For all of us who spent so much time restarting computers to diagnose them over the years, this page will bring back some of the “glory days”. Relive the restarts of all the popular OS’s and versions.

I don’t understand this one. The reason many (most) sites require you to confirm your password is to ensure you typed it correctly when creating your password, otherwise a typo would prevent you from logging back in correctly later. We’ve all “fat fingered” a password before. That simple confirmation step prevents it on creation. How does entering my password twice when logging in provide any additional security? If the password is compromised, the extra field does nothing.

I presume the reason is to make Quicken look/feel more secure than it really is.

I should note that I like Quicken. I like it enough that even though the native Mac version is so disappointing on paper that I never purchased it, I did I purchased the Windows version and continue to use it there. I think that demonstrates my not hating Quicken. It does however have its quirks that just make me wonder what they were thinking.

In less than an hour, any reasonably skilled programmer can write an application that will “skim” – or steal – a consumer’s financial and personal information right off the card utilizing an easily obtained Square card reader. How do we know? We did it. Tested on sample Square card readers with our own personal credit cards, we wrote an application in less than an hour that did exactly this.

Allow me to debunk the hell out of this:

• To skim a card you need physical possession of the card. The numbers are printed on the front. No reader needed.
• Skimming is normally done by attaching a device in front of a legitimate reader (such as an ATM) so it passively collects data. Not via cell phone. Stealing a credit card, walking to a back ally and skimming doesn’t make any sense.
• Credit cards numbers are worth almost nothing on the black market. They are sold in bulk. This process is to slow to be viable for even the most brain-dead of criminals to want to bother with.
• There are easier methods than the above including phishing attacks, becoming a waiter (the best job for credit card thieves), or just hacking one of the many insecure ecommerce sites on the net. An ATM skimmer attached to an ATM is much more profitable and harder to get caught since you can leave and come back later.
• Square’s dongle doesn’t encrypt data because it goes directly to the phone. You’d need to extensively modify the device to intercept anything. The connection from your phone to Square seems to be encrypted.
• Oh yea… They have their logo on top, but never link to their homepage or explain who they are. VeriFone is a vendor of credit card scanners. A direct competitor of Square. They also sell wireless scanners that would compete directly with Square. They cost a lot.

How’d I do?

Bonus:

VeriFone sells “contactless” point of sale systems. I’ve mentioned several times over the past few years how poorly thought out these seem to be. WREG recently did a great story on how easy it is to scan/clone one of these cards to a hotel key (full disclosure: WREG is an affiliate of my employer).

Conclusion:

If someone steals your credit card swiping it on their own scanner, reads the numbers off, or just running to the nearest store and buying things, it doesn’t make a difference. Square isn’t the security hole here.

I’ve got a square reader on hand and can say it’s cheaply made (obviously), but no reason at all to think it’s any less secure than any other terminal. The owner/operator of the terminal is the chief point of failure.

The problem with the MacBook Pro is when you have the computer open and on and you connect another display you’re given the option to mirror or use the display as a second display. If you mirror and close the laptop it goes to sleep. That’s completely illogical. There seems to be no way to disable going to sleep in this situation that I can find. I can’t imagine why anyone would want another behavior when closing a laptop while having a display and input device connected. When no display is connected and the laptop is closed, it should obviously sleep.

Searching on Google returns numerous forum threads with people who also have this gripe. Even a check box in the Energy Saver pref panel to facilitate this would do nicely.

For the record Windows is no saint either. It’s handling of monitor resolutions, especially if your desktop display is a different resolution is abhorrent. It can result in anything from reshuffling icons to putting windows out of the display area. I’ve never even bothered with such functionality in Linux, at least not yet so I can’t speak to its competency in this area.

I’ve only played with it for a few minutes on my Core i7 MacBook Pro, and things seem very speedy and my CPU didn’t see much of a spike. Hopefully enough videos will take advantage of hardware decoding that this will be a nice improvement.

I still believe WebM is the better future, but H.264 hardware decoding does make Flash less painful for the moment.

My solution was to build a USB alarm system: Two rotating LED lights to get attention visually as well as a 76 db piezo buzzer which chirps when the system is activates to help get attention. The buzzer only chirps and only when the system first invokes so it’s not an annoyance. It’s enough to get attention, but not enough to bother others. It has multiple chirps so that I can potentially setup multiple alert types.

Now we can really be on the ball!

Obligatory goofy office signage

Parts Manifest

• 1 Arduino Duemilanove
• 1 Piezo Buzzer (I used RadioShack part# 273-059 but you can use whatever you’ve got)
• 1 set of Woot Lights
• 1 Breadboard
• 1 ULN2803A Darlington Transistor Array
• 1 9V DC Power Supply
• 1 USB Female Type A Connector
• 1 Altoids Tin to hold everything
• 1 USB cable

Plus misc. wire to hold it all together, Dremel to cut the tin, multimeter to test your work, soldering iron to wire up the USB connector, electrical tape wrap all sharp corners and protect the inside from shorts.

Description

Essentially I started with Brett’s simple Woot-Off Schematics (mirrored). I made a few changes to meet my needs. I added a Piezo Buzzer to Pin 2/17 on the Darington Transistor Array and connected it Pin 8 on the Arduino. To avoid needing to modify the USB powered lights, I decided to wire up a USB connector using pins 1 and 4 (see pinout). This made installation logistics easier for me and also looks cleaner and more professional.

Here’s what the schematics look like (click for a bigger version). This is my first attempt at schematics, so pardon the sloppiness.

From there I put together a pretty simple sketch (download below) and uploaded it to the Arduino. Essentially it looks for one of three inputs via serial: 0, 1, 2. 0 turns the alarm off. 1 and 2 turn on the lights and audible tone. The sole difference is the tone is slightly different between the two, this helps differentiate between different events. I could setup an infinite number of alarms. Right now the code is pretty simple and limited to two, but I could expand and put together an algorithm to calculate X tones.

After that I wrote a quick Python script (requires pySerial) to send commands to the Arduino. I then wrote a batch script essentially as a wrapper (all available below).

So how is this invoked? I simply setup an Outlook filter to sniff find emails that meet the criteria for setting off an alarm and make it run an application, in my case the batch file.

Now when I get an email that meets the standards of setting off an alarm, I literally set off an alarm.

The version I use has a conditional in the Python script to check the day of the week and the time so the alarm doesn’t go off in the middle of the night since that’s pretty pointless. The one below is 24×7. You can modify it to suite you’re needs.

Where to go from here?

I’m contemplating upgrading to a brighter set of LED’s for more visibility. That would be simple enough to do.

It’s also possible to write a python script that monitors something on the web then fires off an alarm when a certain criteria is met. It would be pretty trivial to do. I may do this for an internal tool or two.

For anyone wondering, technically you could use this to build a remotely operated USB Humping Dog or to control any other “usb powered” dumb device. By “dumb” I mean no data connection.

Code

Arduino USB Alarm Controller sketch
Python script (requires pySerial to be installed) + Windows Batch Scripts

• Experimental support for Mac OS X guests

I’m curious how they implemented that so that they steer clear of Apple’s legal team. I’m also curious how that runs. I may need to give that a try.

What’s likely the biggest feature in the upcoming Photoshop release is Content-Aware Fill. I’m sure the photos used for the demo work exceptionally well, and better than in practice, but regardless it’s amazing technology and leap years ahead of what’s currently out there.

Ah the classics.