Tag Archives: data

Windows Security Just FAILS.

The malware records the magnetic stripe information on the back of a card as well as the PIN (Personal Identification Number), which would potentially allow criminals to clone the card in order to withdraw cash.

The collected card data, which is encrypted using the DES (Data Encryption Standard) algorithm, can be printed out by the ATM’s receipt printer, Trustwave wrote.

The malware is controlled via a GUI that is displayed when a so-called “trigger card” is inserted into the machine by a criminal. The trigger card causes a small window to appear that gives its controller 10 seconds to pick one of 10 command options using the ATM’s keypad.

[…]

A criminal can then view the number of transactions, print card data, reboot the machine and even uninstall the malware. Another menu option appears to allow the ejection of an ATM’s cash cassette.

via Cybercriminals refine data-sniffing software for ATM fraud – Network World.

Whoa. This is BAD.

Seriously, though – DES? Cmon, any first year computing student learns that DES has already been outdated by it’s bigger and badder brother, the Advanced Encryption Standard.

See? I do learn things in Introduction to Systems! 🙂

However, the REAL WTF here is why ATMs all over the world are running WINDOWS in the first place. I’m no Apple fanboy (har, har), but even I recognise that Windows isn’t the most hacker-proof OS out there.

Using the Earth as a hard drive?

Where Google gets all that Gmail hard drive space.

★ The Joy of Tech! ★.

…and somehow, it’s probably possible within the next decade or so.

From Boing Boing Gadgets:

BLDGBLOG does some fascinating navel gazing on the subject of hard drive storage on the planetary scale: if ferromagnetically charged minerals can be arranged to make hard drives, what’s stopping us from turning Earth into one giant binary storage capsule, short of the technology?

I kid you not. In years to come – we might be using the earth as our hard drive. I’m not talking about terabytes here, not even petabytes – nope, if we used the earth as our hard drive, I couldn’t even begin to imagine the amount of data a hard drive of that size would hold.

If a 1.8″ drive can hold a quarter of a gigabyte, then the earth, measuring 6371km in diameter, would hold a hell of a lot more – obviously.

Good luck with those seek times, though. You random access times would be shot to pieces (unless you had heads that travelled at the speed of light). 😛

Cool, huh?

Telstra, I salute you!

Oh, finally!

Telstra, in their infinite wisdom, have decided that their data packs are far too expensive and are now bringing up the included data in them.

It took them long enough!

Now the comparison between the $29 ‘yes’ plan (250MB data, 23 minutes calls) and Telstra’s $29 plan (2.5MB data, 22 minutes calls) is far closer that it was – which is how it should have been in the first place.

The difference between the two to bring them on par in terms of data is now $16.50 – a reasonable price to pay, because Telstra has far better 3G coverage in Tassie that Optus, which only reaches Taroona according to some reports.

So Telstra, I salute you. Data AND coverage ftw.

Original link courtesy MacTalk, and the Telstra press release can be found here.

I’ll wade through the usual stuff and just leave you with the important bit:

Telstra Data Packs

Telstra Data Packs

In other news, the UMAT (that’s the Undergraduate Medicine and Health Sciences Admission Test, folks) was this Wednesday. Section 1 was hard, 2 easy, and 3 mildly challenging… Hopefully, I’ll do well, but as we all know, how ‘easy’ (relatively speaking) the test was isn’t necessarily a reflection of how ‘good’ you went 😀

If you’re wondering why this post is here and not on freshbytes – it’s ‘cos I’m trying to cut down on the personal posts on freshbytes, instead focusing on things that affect school life and so on… If you have any comments, feel free to contact me.

This post was composed and published from OSX blogging software, Ecto. I like using it because I don’t have to be online to compose posts, but it also allows me to focus on what I’m writing instead of getting distracted – which means more high-quality posts for you! There are a few things I don’t like about it, though, one of which is how it handles images – IMO, the WordPress editor is far better and handling those sorts of things. Anyway, most posts here will continue to be published in this way, and I’ll be doing some of freshbyte’s posts in this manner as well. I should publicly thank Martin P for purchasing Ecto for me – credit cards are great things – and so here it is: thanks!

More things will be here soon, I promise!