Archives for July 2009

Wunch of Bankers

Groan..... So far the worst scam I've seen is card readers. Mine just arived. Mugger's Charter.

So if your bank uses card readers (they mostly do now) do not lie to a mugger about your PIN number. You see your bank has decided to give every mugger the ablility to check your pin number from the comfort of a darkend ally.

Fucking nice one, if you give him your pin he can type it into any banks card reader to see if your lieing, if you are the card reader will tell him so he can beat you up. Before he had to go to some nice CCTV covered cash point to check so you were pretty safe.  Great, love my bank for that one. And no there's nothing you can do about it the sytem is feature set up on the card so the mugger's charter is universal.

The problem is partly the poor design of the readers, the rest is the cross compatiblity between banks.my bank says:

Q. I am led to believe that a chip-reader supplied by any bank or building society will work equally well. Could you confirm that this is the case?
Yes, it is possible to use other banks’ card readers

All I can say is for god's sake don't, do not use strange card readers, these things read your card and ask you for your pin. Do NOT borrow card readers, or use ones who's history you are not intimatly familure with. A minor tamper and your card details and PIN number are read and a cloned card will be shopping in down town Lagos in no time. I could problaby do this.

I really can't beleive there allowed to do this is GOD DAMN DUMB!

This sytem is a criminals dream, and thats just the obvious bits, given the cheap piece of plastic crap I've been sent I'm sure a secruity expert could do much worse with them.

Please complain to your bank, they've compromised your saftey (not to mention convience) in a misguised atemtp to save money.

Tom

I can't believe M$ sometimes.

M$ is not the best computer company, but for most people its the only computer company. Most of their products are at baest associated with irritation. I use windows, cos lots of software I've learned over the years runs on it. The real key is its thrird party software. There OS I can live with (not vista obviously), their software I hate. On a professional basis. I destest the pile of fceases that is IE, office is now usche a bloated mess that nobody, even I suspect the people who wrote it. Don't even start on Works, this is an afront to all humainty. The one person or so who actully gets this far through my rants will remember that last year I stunned everyone (one being the operative word I suspect) by prounouncing my love and afection for a bit of M$ software.

Windows Movie Maker appeared somehow on my start menu  I needed to edit some video and well it was slick simple and produced some exelent results. I loved it, Its perfect for making, not professional, but highly respectable looking videos. Its filters are good and work, unlike previous experinaces with expencive bits of software. The credits/titles work and are easy. Again atempts to do this before have crashed and burned badly.

Needed to mash up the video's I shot over the weekend of paddle round the pier. So fired it up. It wasn't there. Noooooooo. So I went to widoze.com. It wasn't there either. Nooooooo. Turns out they messed it about a bit on vista, and then made it a cut down version. Now on Windows 7 its gone completely.

The one thing M$ actually did right and they kill it off. It turns out I'm not the only one who's noticed. I thought about down loading the Windows Live Video Beta. But looked at the crap it came with and aparently its not the same thing at all. Fortuneately Moivie Maker does actually work fine on windows 7. Yay! All you need to do is copy it across from and old XP machine and register a few .dll files. Instuctions are from here http://www.brighthub.com/multimedia/video/articles/22658.aspx - nice one. The differences between trying to use it on a pre DDR PIII and my nice new core duo macine make it wonderful.

The results of my windows hack are in the Dinghy Section there's a longer video of the Paddle Round the Pier and a shorter Brighton Sailing Club Centric version which is a bit more funkey.