Skim and Go

This latest variation on ATM skimmers is terrifying: gas pumps are being found with skimmers installed inside them, some with Bluetooth capabilities so that the thieves do not have to do anything more than park near the pump to get the card data off them. Krebs on Security has some good information on this new twist on ATM skimmers, as well as a few photos. I don’t even know what the advice for the average consumer is here. With ATMs, you can recommend that people use machines they are familiar with and pay attention to if they appear to have … Continue reading Skim and Go

Two Winchester Books

Based on how much I enjoyed “The Professor and The Madman”, I have read two more books by Simon Winchester in the past few months: “The Map that Changed the World” and “The Man Who Loved China”. Both continue the theme of tracing the life of a researcher who embarks on an immense project cataloging some portion of human knowledge in minute and exhaustive detail, often to their own personal detrement along the way. “The Map that Changed the World: William Smith and the Birth of Modern Geology” covers the creation of an exhaustive geological map of England and, along … Continue reading Two Winchester Books

More thoughts on video games

I’ve read a couple of interesting videogame related items in the past few weeks – it is times like this that I wish I could assign followup reading to students after they leave a class. I liked this weblog post about recent research into the correlation between videogames and violence not just for the links to some current research, but because of the critiquing of the papers and the general conversation about video game violence going on right now. While I’m not entirely on board with the post’s undercurrent of sceptibility about any psychological research, there are some really interesting … Continue reading More thoughts on video games