Skim
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Thieves find a more insidious way to steal credit card details
The secret service has issued a warning to banks and ATM companies about a new way that thieves can steal your credit card information. A report from Krebs on Security explains that "periscope" skimmers have been found inside teller machines in Connecticut and Pennsylvania in the last two months. Of course, since the devices attach to the internal mechanism, there's absolutely no way for an end user to tell if they're at risk.
VeriFone calls out Square for 'gaping security hole,' publishes sample app to demonstrate
VeriFone, a huge provider of credit card processing systems that's been around since time immemorial, has taken a huge swipe at upstart Square today, branding its free, headphone jack-based credit card readers "skimming devices" and demanding their immediate removal from the market. Crazy, right? VeriFone's CEO has thrown up a YouTube video talking about the exploit its thrown together, and it's more of a social engineering hack than a technical one: a bad guy makes a fake Square app for his phone, plugs in the reader, and steals your unencrypted credit card details without running a "real" payment through Square's system. They're really going big with this, too -- not only is VeriFone's sample app available for download, but they've sent notices to Visa, MasterCard, American Express, and JP Morgan Chase, which handles Square's processing. Sounds like a possible problem, sure -- but when the "exploit" is being announced in such grand fashion by a company that's most threatened by Square's business model, you can't help but feel a little icky about it. Follow the break for video.
The Light and How to Swing It: Leveling your new Sunwalker
Every week, WoW Insider brings you The Light and How to Swing It for holy, protection and retribution paladins. Every Sunday, Chase Christian invites you to discuss the finer side of the paladin class: the holy specialization. Feel free to email me with any questions you want answered, like how awesome tauren paladins are. After The Shattering hit Azeroth, it was clear that the world was never going to be the same. Entire zones were torn asunder, and everyone who can take up arms to combat Deathwing has stood up to fight. The Horde recently inducted the Sunwalkers into the fold, and they're eagerly training in the way of the Light. Now players won't be stuck with blood elves when they want to play the paladin class. If you've been on the general forums in the past few days, you've seen some of the clever names that people have come up with for their tauren paladins. Retbull (gives you wings), Skim (Light milk), and Bovinity (divine cows) were among my personal favorites. I decided to start a new tauren paladin myself, figuring I could heal my way through the low-level dungeons and try out the new starting quests and zones at the same time. It's been years since I've played a new paladin, and it was time for a refresher course.
Skim 0.7 update
Since we last mentioned the Skim PDF reader and annotating application it has grown considerably and the newly released version 0.7 adds bevy of new features. Since that early release back in April they've added considerably to the markup and searching tools (including live search of the document with context in addition to searching just the annotations). There's also greatly expanded AppleScript support and a presentation mode. The crazy keyboard shortcut system we complained about before has also been simplified and improved. In short, Skim is getting better by leaps and bounds and is definitely worth another look if you regularly need to read and markup PDFs. While you can still only highlight PDFs with selectable text (i.e. PDFs that are not just scans), the anchored note and box features make marking up even image PDFs easier. Skim remains open source and thus a free download from SourceForge.[via MacUser]
Skim PDF reader
In a comment to our recent PDF review, Gary let us know about about Skim, a new open source project to produce a tool for reading and marking up PDFs. Skim already has a number of interesting tools, allowing you to: embed notes (both shorter notes that appear over the PDF, and anchored notes which are marked by a speech bubble icon that leads to a separate window) add circles and boxes if the text in the PDF is selectable, highlight, strike-through, and underline. Skim even has a full screen mode, as is popular with the kids these days. For a version 0.2 release there's already a lot of functionality here, which bodes well for the future (though I have to say the keyboard shortcuts for notes and markup are insane). Unlike Papers, which we mentioned before, Skim doesn't seem to be intended as a PDF library manager, but rather an individual PDF markup tool. It is available now as a free download from SourceForge.
Elecom intros skim prevention kit for wallet, cellphone
If you're down with the whole "swipeless" idea, but don't much dig the potential lack of security associated with it, Elecom's coming to the rescue in an attempt to put your paranoia to rest. The Skim Black I lineup of gear consists of a thin, wallet-based card and a not-so-elegant adornment for cellphones (pictured after the jump), both of which eliminate snoopers from jacking your precious information (or identity) by cutting off a reported 99.9-percent of radio waves. To be effective, the skim prevention card must be close to any swipeless cards in your wallet or pocket, while the bulkier SKM-K001 needs to be stuck on the rear of your mobile to effectively destroy the hopes of data thieves (and all stylistic appeal your handset previously had). Both units should be hitting Japan any day, and while the SKM-C001 wallet card will run you ¥1,260 ($11), the cellphone guardian will demand ¥2,310 ($20).[Via AkihabaraNews]
