Anonymous has quite openly made asses of themselves to the point where people suspecting them is pretty justified. They've made a MO of poking angry bears with a stick to hear them growl. I'll feel not one whit of sympathy when these clowns are sitting in a courtroom getting their federal indictments.
Anonymous. They keep using this word, but I do not think it means what they think it means. It's like assuming that every Anonymous Coward is the same person. Anonymous here is really 'anonymous', not some group with structured leadership, dues to be paid, and a secret handshake. When you refer to them, you're referring to everybody and nobody in particular, so quit throwing around 'Anonymous' as if they were Al Qaeda or the New York Mets.
I can hear pretty much any tube TV, good or bad. My friends parents constantly turn off the cable box but leave the TV on with a black screen. The power light stopped working ages ago, but I sure know when it's on, and have to go turn it off. It's a horrible sound that you almost feel more than you hear. And then there are those people who can't even hear the smoke detector low battery chirp. Sometimes I envy them...
Radio Shack these days is a shadow of it's former self. I went there with my dad as a kid, and remember shelves full of electrical and radio crap that I couldn't even comprehend. I went in there for the first time in ages about 3 years ago.. holy crap. It looked more like an AT&T store than the Radio Shack of old. People were lined up to pay their phone bills, and the walls were lined with cell phones and MP3 players and whatnot. Only in the back corner were any sort of electrical components, and nobody could really help me find what I was looking for. It's almost as if someone bought the Radio Shack name, and slapped it on a completely different store...
That's like saying SUVs were a good idea because they use more gas, therefore show progress. Increased power usage can be just as much of a sign that we're building inefficient technology, which is the opposite of progress.
I once received a 'new' laptop drive from Fry's a few years ago that had a fully working Win 98 install, complete with AOL and stored logon information. Ok, it was more than a few years ago, but still. This is why I consider hard drives to be consumables, like toner cartridges or keyboards. Once it fails, DESTROY IT and throw it away. The cost of purchasing a new drive, instead of replacing it under warranty, is nothing compared to the risk you take by letting your data fall into some strangers hands. Unless the vendor will allow you to receive a new drive on the condition that you destroy the old one and provide a certificate of destruction, just write it off and dispose of it safely.
Still not ironic. It sounds like they're planning to pull out of the whole deal because the money just isn't there. The 'cost-saving strategy' really has nothing to do with it. This is more like having to call your buddy to tell them you can't go on the road trip you two had planned for years, because you're totally broke. Now you're just staying home. End of story.
Have you not been paying attention to how the American medical industry works these days? Why cure it once, when you can treat it indefinitely? There's no benefit to the shareholders by catering to short term customers.
Well, that's the thing. These bombs are meant to penetrate in a rather narrow fashion through so many yards of concrete, still intact, so that they can deliver the payload on the other side. Think of hammering an explosive-tipped nail into a board, and the tip explodes when it breaks through the back side. Now hammer in a nail half way, then hammer in another one within a few inches of it, then another somewhere within that same inch radius.. you still aren't getting all the way through. You've got to go through in one shot, or get yourself a drill. These aren't just huge explosions like the Daisycutter or MOAB, they are hardened vehicles that are meant to travel completely through the bunker and explode within.
You ever see where most of those rounds land? Not on target. It'd be a neat trick to hit a moving object from another moving object that's being affected by turbulence while diving at an angle, and hit it with the precision of an expert marksman. One 30mm round may not obliterate a tank, but a shaped charge can be devastating.
Do I want to see a nuclear armed Iran? No, not particularly. But then again, it's none of my business, just as our armaments are none of Iran's business. We have no more right to step into Iran's internal affairs than they do ours. And if we DO step in there and attack them for developing a credible nuclear deterrent, then when someone does it to us... we won't have a leg to stand on.
So, what you're saying is that it's none of your business if every nation on the globe were to develop nuclear weapons? What you seem to forget is the United States originally developed nuclear weapons for a very specific purpose: to stop the Axis powers. The first and last time we used nukes were on a ruthless, active enemy that attacked us first. Say what you want about America, we have shown incredible restraint in the use of unconventional weapons after 1945, and even then it wasn't a decision that was taken lightly. After all, we have a lot to lose, and our population isn't seen as entirely expendable. Can you say the same about Iran? How about Somalia? The Congo? Do you really feel it's necessary to allow any country to develop weapons of mass destruction, completely unchecked, because it's "none of our business"? In a perfect world, we'd dismantle every warhead in existence and burn the schematics. Allowing yet another nation to obtain the power to obliterate entire cities is moving in the complete opposite direction of where we need to go.
Each successive bomb would have to hit the exact same spot, and blow through a layer of debris in an ever-changing target zone. This isn't water torture, this is blowing the motherloving shit out of a huge chunk of reinforced concrete. You don't kill a tank by shooting it with an AK-47 a hundred times, you hit it once with something that will penetrate. The effects of lesser attacks are not necessarily cumulative.
Well, paper can be abrasive. USD bills are made of a fabric, so as long are they're clean they should be a bit better for the life of the head. Plus, there's just something satisfying about cleaning a credit card machine with cash. George would probably have a good laugh.
I used the plastic bag method numerous times, and it did have a fairly decent success rate. The science of it completely escapes me, but it made me sound like a wizard and it got people off the phone. Great success!
usable in those low value high volume transactions where cash still reigns supreme.
finding away to replace the last of the legal anonymous cash transactions.
And the CC companies are quiet happy to refund any fraudulent transactions in the short term in order to get to that long term goal,
I think you may have hit the nail on the head here, but a bit differently than you think. Processors make a flat (authorization) fee on each transaction, as well as a percentage of it. The more they can get customers to use credit on small transactions, instead of cash or debit, the more money they can make. Meanwhile, the merchants get the shaft. A $.25 auth fee on a $100 purchase is not much, but if you have to pay $.25, plus 1.5-3.5% per transaction on a $5 sale that you may run a hundred times a day (say, a pack of smokes at your gas station), that cuts into your bottom line much more severely than if you were to deal in cash. Visa/MC prohibit any sort of minimum purchase amount, so somebody could walk into your gas station, buy one of those 25 cent candies on the counter, and you'd be better off just giving it to them for free instead of running their card.
Also on the subject of speedy, low dollar transactions. Many places now no longer require a signed receipt on sales below a certain dollar amount. Many of those transactions aren't even being authorized at that time. The machine just records the info, spits out a receipt, then worries about it later at batch time. Why's this? Because the merchants ultimately bear the burden of most fraud, and they've found it's better to clear the line of customers as quickly as possible and worry about the small chance of loss on a bad card. This being said, the CC companies do NOT refund your money. The merchant does. The processors get paid no matter what, which is why they allow these practices. Please don't make the mistake of thinking Visa and Mastercard are there to look out for everybody, and take the hit when fraud occurs. It's the merchant who has to pony up, but V/MC love the great PR for their "$50 max fraud liability" guarantee and whatnot...
In addition to the the reasons given below, I would like to point out that you are assuming an advantage exists for consumers. It is the transaction possessors and merchants that reduce risks and costs from RFID cards. It is sold as a novelty to consumers and card holders.
In my 7 years of experience in the processing end of the industry, face to face fraud is extremely low, and I can't recall ever hearing a story about a cloned card being used. A physically stolen card, yes, but not a duplicated one. Not to say it doesn't happen, but the majority of fraud is MOTO/Internet based with stolen numbers or dishonest customers, or is fraud being committed by the merchants themselves. I fail to see how RFID is going to make any major impact on credit card fraud, seeing as how all it's doing is adding an additional, more discreet method of obtaining stolen card numbers. Also, the issuers and processors don't care about risk as much as you may think. We made loads of money off of chargeback fees and the percentage of any returns we forced the merchant to make in addition to the original, disputed sale. It was usually the merchant who was ultimately left taking the loss, and sometimes it was big enough to put them out of business. Getting Visa/Mastercard to ever take the hit was laughable
One advantage is that magnetic stripes wear out. RFID cards won't. Similarly, swipe readers wear out, get gummed up, etc., whereas RF readers don't.
If I were responsible for the maintenance of POS terminals for a store, especially one with non-trivial traffic, that might be a different story.
The magstripe can wear out, but you can still key in the number manually when this happens. RFID chips are not invincible, and can be damaged, but certainly not as easily as a magstripe.
I did phone tech support for 7 years, working on various makes and models of credit card machines. The number of units that I personally saw during that time that genuinely had the reader head worn down to the point of malfunction was less than 10. I replaced far more units due to beer damage. Most read failures were either due to a badly abused card, or a slightly dirty head. Wrapping a dollar bill around a card and running it through a few times cleared up the read problems almost 100% of the time. And no, it doesn't have to be a $1 bill. If I had one for every time I was asked THAT question...
Paget did not clone the RFID card. She transferred information from a secure environment (RFID) to an insecure environment (mag stripe).
FWIW, the who needs RFID cards is defintely an American bias. When I was in Paris last year there were a number of times where not having a RFID card was a real PITA.
Ah, this is what I just asked about in another reply. Until they lock out mag stripe reads on an account, they will always be the weakest link.
I was in Paris in '10 as well, and the only place I recall where RFID would have been worth using was at the Metro ticket counters, so that the card didn't need to be passed through the safety glass. Places like gift shops and restaurants wouldn't have seen much of a benefit...
Well, all that is encoded in a credit card's 2 tracks is account number, expiration date, and name. What is keeping someone from grabbing this information via RFID, then encoding it into a standard magstripe card and going on the usual spending bender? Seems like a lot of extra work to make a counterfeit RFID card when you can just go the quick and dirty route and make a card that can be used anywhere they take plastic, not just the places with contactless readers.
What exactly is the advantage to these RFID credit cards? All the readers I've seen still require you to get the card close to it to work. Has the world really grown so lazy that we can no longer be bothered to make a vertical swiping motion? I can see the benefit for payment-enabled cell phones or key fobs, but credit cards? Seems like a solution to a problem that didn't exist.
Bill Gates could literally cure cancer, eradicate AIDS and make Malaria piss itself and people would still be giving him grief about Windows, IE6 or ripping off Apple.
I don't really think he's doing it to win. I also don't think he really gives a shit what people think about about the above mentioned 'sins'. If I had so much money that I could give three quarters of a BILLION dollars to charity and still have enough left over to pack a car completely full of $100 bills, I think it's far past the point of needing to prove myself to anybody.
You don't read the same reviews I do, on Amazon... "This thing was DOA out of the box..." "This lasted 30 days and then died..." etc.
Oh, I read those all the time, and they're typically on cheap made-in-china shit that give everlasting life to the term "you get what you pay for". Once you come to terms with the fact that cheapest is rarely best, and start making small investments instead of purchases, your experience will be much better. I can honestly say I have not received anything that has been DOA in longer than I can remember, and the only thing I've had to file a warranty claim on in the past decade has been my Xbox 360. Not to say that expensive, higher-grade items don't occasionally arrived DOA, or fail before their warranty expires, but typically the early failure rate runs in inverse proportion to the cost of the item compared to others of it's type.
The idea that AT&T could ask customers to pay even more while at the same time offering such a crappy data network is patently absurd.
No, the idea is entirely believable. In fact, I would question it if I heard anything to the contrary. This is how big business in America works these days: Take all you can, give nothing back. Or was that pirates? Close enough...
Can you remember the last piece of technology hardware you had which outlived its warranty?.
Pretty much everything I own, seeing as how most warranty terms are a year at best. No company in its right mind would design a product that would NOT make it past its warranty expiration.
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Anonymous has quite openly made asses of themselves to the point where people suspecting them is pretty justified. They've made a MO of poking angry bears with a stick to hear them growl. I'll feel not one whit of sympathy when these clowns are sitting in a courtroom getting their federal indictments.
Anonymous. They keep using this word, but I do not think it means what they think it means. It's like assuming that every Anonymous Coward is the same person. Anonymous here is really 'anonymous', not some group with structured leadership, dues to be paid, and a secret handshake. When you refer to them, you're referring to everybody and nobody in particular, so quit throwing around 'Anonymous' as if they were Al Qaeda or the New York Mets.
I can hear pretty much any tube TV, good or bad. My friends parents constantly turn off the cable box but leave the TV on with a black screen. The power light stopped working ages ago, but I sure know when it's on, and have to go turn it off. It's a horrible sound that you almost feel more than you hear. And then there are those people who can't even hear the smoke detector low battery chirp. Sometimes I envy them...
Radio Shack these days is a shadow of it's former self. I went there with my dad as a kid, and remember shelves full of electrical and radio crap that I couldn't even comprehend. I went in there for the first time in ages about 3 years ago.. holy crap. It looked more like an AT&T store than the Radio Shack of old. People were lined up to pay their phone bills, and the walls were lined with cell phones and MP3 players and whatnot. Only in the back corner were any sort of electrical components, and nobody could really help me find what I was looking for. It's almost as if someone bought the Radio Shack name, and slapped it on a completely different store...
That's like saying SUVs were a good idea because they use more gas, therefore show progress. Increased power usage can be just as much of a sign that we're building inefficient technology, which is the opposite of progress.
I once received a 'new' laptop drive from Fry's a few years ago that had a fully working Win 98 install, complete with AOL and stored logon information. Ok, it was more than a few years ago, but still. This is why I consider hard drives to be consumables, like toner cartridges or keyboards. Once it fails, DESTROY IT and throw it away. The cost of purchasing a new drive, instead of replacing it under warranty, is nothing compared to the risk you take by letting your data fall into some strangers hands. Unless the vendor will allow you to receive a new drive on the condition that you destroy the old one and provide a certificate of destruction, just write it off and dispose of it safely.
Still not ironic. It sounds like they're planning to pull out of the whole deal because the money just isn't there. The 'cost-saving strategy' really has nothing to do with it. This is more like having to call your buddy to tell them you can't go on the road trip you two had planned for years, because you're totally broke. Now you're just staying home. End of story.
How is international collaboration 'ironic'?
Have you not been paying attention to how the American medical industry works these days? Why cure it once, when you can treat it indefinitely? There's no benefit to the shareholders by catering to short term customers.
Well, that's the thing. These bombs are meant to penetrate in a rather narrow fashion through so many yards of concrete, still intact, so that they can deliver the payload on the other side. Think of hammering an explosive-tipped nail into a board, and the tip explodes when it breaks through the back side. Now hammer in a nail half way, then hammer in another one within a few inches of it, then another somewhere within that same inch radius.. you still aren't getting all the way through. You've got to go through in one shot, or get yourself a drill. These aren't just huge explosions like the Daisycutter or MOAB, they are hardened vehicles that are meant to travel completely through the bunker and explode within.
You ever see where most of those rounds land? Not on target. It'd be a neat trick to hit a moving object from another moving object that's being affected by turbulence while diving at an angle, and hit it with the precision of an expert marksman. One 30mm round may not obliterate a tank, but a shaped charge can be devastating.
Do I want to see a nuclear armed Iran? No, not particularly. But then again, it's none of my business, just as our armaments are none of Iran's business. We have no more right to step into Iran's internal affairs than they do ours. And if we DO step in there and attack them for developing a credible nuclear deterrent, then when someone does it to us... we won't have a leg to stand on.
So, what you're saying is that it's none of your business if every nation on the globe were to develop nuclear weapons? What you seem to forget is the United States originally developed nuclear weapons for a very specific purpose: to stop the Axis powers. The first and last time we used nukes were on a ruthless, active enemy that attacked us first. Say what you want about America, we have shown incredible restraint in the use of unconventional weapons after 1945, and even then it wasn't a decision that was taken lightly. After all, we have a lot to lose, and our population isn't seen as entirely expendable. Can you say the same about Iran? How about Somalia? The Congo? Do you really feel it's necessary to allow any country to develop weapons of mass destruction, completely unchecked, because it's "none of our business"? In a perfect world, we'd dismantle every warhead in existence and burn the schematics. Allowing yet another nation to obtain the power to obliterate entire cities is moving in the complete opposite direction of where we need to go.
They also don't string people up to billboards and then drive the bus out from underneath them as a form of Sunday entertainment.
Each successive bomb would have to hit the exact same spot, and blow through a layer of debris in an ever-changing target zone. This isn't water torture, this is blowing the motherloving shit out of a huge chunk of reinforced concrete. You don't kill a tank by shooting it with an AK-47 a hundred times, you hit it once with something that will penetrate. The effects of lesser attacks are not necessarily cumulative.
Well, paper can be abrasive. USD bills are made of a fabric, so as long are they're clean they should be a bit better for the life of the head. Plus, there's just something satisfying about cleaning a credit card machine with cash. George would probably have a good laugh.
I used the plastic bag method numerous times, and it did have a fairly decent success rate. The science of it completely escapes me, but it made me sound like a wizard and it got people off the phone. Great success!
usable in those low value high volume transactions where cash still reigns supreme. finding away to replace the last of the legal anonymous cash transactions. And the CC companies are quiet happy to refund any fraudulent transactions in the short term in order to get to that long term goal,
I think you may have hit the nail on the head here, but a bit differently than you think. Processors make a flat (authorization) fee on each transaction, as well as a percentage of it. The more they can get customers to use credit on small transactions, instead of cash or debit, the more money they can make. Meanwhile, the merchants get the shaft. A $.25 auth fee on a $100 purchase is not much, but if you have to pay $.25, plus 1.5-3.5% per transaction on a $5 sale that you may run a hundred times a day (say, a pack of smokes at your gas station), that cuts into your bottom line much more severely than if you were to deal in cash. Visa/MC prohibit any sort of minimum purchase amount, so somebody could walk into your gas station, buy one of those 25 cent candies on the counter, and you'd be better off just giving it to them for free instead of running their card.
Also on the subject of speedy, low dollar transactions. Many places now no longer require a signed receipt on sales below a certain dollar amount. Many of those transactions aren't even being authorized at that time. The machine just records the info, spits out a receipt, then worries about it later at batch time. Why's this? Because the merchants ultimately bear the burden of most fraud, and they've found it's better to clear the line of customers as quickly as possible and worry about the small chance of loss on a bad card. This being said, the CC companies do NOT refund your money. The merchant does. The processors get paid no matter what, which is why they allow these practices. Please don't make the mistake of thinking Visa and Mastercard are there to look out for everybody, and take the hit when fraud occurs. It's the merchant who has to pony up, but V/MC love the great PR for their "$50 max fraud liability" guarantee and whatnot...
In addition to the the reasons given below, I would like to point out that you are assuming an advantage exists for consumers. It is the transaction possessors and merchants that reduce risks and costs from RFID cards. It is sold as a novelty to consumers and card holders.
In my 7 years of experience in the processing end of the industry, face to face fraud is extremely low, and I can't recall ever hearing a story about a cloned card being used. A physically stolen card, yes, but not a duplicated one. Not to say it doesn't happen, but the majority of fraud is MOTO/Internet based with stolen numbers or dishonest customers, or is fraud being committed by the merchants themselves. I fail to see how RFID is going to make any major impact on credit card fraud, seeing as how all it's doing is adding an additional, more discreet method of obtaining stolen card numbers. Also, the issuers and processors don't care about risk as much as you may think. We made loads of money off of chargeback fees and the percentage of any returns we forced the merchant to make in addition to the original, disputed sale. It was usually the merchant who was ultimately left taking the loss, and sometimes it was big enough to put them out of business. Getting Visa/Mastercard to ever take the hit was laughable
One advantage is that magnetic stripes wear out. RFID cards won't. Similarly, swipe readers wear out, get gummed up, etc., whereas RF readers don't.
If I were responsible for the maintenance of POS terminals for a store, especially one with non-trivial traffic, that might be a different story.
The magstripe can wear out, but you can still key in the number manually when this happens. RFID chips are not invincible, and can be damaged, but certainly not as easily as a magstripe.
I did phone tech support for 7 years, working on various makes and models of credit card machines. The number of units that I personally saw during that time that genuinely had the reader head worn down to the point of malfunction was less than 10. I replaced far more units due to beer damage. Most read failures were either due to a badly abused card, or a slightly dirty head. Wrapping a dollar bill around a card and running it through a few times cleared up the read problems almost 100% of the time. And no, it doesn't have to be a $1 bill. If I had one for every time I was asked THAT question...
Paget did not clone the RFID card. She transferred information from a secure environment (RFID) to an insecure environment (mag stripe).
FWIW, the who needs RFID cards is defintely an American bias. When I was in Paris last year there were a number of times where not having a RFID card was a real PITA.
Ah, this is what I just asked about in another reply. Until they lock out mag stripe reads on an account, they will always be the weakest link.
I was in Paris in '10 as well, and the only place I recall where RFID would have been worth using was at the Metro ticket counters, so that the card didn't need to be passed through the safety glass. Places like gift shops and restaurants wouldn't have seen much of a benefit...
Well, all that is encoded in a credit card's 2 tracks is account number, expiration date, and name. What is keeping someone from grabbing this information via RFID, then encoding it into a standard magstripe card and going on the usual spending bender? Seems like a lot of extra work to make a counterfeit RFID card when you can just go the quick and dirty route and make a card that can be used anywhere they take plastic, not just the places with contactless readers.
What exactly is the advantage to these RFID credit cards? All the readers I've seen still require you to get the card close to it to work. Has the world really grown so lazy that we can no longer be bothered to make a vertical swiping motion? I can see the benefit for payment-enabled cell phones or key fobs, but credit cards? Seems like a solution to a problem that didn't exist.
Bill Gates could literally cure cancer, eradicate AIDS and make Malaria piss itself and people would still be giving him grief about Windows, IE6 or ripping off Apple.
I don't really think he's doing it to win. I also don't think he really gives a shit what people think about about the above mentioned 'sins'. If I had so much money that I could give three quarters of a BILLION dollars to charity and still have enough left over to pack a car completely full of $100 bills, I think it's far past the point of needing to prove myself to anybody.
You don't read the same reviews I do, on Amazon ... "This thing was DOA out of the box ..." "This lasted 30 days and then died ..." etc.
Oh, I read those all the time, and they're typically on cheap made-in-china shit that give everlasting life to the term "you get what you pay for". Once you come to terms with the fact that cheapest is rarely best, and start making small investments instead of purchases, your experience will be much better. I can honestly say I have not received anything that has been DOA in longer than I can remember, and the only thing I've had to file a warranty claim on in the past decade has been my Xbox 360. Not to say that expensive, higher-grade items don't occasionally arrived DOA, or fail before their warranty expires, but typically the early failure rate runs in inverse proportion to the cost of the item compared to others of it's type.
The idea that AT&T could ask customers to pay even more while at the same time offering such a crappy data network is patently absurd.
No, the idea is entirely believable. In fact, I would question it if I heard anything to the contrary. This is how big business in America works these days: Take all you can, give nothing back. Or was that pirates? Close enough...
Can you remember the last piece of technology hardware you had which outlived its warranty?.
Pretty much everything I own, seeing as how most warranty terms are a year at best. No company in its right mind would design a product that would NOT make it past its warranty expiration.
"80,000 feet — three times the height of a jet "
Oh, where to begin...
Per Wikipedia:
Height of Airbus A380: 80.2 ft
Highest known altitude attained by a conventional jet-powered airplane: 123,523 feet.