RFID Eye Opener

This video shows how easy it can be to obtain someone's credit card information using very cheap and easy to come by products.  This only applies to the RFID enabled credit cards with wireless chipsets embedded in them.  The video below demonstrates it with an American Express but I believe there are RFID cards available through Visa & Mastercard currently as well.  The demonstration uses a laptop and requires the would-be thief/hacker to get close to his victim but its only a matter of time before the same results may be obtainable so discreetly that a victim would never know it has happened.  If this doesn't prove the insecurity of the current RFID platform, nothing will.  I know I wont be carrying an RFID card any time soon...

Thumbs down for Vista Service Pack 1

If you, like me, were hoping to see file transfer speed improve with Vista Service Pack 1, get ready to be let down. In my tests, speeds have not improved at all. Infact, most of my tests with SP1 were slower than they were before with the RTM of Vista. I tested local hard drive 1 to local hard drive 2, local hard drive 1 to network share (Win2000 machine), network share to hard drive 1, and local drive 1 to the same local drive.

Very disappointing... I so wanted to like Vista but Microsoft is making it very hard. Its like they are trying to push loyal users away. At this point, I'm just tired of trying. I don't have the energy or time to whip a Linux distro into working order. I'd be even more restricticed with OSX. Windows 7 is too far off to even start thinking about. XP seems like the only logical choice for a productive workstation. I sure hope they can turn things around with Windows 7...

Media Center Not Finding Your Local Channels Anymore?

I've been using Vista's Media Center software for the past couple months to watch & record my local ATSC HD channels (using an AverMedia A180 ATSC/QAM tuner). Media Center's supported ATSC functionality has been working great. (Don't get me started on QAM in Media Center...) That is until a couple of weeks ago. I had Media Center configured to record new episodes of "Lost" each week off the Phoenix ABC affiliate, KNXV-DT 15. However starting 2 or 3 weeks ago, it started to miss the Lost scheduled recordings. Once I finally got annoyed enough to look into the issue, I stumbled across a couple of links that helped me resolve the issue. Apparently, the media center guide had the wrong frequency assigned to this station. The episode guide had channel 15 assigned to frequency 15. According to smarter people on the internet, this frequency should be 56. So either the episode guide recently updated with the wrong frequency or the local station changed their frequency. Either way the fix is the same. If you edit the XML config file for the episode guide, you can remove the problem channel, then use the media center guide configuration GUI to manually add the channel with the correct frequency. So here's step by step procedure that worked for me.

(note: the process below was in Vista Ultimate Edition. I've never used XP's media center so the process might be slightly different.)

• Close Media Center completely
  
• The guide file is at C:\Documents and Settings\All Users\Application Data\Microsoft\eHome\EPG\prefs\atscchannels.xml
  
• Open that file to edit in a plain text editor
• delete the line that contains the problem channel
• save and close the file
• open Media Center
• Settings->TV->Guide->Add Missing Channels->Add DTV Channel
• Enter channel number. (in my case, 15-1 for channel 15)
• Enter Frequency. (in my case, 56)
• Enter Channel Name (KNXV-DT in my case)

Betcha didnt think anything useful or productive would come out of THIS blog! HoboTown FTW!