary of putting their credit card details online.
This natural suspicion is understandable. There has been a lot of negative publicity around putting credit card details on the Internet.
For the most part, reliable sites like Amazon, Kalahari or, in this case, ITWeb, have thrown a lot of talent at ensuring their payment systems are secure. Dodgy purveyors of pornography or performance-enhancing pharmaceuticals would be more likely candidates for using credit card details for their own wicked ends.
The real culprits
However, the paranoia persists, and we`ve had to field a number of queries and complaints about the payment process from a variety of different individuals. These are aside from the entertaining queries we`ve been getting from people who offer to spell their credit card details for us, and then proceed with "C-r-e-d-i-t C-a-r-d". Or the person who, when asked to enter his credit card number with no spaces, typed "0071space9034space7865space2345".
For the most part, reliable sites like Amazon, Kalahari or, in this case, ITWeb, have thrown a lot of talent at ensuring their payment systems are secure.
Georgina Guedes, Editor, ITWeb Brainstorm
The one that really had us in stitches was the guy who offered his credit card details telephonically, and proceeded to rattle off an eight-digit number. When he was told that credit cards have 16 numbers, he informed us snootily that his didn`t. Questioned as to what kind of credit card he had, he responded that it was a Clicks card.
"Oh, well, unfortunately, you can`t buy a subscription to Brainstorm with a Clicks card. It`s not a credit card. It`s not even a credit card at Clicks - it`s a loyalty card."
"But it`s a gold Clicks card."
Which leads me to believe that in fact, it`s the poor online merchants that need to be wary of the chancers out there representing themselves as customers, and not the other way around.
Both sides
Regardless, it seems that this mutual suspicion could possibly be a thing of the past if an enterprising mathematician`s proof turns out to be correct. Rather than ensuring the safety of our online transactions, he has found the solution for a theory that implodes the foundation of encryption on the Internet.
The problem that Louis de Branges, a French-born mathematician now at Purdue University in the US, claims to have a proof for is the Riemann Hypothesis. The Riemann Hypothesis has something to do with (and I am no mathematician) being able to understand the seemingly random nature of prime numbers.
The random nature of prime numbers is the cornerstone of Internet cryptography, so the ability to understand them in this way would mean that any code based upon them could be cracked. This would mean that all Internet encryption would be rendered insecure, and people would have to deliver cheques or bags of money to the likes of Amazon or ITWeb to secure their purchase.
Of course, there`s always the possibility that the problem has not been solved. The rest of the scientific community remains sceptical of the complex proof. But they were sceptical the last time De Branges solved a problem, and it turned out he was right then.
He`s got a pretty good incentive to spend his hours tinkering with equations. The Riemann Hypothesis is one of the seven "millennium problems" for the solution of which the Clay Mathematics Institute in America has offered a payout of $1 million. Time will tell whether he has earned the cash, and brought down e-commerce, or if this is another tempest of so much hot air.
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