Monthly Archives: August 2006
Call forward and pizza fraudster
How to steal Credit Card number with a call forward: really impressive.
Here how it works:
A fraudster contacts an AT&T service rep and says he works at a pizza parlor and that the phone is having trouble. Until things get fixed, he requests that all incoming calls be forwarded to another number, which he provides.
Pizza orders are thus routed by AT&T to the fraudster’s line. When a call comes in, the fraudster pretends to take the customer’s order but says payment must be made in advance by credit card.
The unsuspecting customer gives his or her card number and expiration date, and before you can say “extra cheese,” the fraudster is ready to go on an Internet shopping spree using someone else’s money.
Once again: let’s explain to helpdesk operators the security rules!
The entire article can be found here
But… Did they have empty space to fill?
I read this article….
I had only one question: “did they have empty space to fill with an article?”
Is there someone that doesn’t know PGP?
PGP was born in 1991 it is as old as the world and quite unsed, this article give us no news.
Adblock Filterset.G Updater
So you use Adblock to avoid seeing banner and other adivse from sites you visit.
But you have to tune the plugin and, if you don’t do it, the filter doesn’t work and you fill a sense of frustration.
Adblock Filterset.G Updater is the answer to you problem: it automatically downloads the latest version of Filterset.G every 4-7 days and keep your ruleset updated, easy!
TrueCrypt!!
USB memory, laptop and PDA keep our data but it’s very easy to loose them.
Encryption is the answer to this matter but, if you (like me) use different machines with different operation system, you have to find something that gives you the possibility to encipher/decipher your data using something that behave in the someway on the different operating system you use.
Truecrypt is ‘that thing’: it’s available for Windows and Linux and it ciphers your data using AES-256, Blowfish, CAST5, Serpent, Triple DES, and Twofish. Data ciphered can be read easily on the different platforms that support Truecrypt.
Developers are planning to release the software for MacOS X too.
Linux and desktop?
I started using Linux in 1995. During the same time Microsoft issued its new operating system: Windows 95.
The Linux usability was very different and the X11 GUI was totaly different from the one we are used to see today.
Linux was intented to be used only a server (a Unix alternative) but someone, someday, decided to use it as a desktop.
Many things changed from that day and many projects born around that idea. KDE, Gnome are only two examples… but now?
It seems that this effort lost its power, like when you throw a ball: it runs for a time and the it stops. The same thing happen to Linux: we saw an initial effort to make the operating system more usable for all and now the energy run out. We are making distros always easier to install but we are forgetting to add some basic functions that a modern operating system must have. While other operating systems are moving on the multimedia way (for example), Linux seems to be not interested in adding these functions.
A good effort has been done by Apple, I think that MacOS X is what Linux should be: a stable and easy-to-use operating system with all what a user need. Probably Apple should help the OpenSource world just a little bit more than what it’s actually doing or probably we should decide that Linux is a good operating system for the a server and we should leave space to the other OS into the desktop environmet.
Cremona Live Role Game
I partecipated to a Live Role Game Session in Cremona.
I took some pictures and put them into my Gallery.
Here the link and a sample.
1963 FBI Fingerprint Book on Project Gutenberg
The Science of Fingerprints: Classification and Uses, FBI, 1963. Introduction by J. Edgar Hoover.
You can download the book from the Project Gutenberg site, follow the link
