Reprogrammable ATM's

Wired just published a story on how a man stole $1,540 from an ATM by making it think it was dispensing $1 bills when it was really dispensing $20's.  It was a Triton 9100 and the default master password had never been changed from '123456'.  See http://blog.wired.com/27bstroke6/2007/07/atm-reprogrammi.html for the article.

Phishing just became a whole lot worse

Secunia just released a vulnerability for some IE browsers where an offending website can display the URL of a different site in the address bar. Instead of seeing citibank.com’s website, like you think you are, you might really be punching your SSN into evil.com

• Secunia article (there’s a link to test your browser)

What's eating the Hard Drive?

Files and directories have a funny way of always getting bigger. No matter how big my hard drive is, it always seems to fill up. About three months ago I upgraded from a 40GB drive to a 160GB drive in my computer. Would you believe it, three months later I’m stuck wondering why I only have 30GB left (drives don’t perform as well once you drop below 25-20% free space). Instead of trawling through Windows Explorer, looking for large files, theres a convenient freeware tool called JDiskReport. After a brief scan (in the order of minutes) it reports back which directories are using the most disk space.

Its a quick download and install. From here on out its fairly intuitive.

• JDiskReport

Special thanks to LifeHacker for posting on this.

Managing Web & Email Hosting

Plesk is probably one of my favorite web host management tools. Through it, you can manage your entire website, from databases and email accounts to web pages and domain names. Its very simple to use and is common among many of the webhosting providers. Nubrek.com and merchantTechnology.org are hosted on a webserver that I manage through a Plesk interface. Its great, simple, and easy. Most providers offer it as an option for web hosting. Similar tools include Ensim and cPanel. I tried using them about two years ago but their interfaces were just a bit too cluttered.

Web Conferencing

The time comes where you may need to demo or even close a deal over the phone. Nubrek sells On-Demand software (web applications) so we’ve done a lot of demos where we’ll walk through the software with the customer. Unfortunately, this meant we didn’t always know where customers were in the demo and made it difficult to provide a consistent demo experience. Anyone selling POS software, like Authorize.Net, stands to leverage this technology. Needless to say, these needs started us on a search to find a solid web-conferencing tool. Below is what we found.

• WebEx - these guys were a forerunner of the whole web conferencing. The high price felt a bit out of place for us.
  
  
• Microsoft LiveMeeting - A bit harder to use that WebEx, it requires Internet Explorer, and the price was no better than WebEx.
  
  
• Infinite Conferencing - These guys are smaller than WebEx and LiveMeeting, but the small company feel worked well for us. They charge us a fixed $50/month and we’ve had a great experience.
  
  
• GoToMeeting - This service is owned by Citrix, the guys behind GoToMyPC, WindowsXP Remote Desktop and other cool technologies. They do a great job.
  

Note: For voice we use the 20-person conference line with our Packet8 service.

Data Encryption in the Wild

I recently purchased a portable USB hard drive to keep my personal data on. After a few months of carrying it around, through airports, hotels, and such, I realized I was basically a sitting duck if it ever was stollen. Enter truecrypt. I first learned about it off of LifeHacker. TrueCrypt is an opensource tool that institutes a high level of encryption around your file system, and then presents that file system to Windows as a new drive volume. I plug my portable drive in to my laptop or my desktop, enter a reasonably cryptic password, and bada-bing-bada-boom –I have my data. Speed doesn’t seem to be an issue. TrueCrypt clocked 57 Mbps for buffered reading & writing. Even while doing the decryption and encryption my CPU didn’t go much above 10%.

The other great feature is that if you let TrueCrypt actually manage the drive, the partition table will be encrypted so anyone who finds it will think they just found an empty hard drive. If you want to keep it simple, you can just create an encrypted file on your drive and use that, start simple and work up.

• TrueCrypt website

Microsoft Office Live

If any of you have used the later versions of Outlook Web Access (most notably with Exchange 2003), I’m guessing you’ll agree with me that its almost like using Outlook except that you can run it through a web browser with no special configuration. Microsoft has had this technology in their products for upwards of 6 years now. They’re now moving into the rest of the Microsoft Office space with a Word & Excel equivalent products. This time though, instead of relying on your own hosted server, this is provided as an On-Demand service from Microsoft. The product suite hasn’t officially been released yet, but the beta sign-up site is available at http://www.microsoft.com/office/officelive/default.mspx.