This clever hack uses an RFID tag on a cat collar and an old CD drawer to give a cat access, preventing any other animal from eating its food
Little Cat Toos demonstrates cat feeder from champenoise on Vimeo.
Monthly Archives: July 2010
TNRXSafety Program
The Tennessee Perscription Safety Program uses tokens and registration to reduce prescription fraud. The state has the second highest per capita prescription drug spending in the US.
Through the use of card swipe technology PSP will be the first in the country to immediately track the validity of a prescription in physician offices and pharmacies. The program uses the same technology utilized by financial networks to validate a credit card purchase.
The system is meant to give “warning signals” for problem patients and prevent common attack methods. Paper prescriptions can be easily modified, for example, whereas the cards are intended to be more resistant.
Hotels Targeted (Again)
I start my Top Ten Breaches presentation with data analysis and a review of what gets attention in the news. It does not always map to what I find when I look at the actual breach reporting databases.
Here is an example of what I like to dispel and clarify: Credit Card Hackers Visit Hotels All Too Often
A study released this year by SpiderLabs, a part of the data-security consulting company Trustwave, found that 38 percent of the credit card hacking cases last year involved the hotel industry. The sector was well ahead of the financial services industry (19 percent), retailing (14.2 percent), and restaurants and bars (13 percent).
The first question is what percentage of Trustwave customers are Hotels. Next question is whether payment card breaches are the only subject of the study (versus PII, etc). Then I would want to know, depending on the first two answers, the sample size…and so on.
It is plausible that Trustwave releases this kind of study to drive more business to their Hotel security and breach response team. The full set of data might show educational institutions and government agencies are breached more often, but Trustwave could isolate a data set most relevant to the services they sell (or it may just turn out to be the only data they have). Without reading the report it is hard to say what assumptions were made.
That is why I find the news better for anecdotes about the individual breaches. However, I find it odd in this case that the NYT reporter is quoting from ABC News instead of a primary source:
Last month, Destination Hotels and Resorts, a chain of luxury properties in the United States, notified customers that credit cards “may have been compromised.”
ABC News reported that Destination had been victimized by “an intense database attack that lasted over three months,” and quoted law enforcement authorities saying that losses, which totaled hundreds of thousands of dollars, averaged $2,000 to $3,000 on each of the estimated 700 credit card numbers stolen.
Fungus of Death
Scientists claim to have solved the mystery deaths in China
Families, who make their living by collecting and selling the fungi, eat the Little White as it has no commercial value – it is too small and turns brown shortly after being picked.
A campaign to warn people against eating the tiny mushrooms has dramatically reduced the number of deaths. There have been no reported deaths so far this year.
It is not just about the mushroom. The article ends with a twist.
…the toxins could be acting together with high concentrations of barium, a heavy metal, in the local water supply
Uh, that does not sound very good either. Will there be a warning about the water too? Barium is said to cause the symptoms blamed on the mushrooms.
All water or acid soluble barium compounds are poisonous. At low doses, barium acts as a muscle stimulant, while higher doses affect the nervous system, causing cardiac irregularities, tremors, weakness, anxiety, dyspnea and paralysis.
Some are not affected by it, apparently, while others are very sensitive, which must make the investigation difficult. This new killer mushroom discovery sounds much more interesting than yet another pollution story, but perhaps it will still bring attention to the need for better water quality.