The RFID hacks keep coming fast and furious -- hot the heels of that Mifare / Oyster Card exploit, the crew at BoingBoing TV has posted up a little demo of how easy cracking the RFID encryption on an American Express card can be. All it takes is an $8 dollar reader easily available on eBay, some software, and the courage to walk around with a laptop waving plastic boxes at people's butt pockets, but developer Pablos Holman says he's hoping to develop a newer version that will allow him to be a little more discreet. The root of the problem is apparently the fact that the system uses local decryption rather than sending card info to a secure data center, but either way we've been worried about this for a long time -- we're sticking to loose change and the barter system from now on. Video after the break.

In a day and age when children are practically bombarded from birth with ads extolling the virtues of consumerism, we're not sure that it's the best idea to be thrusting credit cards into their impressionable little hands (debit cards, maybe), but that hasn't stopped Hasbro's Parker Brothers from trading in paper for plastic in some of their most classic games. The latest title to get Visa-fied -- and the first to hit US shores, as that special edition of Monopoly was UK only -- is everyone's favorite Game of Life, which as we all know takes players through a thrilling journey from college to career to fabulous riches or abject poverty. As with Monopoly: UK, stacks of cash are replaced by a "personal assistant and electronic banking unit" -- in this case known as the LIFEPod (attention Apple legal!) -- but this time the gameplay itself is also getting a facelift, with the so-called "Twists and Turns" edition dividing the board into four "life paths," ditching the old spinner, and perhaps most significantly, crowning a winner not by wealth alone but by a combination of loot and "life points." Also like the "hipper" version of Monopoly, T and T will sport a higher price tag than the regular game ($35 versus $13) when it goes on sale this summer, although you do get a bonus copy of Visa's "award-winning financial literacy curriculum," Practical Money Skills for Life, which debunks such widely-held myths as the one that "there's no such thing as instant gratification" -- well kids, with a Visa card and a five figure spending limit, there sure as heck is!

While sniffing out ATM info has been used by tricksters criminals for years, a Manchester-based bloke was trafficking private bank information from various cards to illegally purchase goods -- with the help of DAPs, no less. Although your evil twin could manage to reprogram an ATM to disperse 300 percent more cash than it really should, this fellow secretly attached an (unsurprisingly anonymous) "MP3 player" to the backs of free-standing cash machines in "local bars, bingo halls, and bowling alleys." The device recorded the tones from transactions, which were then decoded and "turned into information used to clone new credit cards." The fellow learned his savvy computing skills from "a friend in Cambridge," and was oddly not caught jacking cash or throwing down on a new HDTV; rather, police caught on to his scheming when they located a counterfeit bank card in his vehicle during a routine traffic stop, which led them back to his presumably disclosing home. While we applaud the ingenuity, the motives are certainly below traditional moral standards, but this certainly isn't the first (nor the last) criminal offense involving DAPs.

While we were a bit skeptical when Chase sent us one of their questionably-secure RFID-equipped "Blink" cards last year, we're gonna be all over a new technology from several companies that actually gives credit cards a heigtened level of security by generating a one-time passcode for each transaction, viewable on an embedded e-ink display. The OTP DisplayCard, as it's being called, was developed by InCard Technologies in conjunction with security firm nCryptone using technology from SiPix Imaging and SmartDisplayer, and is being targeted at financial institutions or at other companies as a replacement for the password-generating key fobs used to enable VPN access to their intranets. While the added security feature would come into play for both online and in-person transactions, it will probably be most useful for Internet purchases, making your credit card info almost worthless to identity thieves who can't get their hands on the card itself. Oh, and to answer the inevitable question: no, these cards will not be able to play Doom.

[Via mobileread]