The “Break it Down” Blog

New Credit Card Cross-Sell-Like Scams Used by Vendors

12 Angry Men did an awesome write-up on a new type of “scam” used by shady marketing companies to automatically opt-you-in to very small month reoccurring charges that you are most likely to not notice on your credit card using some trickery of how credit card data is handled in a typical HTTP session. Here [...]

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Requests Wanting off Terror Watch List Surge

That’s weird… people DON’T want to be a randomly compiled list of terrorists so their travel plans get delayed or completely cancelled? I don’t get it… Looks like the department of Homeland Security is fielding thousands of requests a month to get taken off the terror watch list as the algorithm used to put people on [...]

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Apple Stops Linux iPod Use

Nice. Apple has decided to start writing out “some kind of hash” to iPods beginning with the new iPods that doesn’t allow the device to report the correct contents and/or transfer files. So far what this means is that iPods will no longer support 3rd party developers meaning all the “iPod” support on Linux for [...]

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Apple Redesigns License Keys

Ok this is slick as can be. Over at Switcher’s Blog he shows the history of license key registration (like that giant key you use to register Windows every time you reinstall it) and how, in a truely Apple fashion, Apple is refining how this process will be done with a little drag and drop [...]

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Internet Explorer, ActiveX, Macromedia Captivate and Flash

Ok this is one of those “good lord I hate Microsoft” moments that seems to occur far too often. Here’s the situation: I’m working on recording and export Flash movies from Macromedia Captivate (now Adobe Captivate) and placing them in a webpage to view them. The problem is, every time I view the page in Internet [...]

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Companies whine over security changes to Vista

Can Microsoft win? Is it even possible? Have a look at this story over at the Register. What I take away from this story is: Microsoft has to secure it’s operating system or everyone will hate it If Microsoft secures it’s operating system, 3rd party security vendors will hate it Don’t secure it too much, so we can [...]

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