Playing With New Blogging Tools

The switch to Mac has caused me some churn. I've been a very devout Firefox user forever but as I get more used to the way my Mac works, the more Safari grows on me. The problem is that ScribeFire doesn't work on Safari.

That brings me to Ecto, which seems to be a pretty popular blogging tool for the Mac. This is my first real post using Ecto. I tend not to do too many crazy things on my blog posts so I imagine that Ecto will work fine.

I'll be testing for a while to see what happens. Please excuse any strange posts in the mean time.

Some People Should Just Avoid Driving

We're getting ready to head out on vacation for a couple of days so I headed over to Barnes & Noble to pick up a book. I get there and see that the pull-through spot I had my eye on was partially double-parked. I've seen this before and it's usually a mammoth SUV with a driver that is incapable of parking the vehicle correctly. My thoughts whenever I see this are usually "If you can't park it, don't buy it". Today however, there was a small twist. The incompetent parker was driving a Toyota Yaris. Seriously, if you can't get a Yaris in between the lines, just stay home. Technorati Tags: rant

An Innovative Way to Precent Credit Card Fraud

This is a great idea. Essentially, this new technology basically embeds technology similar to RSA's SecureID into individual credit cards. For those not familiar with SecureID, it generates a one-time PIN that is used in combination with a username and password to log on to an information system. This way even if a bad guy gets your username and password, they still need the fob that generates the one-time password.

Since the PIN these souped up credit cards generate would be valid for only a single transaction, thieve need to have the physical card in order to conduct a fraudulant transaction. This is like CAPTCHA on steriods.

The technical details are still sketchy. I can only assume that the technology requires some modified infrastructure. We'll probably just see the enhanced authentication used for high value transactions at first, but I bet it will spread to daily transactions as the infrastructure builds out.

This is one of the coolest anti-fraud technologies I've read about in a long time. Here's the article:

Visa plans credit card with onboard TAN generation - News - heise Security UK

Technorati Tags: credit card, security, fraud, technology