GLUG lotto blotto

["Hendrik Martin" <mowl@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi all,

On Friday, I went to pay my water and lights at the local post office....
and of course noticed the Lotto cashier. It wouldn't hurt I thought, and on
my way home I sort of pondered the chances of winning and whether you could
put a computer to work to 'crack' it. (Or a network of computers like
Seti@Home.) My concluding thought was to use a computer, not based on
common-or-garden semiconductor physics, but on quantum physics, to generate
the winning number ;)

But there's another more nefarious option.

I have a friend who worked as a 'customs officer' for a foreign governent -
and he is something of a forged passport spotter (and passport forger
himself).

He said it would be very easy to change the numbers on the lottery ticket.
It's ordinary paper with dotmatrix printing, nothing like a passport or ID
document. A child could do it, he said, on any given Sunday.

The only catch is I suspect the organisers of Lotto has some record of all
issued tickets - with the tendered numbers -  so they would probably know
your ticket is fake. Or would they?

Hendrik Martin