Elliott C. Back: Technology FTW!

I was watching the MacWorld 2009 Apple Keynote live when a message appeared in the feed–”STEVE JOBS JUST DIED”–surprising everyone. In a few minutes, the MacRumors feed was full of coordinated hacked spam:

Highlighted is the beginning of the spam

MacRumors apologized for the incident: “Our MacRumorsLive keynote coverage was hacked today, inserting inappropriate content into the text and photo feeds. We apologize for the inconvenience and are working to restore our services.” However, it was simply negligence on their part for having a control panel which was publicly accessible rather than some kind of nefarious hack. One of the nicer 4chan readers took this screenshot of it before it was taken offline:

See also When Livestreams Go Wrong and 4chan’s /g board where the chaos originated. Hopefully this will teach bloggers and web startups to pay more attention to the security of their websites, as hacking websites is growing more and more popular with savvy internet pranksters.

A credit card number always contains a prefix of 6 digits known as the Issuer Identification Number (IIN) which identify the credit card network that issued the card. I could only find three well-known places to find a list of bank identification numbers (BIN) online:

• Mars Banks Base, a donateware application with about 60k BIN numbers for Visa, AMEX, and Mastercard
• The now-defunct Dumpz.biz and dumpz.us binlist, another collection of BIN numbers
• Wikipedia even has a List of Bank Identification Numbers

I’ve compiled them into a CSV file with the following information: BIN, location, type, name, and phone number. You can download bank-bin-list and unzip it.

If you’re a merchant interested in a solution using the BIN/IIN numbers to validate credit cards to lower the risk of fraud, you should check out Service Object’s DOTS BIN Validation webservice, which can validate 95% of MasterCard and Visa card types.

I think that I found the official wallpapers that are going to be used in Windows 7, whenever Microsoft gets around to releasing it! They’re quite pretty, and quite high-res. Take a look, and let me know what you think:

It’s almost like they took cues from Apple with these, which are smooth gradients and curves. No more boxy Windows in Windows 7! Update: I got these from somewhere else, but reader Skidzopedia has a download link.

If you’ve ever tried to get an animated .gif file to continue playing in IE after a link is clicked, javascript runs for a form submit, or the window.location is set to a new URL, then you’ve probably already gone through the phases of frustration, and come straight to Google.

Here’s the setup. You’ve got a piece of javascript redirecting the user on a click (yes, I know this is a bad idea). Hopefully you got this from a legacy app:

<script language="javascript"><!--
function go(href) {
     $('spinner').style.display = '';
     location.href = href;
}
//--></script>
<a href="defaultAction.htm" onClick="go(this.href);return false">go</a>

Internet Explorer stops animated gifs when there is a javascript event, so if you try this code, it’s going to fail dramatically. What you need (for IE6 and IE7) is a hack:

<script language="javascript"><!--
function go(href) {
     $('spinner').style.display = '';
     location.href = href;
     $('spinner').src = $('spinner').src;
}
//--></script>
<a href="defaultAction.htm" onClick="go(this.href);return false">go</a>

Yes, reassigning the src attribute of an img will cause the image to keep animating, even when in the process of loading the next page. Note–this doesn’t work as well in Firefox. For that, you should either (a) upgrade the application to load data through AJAX, not URL redirection, or (b) use an iframe pointing to the image.

PS, if you need some ajax loading indicators, there’s a bunch!

Is McCain going to steal the election? The poor performance of uncalibrated electronic voting machines, which can check a different box than you touch if they are intentionally, or accidentally miscalibrated, may lead to voter confusion this year. For example, the following photo shows the actual difference between where you touch, and what candidate registers:

I took it from the following youtube video:

You can read WIDESPREAD TOUCH SCREEN VOTE FLIPPING!! at Daily Kos for an emotional rundown:

It’s been the ES&S iVotronic touch-screen machines that have failed, flipping votes from one candidate to another not chosen by the voter. In virtually every instance, it’s been an attempted Democratic vote, that has flipped to a Republican, or been flipped another party (third party candidate).

While this could be dismissed as small, technical error, coupled with ineptitude, it could also be the only part of a conspiracy to keep the Bush legacy in office. The so-called “tip of the iceberg” of the Bush/Republican dynasty. In a way, it’s good that widespread technology is being brought into the public awareness–for too long people have “trusted the system” without realizing how fragile it actually is. Your heat, electricity, transportation, and water are all controlled by computer systems. If those fail (like the election systems appear to be), your basic necessities will no longer be met.