A daily miasma of frivolity by two wanna-be cultural critics. Or: just, like, some good links, dude.

Tag Archives: ”online privacy”

Jun 15 2011
Mark Twain, probably

Hackers Stole 200,000+ Citi Accounts Just By Changing Numbers In The URL

Hackers Stole 200,000+ Citi Accounts Just By Changing Numbers In The URL

Consumerist:

Basically after you logged into your account as a Citi customer, the URL contained a code identifying your account. All you had to do was change around the numbers and boom, you were in someone else’s account.

So if the URL was something like citibank.com/user/12345, all you had to do was change it to citibank.com/user/123456 and you had access to all of their account information.

Oh for crying out loud. From the comments:

Well, actually more like when you unlocked your door, every other door on the street unlocked for you too

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Jun 15 2011
Mark Twain, probably

Nissan LEAF leaks position, speed information via its RSS reader

Nissan LEAF leaks position, speed information via its RSS reader

The Nissan LEAF all-electric car is full of technological firsts. One of which is a GSM cellular connection to the internet for providing voluntary telemetry information to Nissan, new charging stations, competitive driver rankings, and even RSS feeds. This is called Nissan CARWINGS.

Apparently when CARWINGS checks RSS feeds, it sends a bunch of parameters in the query string. Parameters like these:

“lat” and “lon” variables contain the current position of the vehicle, “speed” is the vehicle speed, “car_dir” is the direction of the car, and “lat_dst” and “lon_dst” is your destination configured in your navigation system”

All of these lovely values are being provided to any third party RSS provider you configure: CNN, Fox News, Weather Channel, it doesn’t matter!

Oh dear.

On the upside, this post does contain a demo of a cool location-based weather RSS feed, so uh, I guess it’s not all bad news for Nissan. (It’s all bad news for Nissan.)

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