It doesn't say specifically whether or not the college that was defrauded (I'm not arguing that nothing illegal took place there) was using a Blackboard variant or not, but I'd say it's a pretty safe bet that it was.

Anyone with access to a magstripe writer (common enough at any technical school) could easily have done what this student did. These systems are simply _not_ secure. Not just "a little insecure", not just "a few minor flaws", but entirely _not_ secure.
Just about any technique one would care to name can be used to defraud these things, and Blackboard is trying to use lawyers and spin doctors to cover it up, and everyone loses. The colleges lose money when students beat the system. The students lose money when the colleges won't believe there's a problem. ...and hopefully Blackboard loses money now that word is getting out their system is ancient garbage.

CNN.com - Campus hacker gets probation - Apr. 18, 2003

Whee! Looks like I'll be able to finally take the apps I don't ever use right the heck out of the firmware in my Handspring Visor with this little puppy. Mebbe even do something about that freaky P logo thingie...

Romeo: The Palm ROM Tool

I dunno how legit this is (I mean, really, what moron makes a personal icon like that for this kind of question?) but it's definitely funny.

How do I sniff panties??? Work safe.

] The protesters said Fox's sentiments only proved their
] point: that media coverage, in particular among the
] television networks, is so biased as to be unbelievable.

I don't think Fox News even knows the meaning of the word "bias". Just a few days ago I watched a commentator on Fox go on a diatribe against some professor who sent in a letter saying he should be ashamed of being biased in his coverage. The warped and depraved thing about it is that if what the man on Fox News said were posted to Slashdot, it would be virtually guaranteed to be a -5 Flamebait/Troll within minutes.

Fox news ticker speaks out against NYC protesters

Read it or you suck.

Who knows the evil that lurks in the buffers of men? The Stack knows!

Any time travellers who wish to make their fortune by tampering with the past should contact me immediately (if not sooner). I charge 10% of profits after taxes, in contemporary currency, and discretion is assured. Everything else (returns, nature of markets, use of numbered swiss accounts) negotiable.

Insider Info Wanted

Rather than do the usual Where-The-Hell-Is-A-Working-Mirror dance, Razen and I have stumbled across this mirror of the Slackware 9.0 ISO which seems to have been overlooked. (I can't get the bloody thing from any US mirrors, but a dinky server in Norway is feeding me at an average 135K/s. @#$%&*!)

Slackware 9.0 ISO

By god I know propaganda when I see it, and this sir, is propaganda.

Damn good propaganda.

deviantART; your choice by thisign

For those of you who didn't know, Mozilla 1.3 was finally pronounced worthy and released. What's _dreadfully important_ about it is that this version has a nice little feature that finally allows you the granularity of control over pop-ups similiar to that of cookie of your cookie controls. Don't freak out about the old control in the Preferences missing. Take a gander at Tools->Popup Manager->Suppress Popups From This Site... and there's an option to allow them as well. No more problems with having those damned annoying popups disabled breaking various bits of MemeStreams code.

(Oh, and it builds against Gtk2 without a fight)

Mozilla 1.3 Released Several Days Ago, but What The Hey

Hey while I'm sitting here staring at it, here's something I think is pretty useful. It's a late descendant from all those non-executeable stack patches for gcc so you can build somewhat hardened binaries if you're not chronically addicted to rpms. This one seems to be the most reasonable to work with that I've seen as well. It doesn't require you to keep older copies of your compiler around, since you tell it to build protected binaries with a new -f argument (usually passed through CFLAGS).

GCC extension for protecting applications from stack-smashing attacks