Chip and pin cards can be hacked. Well, there’s a surprise, who would have thought that a piece of technology wouldn’t be intruder-proof? And that the prospect of free money would ever tempt a thief?

It’s on BBC tonight but as nothing short of a lobotomy would allow me to watch Watchdog, here’s a link to the Register story on it. Cambridge University researchers got the card details as a payment was made and transmitted them to a card cloner.

According to the Metro (free bus & train paper) the card companies said this was unlikely to ever be a real threat as it would need there to be a dishonest shop employee with an accomplice outside the store.

Clearly, it is an almost physical impossibility for there to be a dishonest shop employee. And for them to know another person – the odds aginst that must be billions to one.

Tags: cards, credit, crime, chip and pin, BBC, fraud, technology, society.

For months now, this blog has had “issues” with Technorati, and sadly it is like banging your head against a wall. Fundamentally, nothing that this blog complains about is going to make Technorati change they way they do things (and we are aware of that), but we do feel that by highlighting it there may eventually come the time that enough people have the same problem – which may then get them to change.

The problem is a recurring one. Technorati is erratic in how it indexes blogs following a ping. For example when you look at the most recent posts from this blog, the last two posts (Intemperance and AJAXification) are conspicuous in their absence. According to Technorati, the most recent post is the Charlie Brooker one, made 23 hours ago now (and an hour before the last two).

Broadly speaking this is not a massive problem. The posts are there. Any one who visits the site will see them and other indexing services have picked them up. The problem is Technorati. Technorati is probably the most popular blog search and using tags to find blogs is truly an excellent idea. Rarely do we at Why Dont You search for content, we search for tags. Finding posts tagged with the words you are looking for is often a much better way of getting information.

Given Technorati’s problems though, there is no way to know what is being missed. As an example, if the one true AJAX tutorial is out there, it could be tagged AJAX on an indexed blog, but Technorati may have decided to capriciously ignore it.

At the moment, I don’t think there is a solution. As previously mentioned Google seems to have a better index and is a much faster (and more reliable search) but it doesn’t use tags – which are (IMHO) quite critical regarding blogs. I suppose I still wish I had the skil, and server capacity, to make my own blog search / indexer.

Tags: Search Engines, Technology, Technorati, Software, Code, Blogs, Blog Index, Tagging, Weblogs