Another exploit has been found in the Chip and PIN system. The exploit is a man-in-the middle attack that wouldn’t take too much know-how to pull off. You can watch the BBC report on the issue or check out the paper (PDF) published by the team that found the vulnerability. A stolen card resides in a reader that connects to a dummy card via a small cable. When the dummy card is inserted into a card reader, any PIN can be used to complete the transaction. The chip on the original card gets confirmation that the sale was completed via signature and the vendor’s card reader gets confirmation that the pin was correct. The UK based Chip and PIN system seems like a great idea, but it has had its share of security loopholes. This makes us wonder how hard it is to roll out security patches to the hardware readers in the system. Obviously this needs to be patch but does it take a technician visiting each terminal to flash an upgrade?
Switching to the topic of wide-scale attacks, we caught the NPR interview with [James Lewis] on Wednesday when they discussed the growing threat of Cyberterroism. He feels an attack on the US electrical grid is currently the biggest threat and will happen in the next ten years. Obviously taking the grid down would endanger lives and bring things to a standstill; traffic lights, refrigeration, heat, etc. We’re just glad that when asked if he thinks there is already malicious code residing in the control system, he doesn’t think that’s the case.
[Mario the Magician] wrote in to let us know that he makes Hackaday a priority every morning with his coffee. Well, so do we. He also included a link to his homepage when submitting this revelation. The juicy details that are as much of a fix as the caffeine in the coffee are missing from his posts. But the hacks are solid.
Magicians are hackers. If you could go out and buy the props, the concept are unlikely to impress anyone. [Mario] demonstrates his Nickel Box and a Jedi Mind Trick he built. The Nickel Box is a mechanical contraption that somehow transports a coin from one part of a cigar box to a tiny little enclosure on top of it. The Jedi Mind Trick uses a microcontroller and an old Star Wars soundtrack cassette tape box to put on a light and sound show while it recovers your chosen card from a shuffled deck. Great demonstrations, but no word on what’s going on inside.
[Mario's] also has a collection of… performance oddities. His talking television takes an audio input and displays a 1950’s-esque oscilloscope effect on an old TV. He’s attempting to stop his heart, or burn the house down, or both with a flyback transformer lightning box. And his drawing automaton, well, you’ll just have to see it.
We believe in electrons, not magic (even though some say there are no electrons). So we want to know how those magic props are built. Like any good magician, [Mario] probably won’t reveal his secrets. If you’ve got the goods this your chance. Write a post detailing your magical prop builds and send them our way. If it’s well done we’ll feature it here on Hackaday.
We’ll ask it again, why aren’t we building our own printers? We’re building 3d printers, CNC mills, and hacking the ink cartridges on commercial printers. What does it really take to build say a 300 dpi black and white printer? Something that lets you clean and service the print head rather than throwing it out when the ink reservoir is empty?
Someone has set out to answer these question with the Openprinter project. If this interests you, join up and start the revolution. RepRap had simple beginnings and maybe it’s time to take the army of self-replicating 3D printers and use them to print parts for 2D printers that don’t drive us crazy.
SparkFun’s free day came and went as entertainment for some and an infuriating event for others. They filmed some video in their office during the madness to give us a look at how it went on their end. We find it amusing that Solarbotics, one of their competitors, sent them flowers with a card reading “Rest in Peace SparkFun”.
According to [Nate's] original post, the concept of free day was inspired by reading [Chris Anderson's] book “Free: The Future of a Radical Price”. We recently finished reading this wonderful work and we’re making it our next book recommendation. [Chris] is editor-in-chief of Wired and has had a ring-side seat as the digital world rose around us. He takes a historical look at what the price of free really means, defining cost by adding more terms like Gratis and Libre to the mix. If you have a good handle on the companies that have defined the 21st Century business model so far you wont’ be able to put this book down.
Now, we should mention something that is remotely related to hacking since we try to do that sort of thing around here. The SparkFun post also reminds those folks lucky enough to get a $100 credit to chronicle and share their projects. We’d love to see them too so get your projects written up and send us the dirty details.
First the bad news, it’s too late for you to apply for this grant. The good news is that you can vote for the projects you think deserve money to do some good.
The Fun Theory is the group that produced the musical subway stairs and the bottle bank arcade. Now they’ve put out the call to arms on the Internet for submissions that make life more fun and our communities better places. All of the submissions for the fun-theory-award are in and available for your perusal. Some of the most popular submissions include a vending machine that uses recycled cans to play a slot-machine game, a hand sanitizer that makes funny sounds when used, and putting a giant crossword puzzle at bus stops to encourage ridership and make waiting more fun.
The question that pops to mind: how is this not an antitrust suit waiting to happen? Directory assistance is BIG MONEY that Google undercut when launching its free service. By shipping phones that have the number pre-programmed doesn’t that limit choice and competition in the same way that shipping Windows with Internet Explorer does? Perhaps the difference is that Microsoft has a near monopoly on the PC OS market while GE can’t say the same about cordless phones.
We’re not antitrust lawyers, and neither are you, but we’d still like to hear your opinions about this in the comments.
A post about Operation Chokehold popped up on (fake) Steve Jobs’ blog this morning. It seems some folks are just plain tired of AT&T giving excuses about their network. The straw that broke the camel’s back came when AT&T floated the idea of instituting bandwidth limitations for data accounts. Now, someone hatched the idea of organizing enough users to bring the whole network down by maxing their bandwidth at the same time.
We’re not quite sure what to think about this. Our friend Google told us that there’s plenty of press already out there regarding Operation Chokehold so it’s not beyond comprehension that this could have an effect on the network. On the other hand, AT&T already knows about it and we’d wager they’re working on a plan to mitigate any outages that might occur.
As for the effectiveness of the message? We’d have more sympathy for AT&T if they didn’t have exclusivity contracts for their smart phones (most notably the iPhone). And if you’re selling an “Unlimited Plan” it should be just that. What do you think?
We got a tip about a USB CD destroyer. We found its methods amusing as it just scratches the CD as seen above on the left. If you really have data security issues, perhaps something more than scratched plastic should be used. There are a lot of paper shredders that can also shred CDs, what about taking that shredder with the burnt out motor and turning it into a hand-cranked shredder that doubles as a CD killer?
Got a lot of optical media that needs to go? These folks developed the chain-gun of CD shredding with an automatic feed. This consists of a CD shredder and a slew of discs connected with packing tape. As seen in the video after the break, the shredder advances and the next disk is pulled into its jaws.
Microwave has been a popular bringer of death for disc media. The light show and resulting chaotic art (above on the right and after the break) are what make this interesting, but it’s pretty hard on the much-loved kitchen appliance. What we’re really looking for is a way to force a CD/DVD writer to overwrite data. The fact that burnt discs, rather than factory pressed versions, are what normally need to be disposed of makes this a hack waiting to happen. Why isn’t this a standard hardware feature of all drives, and can it be implemented in software?
There’s always the low-tech snap, scratch, or mangle methods. We usually just scratch the foil off the top of the disc.
If you have just the right kernel, and a copy of your CPU key, and a second unbanned Xbox 360, you may be able to reactivate your machine. But how many people have those things available to them? Undoubtedly an Xbox 360’s desirability is greatly diminished if Xbox Live is removed from the equation. This is something Nintendo could learn from when it comes to the Wii (no online multiplayer with New Super Mario Bros Wii?… Really?). So whether you are the one who was banned, or you decided/were tricked in to purchasing a banned console, what are you going to do with it now that online play is out of the picture?
We’ve seen the console emulating SNES games and even XBMC run with the help of Ubuntu. Leave us a comment and tell us if you are planning to just go without Xbox Live, use the machine as a desktop running Ubuntu, or spearhead the effort to repurpose this powerful (and flawed) hardware platform. Will you go out and capitalize on cheaper hardware, or have you been burnt by the grim reality of a crippled rig?
[Cory Doctorow] has published a novel about the near future and a couple of hackers who can make anything from the stuff lying around. We like a good sci-fi novel, and have no shortage of recommendations (go read Snow Crash) for those who need them. We’re adding ‘Makers’ to our must read list.
Not only is this book about you, but its release most likely agrees with your life philosophy. You can download this book, right now, for free, legally. This is because it has been release under the creative commons license. Best of all, if you like the book and want to make a donation, you are directed to purchase a book on behalf of a school or other program that has requested a copy but doesn’t have the funds to acquire it themselves.
So, buy the book if you want a physical copy, download it if you prefer that method, but either way we think this is better than stealing the printed word.
