Patrick Talmadge

I read a recent post that detailed how to hack gift cards. The post shocked me how insecure the gift cards are. I hope the release of posts detailing how to hack gift cards will bring about a change in the security of new cards.
You go to a store that has gift cards on display check to see if the serial number is show on the back. Some cards cover the number. If the number is not covered you write down the serial number of the cards. You then check to see if the card has been activated by checking to see if the card is valid via the phone number or internet. Once you find an active card you can then purchase things online with your new gift card.

Hacking, Security

Gmail is releasing a new feature that allows users to add up to 5 email accounts that Gmail can pull email from. The feature only works with POP3 email accounts but this means you can pull your work email or other personal email into Gmail. You can even create custom from accounts that will allow you to send email from your other email addresses.
Check out the new feature post from Gmail here: http://mail.google.com/mail/help/whatsnew_getmail.html 

General gmail

I have been playing with the TOR (the onion router) network for a while now. I like the anonymity that TOR provides but my problem was always portablity. The download you get from TOR you always had to install TOR, Vidalia, and Privoxy. Once those three are installed you have to set your proxy server settings in your browser to join the network. All of this is not much of a problem if you are on your home computer. But I wanted anonymity on computers that I may not have privileges to install software.

Last week I came across a neat blend of Firefox and TOR. Torpark is a great little app that you can unzip to your desktop or a flash drive and run with out an install process. I installed Torpark on my 1GB flash drive it can take several minutes for it to connect to the TOR routers.  Once connected it seems to be a very good solution to my problem. The browsing seems just as fast using the TOR install.

Torpark is built on Firefox 1.5 and it does tend to take a little while to connect to the network. I think if Torparks developers continue to work on this app it will be a great program for portable internet anonymity.

Security