Our new stamps
Before January, we have to turn in all our old stamps and trade them for these >>
Yes, that’s a QR code. Well, no – apparently “QR Code” is trademarked, but it’s the same idea. According to the Royal Mail, each stamp will be unique and the idea is you scan it with the Post Office app and you can connect your letter to an audio or video file online or what have you.
Naturally, it’s making everyone’s spidey sense tingle like mad. I can’t work out any way they can use it for nefarious purposes, though.
Well, not really. These are two stamps from a single book. I overlaid them and they are close but not exact. See here.
The green is one stamp, the purple is the other and the dark gray is where they both agree. Presumably a totally different book of stamps would have more differences.
So in theory, if you sent a poison pen letter and they raided your house and found a similar stamp…eh, it’s a reach.
Honestly, it’s probably just some boomer civil servant’s notion of STAMPS OF THE FU-TURE!
The QR reader in my phone tells me it’s a long string of numbers and letters, but I couldn’t find a way to copy and paste them into anything to compare. If I get curious enough, I might do proper scans of some books of stamps and overlay them to see if I can find a pattern.
Can anyone intuit the formula for how many unique combinations there are in a matrix of 16 x 48 binary dots?
October 24, 2022 — 5:08 pm
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