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Magnetic Stripe Snooping at Home
pbrinich writes "Have you ever wondered what information is actually stored on all those cards you have in your wallet? Well, it turns out you can find out yourself! An excellent project, Stripe Snoop started by Billy Hoffman, a Georgia Tech computer science student, contains schematics, source code and a wide variety of information about the standards used to store all sorts of information on your magnetic cards."
That is disturbing a person who is well informed finds my card and can just go up to any atm and empty my account with the plain text pin located on the card. If this is true, you are rite this is quite disturbing.
Linux is like a teepee. It has no windows, no gates, and there's an Apache inside.
It's not really tin, it's aliminum.
Or aluminium to you Brits.
From Stripe Snoop's FAQ :
Q: Why did you release Stripe Snoop under the GPL?
A: Well, its not because I like Richard Stallman, thats for sure. I don't believe that all code should be Free Software,and think he is pretty much a coding communist. One of the reasons Stripe Snoop was created was the lack of cheap or quality magstripe software, especially that would run on Linux. I have worked very hard on Stripe Snoop, and the last thing I want are the very companies that have expensive, crappy software from using my code and not contributing code themselves. In this regard the GPL provides the protections I want, even if I disagree with most of the creator's politics.
I don't understand what is important about this... There have been hundreds of magstripe readers with software out for years, some of which are free (software, obviously, not hardware). And it's not like he had to decrypt the stuff... they're called standards for a reason: it's usually public knowledge how to get the info off of a card.