Stripe Snoop, a Track 2 magstripe decoder has been released into the GPL, and is available in source or binary from at my homepage, Most Sigificant Bit.

Included is a detailed article about interfacing Magstripes to PCs, diagrams and pictures, as well as the software itself.

I will be presenting a talk about Magstripe interfacing at Intersz0ne III this weekend

.. and, I built a coke machine that works

Stripe Snoop Released, MSB updated *PLUS COKE MACHINE!*

As I watch the "real world" outside of college, I get more and more concerned. In the 70s and 80s, it was factory and other blue collar jobs that were being outsourced, crippling towns like Flint MI. Today its High Tech jobs going over seas to India. So what do we have left? What is one thing America really does well? Innovate. We have our intellectual capital left: our inventors and engineers. The only problem is we are destroying that industry as well. The DMCA, the Economic Espionage Act, and other laws are forcing a current generation to stop being curious. Take any examples you want: playfair, decss, Diebold voting. SDMI showed us universities are not completely safe either. We are selling our next generation of inventors and engineers short. How do we create the new inventions of tomorrow without understanding the inventions of today? We are bankrupting our long term future to protect the short term profits of bloated companies. This will cost us jobs. Not because the Japanese make it smaller or better, not because the Indians or Chinese can do it cheaper or faster, but because we are passing laws to feed greed.

] New Hampshire is "two-party consent state" -- one of
] those jurisdictions that requires all parties to a
] conversation to consent before the conversation can be
] intercepted or recorded. The decision is the first of its
] kind to apply that standard to online chats, and the
] ruling is clearly supported by the text of the law. But
] it marks a blow to an investigative technique that has
] been routinely used by law enforcement, employers, ISPs
] and others.

Ok, I see what they are doing: IMs are 2 party point to point conversations, like phones. This raises more questions than it answers.

-What about conference calls? Do you still only need 2 of the parties to consent? (in 2 person states, GA is 1 person).

-How does consent factor into a chatroom, arguably the digital equivlent of a conference call?

-Personally I dismiss an IM conversation is like a telephone call. Its more like sending telegrams to each other. I wonder how consent applies to telegrams: Is it illegal to keep a copy of a telegram without 2 part consent? Or is the very natural of sending someone a message as a block a consent to store a copy?

-I argue the very nature of Chatrooms and IMs are so different than telephone calls, you can't *not* violate 2 party consent. From the end user prospective, voice communication is stream based. You either hear it or you don't, and would have to ask for the data to be repeated. The consent laws basically say you can't "cache" this data for later, by recording the stream, without permission from 1 or both parties.

However IMs and Chatrooms are not stream based, they are block based (Hence the telegram analogy). They work by giving you a copy of a block of data, and you can examine the block now, or X seconds in the future. I violate the consent laws by simply not being at my computer to get an IM, since it is "saved" until I read it. Blocks, unlike streams, can't be parsed/understood/read in realtime. They take an amount of time to read the entire block. There is no way to have block communication without storing a copy for some length of time. Yes, a digital TDM phone switch copies the voice bits in the frames, but this is such a fine granularity, at the single bit level for T1 lines.

-Furthermore, the infrastructure itself causes me to violate the laws without even knowing it. My computer could swap the IM in RAM to disk. I could have store and forward proxies setup, that will make a copy. Hell the TCP IP stack is making lots of little copies in case packets are lost in route. This is different than the copies made of a voice stream by the telephone network. IMs/Chatrooms are having parts or all of the messages copied.

Can the consent laws as written even apply to IMs and chatrooms?

Chat, Copy, Paste, Prison

The schedule is posted for Interz0ne III. There are some awesome talks planned and some cool people too. (I am looking forward to hearing Wendy Seltzer).

I love cons because being a poor college student, I rarely travel. They are a chance to see a lot of my friends in the scene, and meet new people too.

Here's hoping I don't get sued!

Interz0ne III This Weekend!

I found this link on Jon Johansen's blog

I like Monkeys

] The problem involves a default username
] and password that are wired into the
] devices' software and can't be
] deactivated without a software update,
] according to a Cisco security advisory
] released Wednesday.

Its not bad coding, this is not failing to check a return value for a buffer overrun, this is pure stupidity, folded up, and place in a program. QA failed, big time

Cicso - redefining retarded

I think Virgil showed this to me a while back, and I ran across it today. A nifty way to explore physics

Hyper Physics

The United States is good at two things. Being rich, and being rebellious.

The first is the product of two geographic accidents and one extremely intelligent decision.

We were close enough to Europe to provide an exciting, temperate, and vast destination for the bored and downtrodden of the 19th century, and yet far enough away to keep us from taking much more then a few bruises when the place collapsed on itself in the 20th.

The extremely intelligent decision was to keep the church out of government affairs. Thomas Jefferson accurately predicted that our southern, "priest ridden," neighbors would succumb to corrupt ineptitude for centuries.

We peaked about 1955. The space program, adjusted for inflation, made our present fiscally unilateral adventures in the middle east look like a minor expense.

We're still quite accustomed to being the richest people on the planet and few seem to be aware that we're in decline. If our military expenditures don't suck us dry the coming implosion of Social Security and Medicare certainly will.

In 40 years we're not going to be the richest anymore.

Neither cost should be underestimated. The domestic concern is now quite well documented. On the other hand, Islamic fundamentalism is an ancient, intractable hate that flourishes because it gives meaning to lives that have none.

Can we really replace that meaning with economic purpose? We can't even create economic purpose here at home.

The other thing, besides being rich, that Americans are good at is rebellion. Our culture is the space that exists between the dress codes of protestant piety and the cloud of pot smoke emanating from the local motorcycle bar. You are taught how to be, and they you are taught not to be it.

Our heros aren't the ones who worked together to solve the problem. They're the ones who stepped outside and succeeded. We don't care about the team. Only the star quarterback matters to us.

Americans are good at going off in a garage somewhere and doing something innovative on one's own. Rebellion is at the heart of that. Thats why the hacker scene was so edgy.

Thats the one hope we have that we can really build a future on once our geographic blessings are spent and everyone else gets an education.

And we're killing it. Between the outsourcing, and the attack on options, and the skittish contraction of meaningful technology investment, we're eliminating the dream that you can go out and work on the edges and be successful.

Sure, Steven Levy found people doing innovative things in Silicon Valley after the crash. There are those among us who don't care about taking risks because they could loose almost all of their net worth without having to change their lifestyles. They are bored and have nothing better to do then tinker. Are we really hanging the future of our economy on a few guys who are rich enough to create their own space programs for fun?

One in one hundred are successful and the more we scale this back the more good opportunities will slip through our fingers.

Today technology innovation consists of screwing up the DNS system. And its not just there. We've even forgotten how to make good music. Our endless co-option of the rebels has been too efficient. The rebels don't have anything more to say.

Taxes and Terrorism. Thats all I can see for years to come. And I'm sick of it already. We heading into a Japanese style socio-economic malaise.

Malaise

] His license is suspended and he's under probation. What more
] do you want? We don't even prosecute repeat DUI offenders
] after they brutally run down pregnant women. There are such
] things as ACCIDENTS. It doesn't require people get sued or go
] to jail. It's exactly that mentality that's eroding the
] foundations of this society.

Holding people accountable for their actions certainly doesn't erode the foundation of a society. Yes there are such things as accidents, and sometimes accidents result in someone getting dead. IMHO The difference between an accident and an offense are decisions you make.

Heatly chose to drink, he then chose to drive at nearly double the speed limit, and thus he chose to put himself and others in an unreasonable state of risk. He should be held accountable for any injuries he caused. Period.

RE: How not to drive a Lamborghini

] So pictures of horror, at a certain point, no longer
] function as news; they become, themselves, the news. The
] papers that have run the photographs from Fallujah have
] been getting scores of letters from readers, some
] appreciative, some not. But that's just the problem: It's
] a fine thing when readers think about what their local
] papers do, but on the whole, one would rather they were
] thinking about Iraq.

Front Page Horror - Should newspapers show us violent images from Iraq? By Jim Lewis