Daily Cup of Tech

If you think that giving a third party access to information is a good idea, this video may make you think twice.

The gentleman in this video found out what the default password was for the ATM machine. He then tried different ATMs until he found one with the default password. Once he got intot the machine with the default password, he programmed it to think that it was dispensing $5 bills when it was actually giving $20 bills. This means that every time you took out money, you received four times the amount of money you asked for!

“But,” you say, “this must have been an inside job. He must have worked for the ATM company!” You’d think so but he actually got his information from the ATM manual which he fouond via a Google search! And he’s not the only one finding interesting things online via Google!

(For those of you who cannot see the video, you can see it on YouTube.)

Lessons Learned

1. Always change your default password.
2. Never make private information public where it can be scanned and catalogued by others

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I’ve updated a couple of things on the LFS page. Nothing ground breaking but I’ve added a couple of pretty pictures.

I’ve also started working on a little project that might be interesting. I’m not going to tell you too much about it but I will drop this hint:

YOUR WEB LINK HERE

Trackback link - http://www.dailycupoftech.com/2006/10/16/lfs-update-and-new-project-hint/trackback/

Nobidy can know everything about a specific topic, even if that person spends all of their time on it much like I do. I know enough to know I know very little (say that five times fast!). I get information and news from several different sources.

One of my main sources of information for the past number of years has been Fred Langa. Fred is an author for Information Week and has a regular newsletter called The Langa List. Recently, he has started his blog which also promises to be a wealth of information.

Feel free to check out all of the different ways that Fred gets information to the people. It never ceases to amaze me what he comes up with.

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In years past, I was not as technically savvy as I am today (which may be saying something). I was also naive enough to believe that what I was told I was getting from my ISP is actually what I received. Now, I’m not saying that all ISPs are out to cheat you but there are definitely some that are less than reputable.

One of the easiest ways for them to “steal” from you is by throttling your bandwidth. This means that they may tell you that you are getting one speed but actually receiving another. Luckily, there are a number of websites out there that let you test your bandwidth.

Recently, I ran across a very cool one that is super easy to use. It has a very nice graphical interface and lets you choose which server you want to test you speed with. Check out SpeedTest and see how your ISP is doing.

Trackback link - http://www.dailycupoftech.com/2006/10/15/check-to-see-if-your-isp-is-cheating-your-speed/trackback/

There are some websites out there that are just begging to be tagged. Not in the good sense but, rather, with good old fashioned graphitti. But, unless you were willing to replace your monitor every single time you saw something lame on the Internet, it wasn’t practical. That is, until now.

The good people at Draw Here have come up with a virtual tagger’s dream. By adding a favourite to your web browser, you can tag any website with whatever you want. The graphitti remains hidden until it is activated by someone “in the know”.

If you want to give it a try, feel free to tag this page by clicking on the link.

Have fun (but please be kind)!

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