Plastic hotel “key cards” with a mag-stripe are notoriously unreliable (at least 5% failure rate). They can easily be demagnetized and stop working, even by proximity to cell-phones and small fashion magnets (unlike payment cards, which are more resilient). I run mag-stripe payment card security tests and the hotel cards that sometimes use to calibrate … Continue reading Get a Free Hotel Room — Key Management Failure →

Inkjet printers create a colossal amount of unnecessary waste, on purpose. HP trumpted a long time ago that more money was made in ink cartridges not the printer (apparently $8000 a gallon). They thus developed their “freebie” printer market around small plastic boxes of ink meant to be non-refillable; a new steady stream of waste … Continue reading The Last Ink Cartridge You Will Buy →

Eight years ago, in 2003, we proposed and presented the use of linguistic analysis for email author identification. Our use case was started with the investigation of Advanced Fee Fraud (AFF), also known as 419 scams from Nigeria. We proved, albeit from a small data set, that language can identify a message author using several … Continue reading Exposing Anonymous With Frequent Pattern →