Like the heads in a VCR, the ones in card readers can wear out. After all, they are reading cards at an extraordinary rate. The busiest turnstile in the subway system, turnstile No. 10 in the middle array by the escalators in the main entrance to the subway below Grand Central Terminal, reads a whopping 236,000 cards a month.

I thought that was a neat factoid. I can imagine New Yorkers saying to themselves, "I know that turnstile!"

The article is rich in trivia about heavy-duty magnetic card readers and the millions of people who (ab)use them.

Mastering the Art of the Swipe

] A series of videos showing how Stripe Snoop works, and
] illustrates all its features. This lets you see how cool
] and exciting Stripe Snoop can be, and is a nice
] introduction if you are interested in the project.

You can do alot with 3 hours, a cheap RCA-out PCI card, and VirtualDub!

Videos of Stripe Snoop in action

In light of the Memestream hacker... [looks at Decius] er... security personal outing to NYC last week, I have been quite interested in the Metrocard. Here is a talk from Beyond Hope about it.

Mertocard Presentation at Beyond Hope [ftp: real audio]

http://homepage.mac.com/leperous/.Pictures/silence.jpg

Indeed.

RE: The Fifth HOPE Artwork

] This demo is the first peek of the comic book adaptation
] of George Orwell%u2019s Nineteen Eighty-four. As you will
] see, it%u2019s still in the penciling stage. Inking and
] colors (sort of) are yet to come

1984 Comic Demo

I'm modifying some of my code to deal with the non standard it uses. Data is on track 2, but I'm not yet sure how to read it.

UPDATE!
The code in CVS for Stripe Snoop now supports Raw mode with a "-r". All this information was collected with it.

Here is what I have looking at some 1 signle ride cards.

On the back of the card is a date (all are issued 7/11/2004), a time, and a number. Based on different single ride cards I have, I believe this number is a station id. (for these cards, all are 1445, but I have others, like 1439 and 0122).

Some of this data looks very similiar or is the same. This is only track 2. Most likely , the rest of the data is stored on Track 3,
the read/write track. Also, the number of leading, trailing zeros can be random. It does not seem to follow any known character set.

4:44P 1445
0000000111100111101110000000000001010010010110000110101001011100100
00001100000100001000000000000000000000000000000000010

5:59P 1445
0000000111100111101110000000000001010010010110000110101001011100100
00001100000100001000000000000000000000000000000000010

5:59P 1445
0000000011110110110111000000000000101001001011000011010100101110010
0000011000001000000100000000000000000000000000000000000

6:00P 1445
0000000011110111000111000000000000101001001011000011010100101110010
000001100000100000000000000000000000000000000000000000000

6:02P 1445
0000000011110111000111000000000000101001001011000011010100101110010
00000110000010000000000000000000000000110000000000000000

Metrocard hacking

Stripe Snoop ver 1.2

- Added support for Linux and Unix-like systems! Must be run
as root however, because of direct I/O requirements.
- Create track-generic parser, to extract fields from a
decoded track, given a set of field delimiters.
- Luhn algorithm (AKA MOD10) implemented to detect proper
credit card/debit card account numbers.
- Can detect Visa credit cards, displays account number,
expiration date, and encrypted pin.

If you are interested in developing for Stripe Snoop, email me. The next step is USB interfacing.

Download here: https://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=113229

] This series of articles takes a look at the consumer
] desktop processors that have borne the Pentium name,
] beginning with the original Pentium up through today's
] Pentium 4 (Prescott) and Pentium M divisions. The
] overview is general enough that for the most part it
] should be accessible to the nonspecialist, and it should
] give you a sense of the major differences between each
] generation of Pentiums.

Perhaps the best article I have ever read overviewing the Pentium architecture, and its advances. The article is an easy read, though if its been a while since you've read something like P&H (Patterson and Hennessy), you might have some trouble.

The Pentium: An Architectural History

noteworthy wrote:
] Advertisements on websites are annoying, often breaking up
] text and flashing to get your attention. To stop about 99% of
] the ads on the internet from even showing, add the following
] code to your userContent.css file:
]
]
] I was finally sufficiently annoyed by obtrusive Flash
] advertisements at the Washington Post that I tracked down this
] information on hiding them from view.

If you use Mozilla/Firebird, the adblock plugin (http://adblock.mozdev.org/) is awesome. Unlike the standard "Don't show images from this server" you enter in URL's with wildcards, and Adblock can either render white space in place on any match, or remove it from being rendered (and thus not taking up any space).

This blocks ALL offending content, images/Flash/Java, everything

Ie:
*.doubleclick.*
*.fastclick.*
*/ads/*
*/ads.*

Blocking all types on Ads with Mozilla/Firefox

Stripe Snoop 1.1 has been released! A 16 bit DOS binary build is now supported (for small homebrew applications). All the fancy SF stuff is working, but I still need to move/update/create the new homepage.

https://sourceforge.net/projects/stripesnoop/