Continuing the unusual string of video posts I’ve been doing, here’s something I recently found on YouTube. Animal, Beaker, and the Swedish Chef sing “Danny Boy” in their uniquely unintelligible style.
Happy belated Saint Patrick’s Day!
Yeah, yeah I’ll get back to making “real” posts soonish. 
Yesterday’s episode of Boing Boing TV shows how to steal credit card information with a laptop and an $8 peripheral. Just walk up next to someone with an RFID-enabled card, and you’ve got it. As the hacker being interviewed points out, with a larger antenna you could set up in Starbucks and walk out with a dozen or more credit card numbers.
I first expressed my concern about this exact thing in a post four years ago:
It poses a grave privacy concern, exposing your [information] to anyone who can pick up a radio signal. I imagine high-tech identity thieves prowling the club with RFID receivers disguised as cell phones or pagers, culling ID info…
It’s amazing to me just how much I called it. An anonymous commenter on the BBTV post says that RFID-reading cell phones are already on the market:
You do not need to hack anything. Nokia and others are currently putting RFID readers in cell phones — you can already buy models with this feature in the open market (google for “6131nfc” for example).
So what can you do to protect yourself? There are a lot of recommendations out there, from drilling a hole through the chip to breaking it by striking your credit card with a hammer. On the less destructive side, this video from Popular Science magazine shows how to make an aluminum foil barrier in your wallet that blocks the radio signals from getting out.
Yes, aluminum foil. When the alien overlords come, you can turn it into a stylish hat to block their mind control rays.
I don’t have any RFID-enabled cards right now, but if I get one I’ll probably give it the tinfoil hat treatment. What about you?
(Props: Boing Boing TV)
Added 5/6/2008 — How-to website Instructables has a run down of the various ways to destroy or completely disable RFID chips in passports, credit cards, and elsewhere. (via The Big Noob and Boing Boing)
As reported by BBC News:
I learned about this video from a post on Boing Boing, where Cory Doctorow raises an excellent question: why is the British news media covering this, but not the US media?
Feast your peepers on the teaser trailer for Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull:
High-definition versions are available from Yahoo! Movies. If you’d like more info about the film, check out Vanity Fair’s feature article and their exclusive interview with Stephen Spielberg.
Based on some publicity photos I’ve seen of a grumpy and aged-looking Harrison Ford, I was worried that this would end up being Indiana Jones and the Damn Kids who Won’t Get Off His Lawn. This teaser leaves me a bit more hopeful.
The first trailer for the the Wachowski brothers’ live action Speed Racer movie hit the Web on Friday. It looks like a colorful, retro-futuristic, and fundamentally silly movie with exciting races, two-dimensional characters, and ridiculously over-the-top villains. A lot like the cartoon, in other words. You can watch the trailer in high-definition QuickTime format, or check out the fuzzier YouTubeized version below.
When I was a kid I thought that the original Speed Racer cartoon was awesome, but I’m not sure that nostalgia is enough reason to see this movie in a theatre. I’m withholding final judgment until there’s more than one trailer to go on. What’s interesting about the trailer is the several direct visual references to the opening sequence of the cartoon — both the Japanese and English versions.
The race sequences themselves owe an obvious debt to the F-Zero and Wipeout video game franchises. It’ll be interesting to see whether these varied influences can be knit together into a coherent movie.
