skimmer

The 404 909: Where we get evicted out of Starbucks (podcast)

Walk into any Starbucks and you'll see the usual Internet leeches sipping on $5 cups of coffee, but not all of them are shopping for designer handbags on eBay or checking the scores from last night's game--sometimes you'll see a student working on homework because his or her family can't afford broadband Internet access at home.

For these individuals, Comcast is offering discounted monthly Internet plans for $9.95 a month with its new Internet Essentials Program. Participating families of three must quality for the national free lunch program and make less than $24,000 a year, which also allows access to discounted computers from Microsoft, Dell, and Acer for just $159.

On today's episode of The 404 Podcast, we'll also tell you about a first-person shooter game coming out of Australia that does away with firearms and instead puts you in the eyes of a photojournalist embedded in a war zone.

The game is called Warco, which stands for "war correspondent," and the object of the game is to film conflicts and create a story from start to finish alongside other journalists covering the same story.

It's up to you to choose which side should be framed as evil and good since there's no obvious protagonist, but we're doubtful that mainstream gamers are willing to forego a gun for a camera, especially since part of the game involves editing the footage you shot earlier.

Next, we'll chat about a gang that used 3D printers to produce their own ATM skimmers. For those unaware, skimmers consist of a plastic card acceptance slot that fits over the ATM machine and can read the data stored on any card's magnetic stripe, while a pinhole camera next to the ATM key pad records the associating code.

Making clever use of a 3D printer in action, a group of four men from South Texas are currently serving time in Houston for stealing over $400,000 between August 2009 and June of this year. It's unclear whether the men built their own 3D printer or bought one online, but KrebsonSecurity.com speculates that a high end device costing anywhere between $10,000 and $20,000 would do the job. Don't get any ideas.

We've got a handful of voice mails to play after the break, and Mickey Mouse pays us another visit, so if you want to be heard on the show, phone us up at 1-866-404-CNET and tell us what's up!

The 404 Digest for Episode 909

Warco: an FPS where you hold a camera instead of a gun. Comcast offers cheap broadband to poor families. Facebook employee leaks music service details on Twitter. Gang used 3D printers for ATM skimmers.

Episode 909 Subscribe in iTunes (audio) | Subscribe in iTunes (video) | Subscribe in RSS Audio | Subscribe in RSS Video… Read more

The 404 Podcast 500: Where Wilson brought his happy pills

We're surprised that Wilson is still standing after going under the knife yesterday to get his wisdom teeth pulled. Luckily, Wilson explains that his disturbingly small mouth, combined with the supreme skills of his dentist, led to a speedy recovery--less than 24 hours after the surgery, we've got our Wilson back! And besides, all of his wisdom is localized to his hair.

Speaking of folks left half-standing from the three-day weekend, my sincerest apologies for my raspy voice on today's episode; we celebrated my birthday on Sunday by laying waste to the hits of Madonna, Weezer, Third Eye Blind, Four Non Blondes, and many more songs (sans Lady Gaga - BOO) at Maru Karaoke Bar in NYC. After a weekend of partying it up for 26 years ill-spent, it sounds like I'm in worse condition than my post-op co-host.

Wilson's happy pills come in handy when he tells Jeff and I about how the U.S. stacks up against the rest of the world in average broadband speed trends over the past few years. We're down in 18th place compared with the rest of the world; we're behind Japan, Hong Kong, Romania, and Sweden, with many countries reporting 50Mbps! What's our excuse? Listen in for the full story.

We also have news on ATM skimmers, like the one in "Terminator 2," making a serious comeback in the new millennium and an absurd story from CNN about folks reporting "Avatar" withdrawal. It sounds like a story you'd find on the Onion News Network, but the phenomenon is very real, and very pathetic. We can make a convincing argument that these individuals reporting depression after seeing "Avatar" were actually disturbed prior to watching the film, but we'll withhold our clinical diagnoses and just say that these people are straight up crazy.

EPISODE 500 Subscribe in iTunes audio | Suscribe to iTunes (video) | Subscribe in RSS Audio | Subscribe in RSS Video… Read more

Skimmer brings your social streams to the desktop

Skimmer (download) is a new social aggregator powered by Adobe AIR. It supports Twitter, Flickr, Facebook, YouTube, and Blogger, and lets you stay abreast of the latest content from each of those services. Everything gets sucked up into a single stream (a la FriendFeed), which you can then sort out by service, keyword, or group of friends. Like Twhirl, Alert Thingy, and others, the idea is to casually keep an eye on all these places while getting real work done in other applications.

In addition to pulling in content, you can also use it to post to any of the included services. It has a built-in YouTube and Flickr uploader where you can simply drag in files and edit the metadata before it's sent off. It also doubles as a personal blogging platform of sorts, letting you combine your various feeds into a single page that can be customized, then embedded on a hosted page or social networking profile.

You can customize the look and feel of this page using a built-in editor, which turns all your feeds into a really slick-looking personal blog with cascading streams of information (I've embedded an example after the page break).

While the app is beautifully designed, I found the main content feed difficult to parse, which is a shame because that's all I'd use an app like this for. The Flickr photo browsing is elegant, and fast loading, but the text portions for places like Twitter and Facebook come in at a very small size. They can be resized to be a tad larger (or absolutely enormous), but the application will scale the text up and down to fit in each update slot, which makes reading hit or miss.

Skimmer has some tough competition coming out of the gate. FriendFeed recently began delving into desktop applications with its AIR-powered notifier, and existing apps like Twhirl and Alert Thingy are getting more and more services all the time. Skimmer has a chance to stand out with its Web site builder, which does a really great job at repackaging your content to go elsewhere.… Read more

High-tech bank robbers phone it in

Your ordinary bank robber can now steal hundreds of account numbers from ATMs without so much as lifting a finger. Instead, he skims.

Skimming is the physical use of secondary readers to capture the magnetic tracks on the backs of credit and debit cards. On ATMs, skimmers and secondary keypads are used to capture account numbers and PINs. Often, the ATM transaction goes through, and the customer doesn't realize that the account has been compromised until later.

Two risks these high-tech criminals face are being caught fitting a faux cover over an ordinary ATM card slot and keypad, then … Read more