How many times has this happened to you? You have just sat down to a wonderful meal of top sirloin, garlic mashed potatoes and a fresh Caesar salad when the phone rings. You think to yourself, "maybe that is Matt calling about season passes at the mountain, I should get that." "Hello? Good evening Mr. <butchers last name because he can't speak English>, I'm calling to inform you of a wonderful oppurtunity...blah blah blah" AHHHHHHH! Why do they always call during dinner. Why? Because they know you're home.
No matter how quickly you get them off the phone, there is no taking back the aggravation they have caused you by interrupting your dinner and quality personal time with your friends/family. But, there is no reason you can't have a little fun with them.
Behold the Telemarketer counter-script. As soon as the person on the other end of the line asks you to purchse whatever wonderful time saving, life enhancing, sex enriching product they are selling, just start with this script and you will have them running for a Taco Bell application in no time!
Today, as I was picking up my dry cleaning I watched the attendent swipe my card through the reader and enter in the amount then asked me to enter my PIN. When I entered my PIN and hit enter I began to wonder what happens to that information as it's whisked out onto the wire on it's way to my bank for authorization. Is it encrypted in any form, is my PIN hashed before being sent, or as I suspected in the most likely answer, is the data sent over the wire in plain text. Hey, I work in information security, these are the things that I worry about.
Well it turns out my third theory was correct. An article over at The Register talks about a group of scam artists in Thailand that stole credit card information using wiretap equipment, then smuggled the information to Malaysia for encoding on to phony cards. According to the Thai police, an estimated $1.59M dollars was fraudulently charged over a 6 month period while an additional $9.5M in charges is still being investigated.
Another thing that concerns me is that some of these credit card machines don't even use phone lines anymore, they have connections to the internet for performing authorizations. Ideally, these machines would connect to the credit transaction clearinghouse via an encrypted VPN, but given the history of financial services lack of security, I doubt that is the case.
I am the proud owner of a 30GB iPod video. This is one of the few devices that the more I use it the happier I am with it. I take it snowboarding, to work, listen to it in traffic. Its awesome.
<rant>This evening I plugged my iPod in to charge and iTunes informed me there is a new firmware version, version 1.1. Great, so I go download it and run the installer and tell it to update my iPod. Anyone else see the contradiction in that message? Nothing went wrong mind you and the new support for the iPod radio remote and bug fixes went fine, just put some thought into your wording Apple. </rant>
The opinions expressed herein are my own personal opinions and do not represent my employer's view in anyway.
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