Any Alternative Uses For The MySmart Pad?

TellarHK muses: "Thinking back to the CueCat debacle, and on the topic of 'soon to be abandoned-ware,' has anyone considered mucking about with the MySmart mousepads? I picked up one of these on sale at Best Buy for $5, figuring someone might come out with a way to use the 'Smart' card reader as a tool for other applications. Sure, I know this'll get a lawyer's underwear in a bunch, but I don't recall signing any license stopping me. Maybe someone's come up with a quick and dirty program or routine for it, under either Linux or Windows?" These are also at CompUSA. Smart-card access to the basement? One more layer of security on your workstation? These look like fun, if someone has a driver.

Comments

American Express smartcard reader

[EMIce]

Likely, even more of us own this reader than the mousepad reader. American Express gave them out for free with their blue cards. Has anyone hacked it yet? The device looks fairly simple and the smartcard follows the ISO standard for layout. These are the same cards(physically) as those used in DTV receivers and other smartcard apps. They even sell blank cards with embedded microcontrollers that can be programmed in assembly or C. The cards do serial input and output, and when power is applied the stored program springs to life and talks via the TX/RX contact on the card. The cards can even be locked so the code inside isn't extractable. Someone could easily write code to do some serious key based authentication. If the American Express readers could be hacked to read and write the cards this could be cheaply accessible to all of us. Not to mention it'd be a great way to get people into microcontoller coding and all the neat associated applications.

A little late

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah I saw these things about 6 months ago at best buy and immediately thought of smart card authentication for computers. I posted it about it but I guess it wasn't interesting at the time. Good that the article finally made it up. The question is... Are these using intellegent smart cards or dumb ones. The smart ones have a mini cpu inside them. The dumb ones are basically flash memory. I've been meaning to find out if there is a way to recharge my "TelMex" phone card that I got while vacationing in Cancun.

The smart card.

[TellarHK]

Actually, I don't think the card itself stores information on the pad's features. It appears to me that the various inserts that the pad ships with, are each designed to tell the pad software which links to use. Not that the inserts are smart, but that the software is.

Now, the real question is how smart the card itself is? Is it a simple serial number that lets the software do all the work, or can information be stored on it? If the former, that might be better for security applications, and if the latter, it might be better suited toward saving personalized data. As each card is non-numbered, on the outside, appearing to have no way to uniquely ID them, it makes the whole matter completely up in the air. I'd like this to get to the main page so we can see more input. :)