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Gates to Get ATM Fees?
The majority of U.S. banks are migrating their ATMs from IBM’s OS/2 to a stripped-down version of Windows. The obvious reason: IBM is ceasing support for OS/2 after 2004. But under the surface there might be something more interesting at play.
Like the proprietary Unix systems of days gone by, ATM manufacturers run platform-specific software on their machines. A bank that has ATMs from two manufacturers (let’s say, from an acquisition, because they’d never buy non-compatible systems, right?) has to support two separate systems. Windows abstracts the ATM hardware, meaning there’s only one system to support. If Microsoft can pull its “one-OS, many platforms” trick again, like it did in the PC space, Gates will be a happy man indeed.
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http://www.banktechnews.com/cgi-bin/readstory.pl?story=20031001BTNR563.xml
RFIDs Reverse Roles
RFID (radio frequency identification) tags have been making headlines of late. The rush is on to track everything from pink pashminas to sliced bread. And if all that excitement weren’t enough, a team of researchers at the University of Rochester have come up with a very creative way to repurpose the RFID tags normally used by vendors to track merchandise: track people instead of goods.
The team put the tags on stationary objects instead of the movable ones. Their system NAVI (Navigational Assistance for the Visually Impaired) equips users with a beefed-up CD player that senses the RFID tags to determine location. Audio tracks on the CD correspond to the various locations in a RFID mesh. Cool.
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http://www.mail-archive.com/[email protected]/msg09643.html
http://www.trnmag.com/Stories/2003/092403/Radio_tags_give_guidance_092403.html
Moore’s Law of Cyber-Crime: Say It Isn’t So
Earlier this year, John Lyons of the United Kingdom’s National High-Tech Crime Unit declared that cyber-crime is “following Moore’s law in the past and into the future” and that virus attacks are its most common tech-related crime. In the United States, the Computer Security Institute and San Francisco FBI’s Computer Intrusion Squad came up with equally grim reports. Ninety-two percent of the 530 companies surveyed reported hack attacks, 75 percent experienced financial losses, and 78 percent identified their Internet connection as a frequent point of attack.
Certainly a topic worthy of careful study by great minds around the world. Switzerland to the rescue.
The global banking and insurance center wants to be the hacking epicenter as well. This fall the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, in partnership with industry leaders such as IBM and Sun, opened the doors to the Zurich Information Security Center (ZISC), dedicated to research on viruses and worms.
Moore’s law must be broken. Black-hats, beware!
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http://www.zisc.ethz.ch/research/index
Wi-Fi + VoIP = My New Phone?
Seems like these days everyone’s raving about Wi-Fi this and Wi-Fi that. And at the same time, cellphone campaigns such as “Can you hear me now?” continue to try and convince us that cell reception doesn’t suck. Why can’t those cell phone companies get some of that Wi-Fi buzz?
Maybe they will, or more likely, maybe some of those WiFi folk will save the day, at least if Intel has anything to say about it. Soon you’ll be able to seamlessly switch back and forth from 802.11 networks to a GSM cellular one—during the same phone call. Intel’s Universal Communicator Platform features a dual-mode telephone handset with an adaptive technology that provides transparent access to the best available network, and software that reportedly delivers near CD-quality sound.
Can you hear me now?
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ftp://download.intel.com/labs/wireless/download/universal_communicator_wpfall03.pdf
Originally published in Queue vol. 1, no. 8—
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