As well as general rantings, one of the main purposes of this site was for me to blog about the ins and outs of working on software. It hasn’t quite worked out like that, has it? The main reason is the speed at which my development goes; two to three hundred projects (in Visual Studio alone) can make someone a bit quick at getting something designed and developed. Because of this, blogging would just slow things right down.

The only real good shot I’d have at blogging the development of an application would be to work on something using a new technology (eurgh – I don’t like applying the technology term to software) that I would have to learn as I go.

Here enters WPF. Despite messing about with it and getting three or four apps at a good stage using it, I’m still not completely sure on quite a few things, such as best design practices. Besides, the app-to-blogged-about has already been to an advanced state-of-being in Windows Forms, but the direction of both the application and the source wasn’t quite where I wanted them to be. These two reasons, among the “new tech” reason and possibly others, are why I will artificially slow down its development to a degree that I can make blog posts about what I’ve done that session/day/period.

It’s FluidBar that I will be working on in .NET 4 and Visual Studio 2010 Ultimate RC. At the time of this post, that link reflects the WinForms version (take a look at its Requires field).

The next blog post should be about FluidBar and Visual Studio 2010, so stay tuned if that kinda thing does it for you, I guess.

For ten days.

For nothing.

On the ninth day, I contacted them and they replied on the tenth saying that my order wasn’t accepted. Erm, but it said it was? Nice. Ten very impatient days waiting for something that was destined to never turn up. I tried ordering again, but continually got a different error of Our server is under heavy load, please try again later. I gave up.

While checking my online bank statement, I noticed there was a debit for £30 with the transaction ID of O2UK (Nelson) 01753 565969. I last used my O2 phone 1.5 years ago, so this… ain’t good.

It appears I became the victim of fraud. For the second time.

How Did It Happen?

I’m not entirely sure. There appears to be two current theories on why it happens, and continues to happen to hundreds – if not thousands – of people every day. It’s a very common occurrence. For completeness, I’ve included an additional common method.

Compromised Server. The first theory is that the company you’re purchasing from has a server that is compromised in some way. This can be anything from logging software to an employee taking notes on phoned-in payments. I used the Dreamhost  website (based in the US) for the first time to place an order a few years back, and I got defrauded two days later. The same happened with Lenovo; my very first order with them and I got defrauded about fourteen days later. I’m inclined to say something about the payment process was compromised.

This could all be a coincidence, but I use my card online quite a bit and have never had any problems. The ordering problems with Lenovo, as mentioned above, seem to make me think that it may not be a coincidence.

Sequential Numbering. This one sounds plausible until you actually think about it a bit. Someone, or a lot of someones, generate a huge amount of valid card numbers (very easy to do, but they simply pass a verification check and nothing else) and test those numbers with a series of expiry dates and C2V numbers until they get a valid combination.

There are reportedly 10 quintillion combinations if the long number and CV2 are taken into account (maybe ~10 billion actual usable combinations due to the built-in checksum check digit). This makes the numbering method sound impossible. Even so, it’s apparently a much-used approach.

Skimming. The oldest of the three listed methods and the only one that directly involves the physical card itself.

This can happen at a petrol station, a restaurant, or any other place that can hide your card momentarily from you for it to be swiped, or even right under your nose if it’s an ATM. A card reader (skimmer) is installed, possibly with a video camera to observe you inputting your PIN, and made to look like part of the original hardware. Your card information (and any associated video) is stored for later retrieval.

In the case of a petrol station or restaurant, the card can be swiped without the card holder’s knowledge. For example, there could be a swiping machine under the counter at a petrol station.

£30? Why Not More?

The £30 mobile top-up is a test by the fraudsters to see if the card is valid, and if it is, it’s an amount small enough to hopefully go unnoticed. Sometimes they will try and charge an amount equalling around 1 pence, with the reason being that some banks don’t actually show such a small charge in bank statements; although the Unavailable and Available cash balances will reflect that change.

Why O2 or Vodafone? Because, especially in O2’s case, these two companies have very lax security and have no qualms with a customer immediately using any new card with their account – there is no card-to-account association required. O2 – formerly BT Cellnet – have allowed this since the year 2000. It’s a fraudster’s card-verifying dream.

Once the card has been verified to be usable, the large transactions begin. The card gets absolutely hammered.

For informational purposes, the mobile top-ups are typically of the following variety: “O2UK (Nelson) 01753 565969“, “O2(UK)LTD PREPAY“, “Vodafone CR Card TopUp“.

Are the Banks Doing Anything About This?

In a word, no. Some banks will alert their customers to any transactions that look suspicious, but they don’t appear interested in stopping these fraudulent practices. Simply stated, it’s cheaper and easier for a bank to merely write off the lost money on their insurance than to do a true investigation, despite having dedicated fraud departments.

O2 make significant amounts of money for any top-ups that are not eventually charged-back. They use the excuse that adding any additional security checks would make life more difficult for customers.

So, What Ultimately Happens?

You’ll notify the bank about the rogue charges on your account (do this immediately!) and they will contact O2 or whomever took the money and then perform a charge-back, possibly requiring you to sign a form beforehand to confirm that it wasn’t you. You’ll more than likely get your money back, and you’ll hear absolutely nothing about what the outcome was.

Further Information

Below are some choice quotes from the following thread from MoneySavingExpert.com.

Blah99 says…

“The cause of this issue is to do with how purchase transactions are validated by some retailers, and a piece of software fairly well known in the fraud world. I won’t explain exactly what it is on a public forum, but it exploits how credit and debit cards are issued. As you know, all credit and debit cards have the same structure of data on them. This is a common standard known as ISO7812, and it defines how the data is structured and stored. Using certain techniques and software fraudsters are able to generate huge numbers of card details, which they then use in test transactions to check validity.

This is the cause of the O2 purchases people are seeing. Whilst it is possible that your card has been skimmed and this has happened, it’s unlikely. A known working card wouldn’t be used against a tiny test transaction – it would be hit for a significant amount, because it’s “known good”.

The bad news is that you have to get your card changed (so that the account number etc changes). The good news is that this is not identity theft, and people aren’t running up charges on your credit that you can’t see.”

Snarf999 says…

“The guy from MBNA said that this kind of activity is known and is usually from a brute force attack, trying as many credit card numbers as possible until one works.”

Like-a-Dream says…

“A Bank manager admitted to me that fraud was already so high the banks don’t want the public to be aware so they try and hush-up the extent of the frauds.”

The first one is Profile Relocator. This allows all newly-created Windows profiles to be created in a user-specified location. This is great if you’re not a nutter and want all of your profile data (including application data, desktop, favourites, etc) in a safe place in case you want to re-install Windows (not really required any more since Vista) or it somehow gets wanked and jizzes over everything.

The second is Wake On LAN Ex 2. Added some feature requests and squashed an exception on start-up.

Finally, the original Wake On LAN Ex was seemingly not providing the latest v0.96 release, but instead v0.95. No idea what the hell happened there, but it’s sorted now. You should be using WoLEX2 anyway.

But you’d know all this if you were following my lame Twitter crap.

Thank you, and good night.

It may be here, but it isn’t so quiet on Twitter. I’ve been posting there about my latest projects, such as Glassix (the 4th rewrite) and audioFlow (a rewrite of Hydrogen), along with work-in-progress screenshots. Along with occasional rants, because that’s what I do.

A quick summary of the current in-development application:

audioFlow is a suite requiring no third-party software that turns a PC into a web-enabled jukebox and streaming media centre. This is a rewrite of Hydrogen which I started almost a decade ago. For live updates on its progress, see Twitter here.

Oh, and you may get glimpses of my Lenovo IdeaPad S10-3t antics. Which I haven’t bought yet. But will do. Why the hell are the buying options for it so limited on the UK Lenovo store? Grr.

I haven’t really planned it as such, but it’s going to include:

Pork, lamb, beef, chicken, turkey, chicken liver, lamb liver, pancetta, bacon, sasuages, meatballs, king prawns, scallops, Gouda cheese, Gorgonzola blue cheese sauce, parmesan cheese, Roquefort cheese, mozzarella ball, cauliflower, spinach, small amount of diced onion, and garlic butter. Let’s not forget the freeze-dried chives that I’m so fond of.

This is going to be hard to proportion as I don’t really eat that much since cutting out all of the carby crap. The temptation to make a huge ball of meat with a cheesy centre and crunchy pork coating has been resisted. Just.

A nice chilled glass of diesel will be the finisher. Or just water, as that’s the only thing I drink now.

I’ve started posting the odd picture and photo to my Twitter crap, so look out for any pics of my disgusting mess there.

Edit: Just had the idea of blending the whole lot, a la paté, and making it into a ball. The only problem is that this idea is making me feel queasy. I’d hate to see what it looked or smelt like. Yetch.

While I do like the nice smooth rainbow colours of this one, it does unfortunately seem to suggest I like to be bummed. So it must be changed.

One day soon, I should shave it all off except for the bit directly under the nose.

Just for a day. See what people say. The Charlie Chaplin look hasn’t been seen in a very long time and should at least be given a chance for revival. It’s a very classical look. One that reminds us of an earlier time. A more simpler time.

And by Charlie Chaplin, I mean Adolph Hitler.

For one day.

Just one.

Fast boot is good. Systray not saving icon information is shit. Fast shut-down is good. Still no way to fully relocate user profile is shit. Taskbar is good. Taskbar is shit. Swishy effects is good. MSI Media Live fucking up and repeatedly resetting its graphics adapter is shit. Fast in general is good. File associations not saving is shit. ClickOnce apps not working is shit. VERY SHIT. Stop using ClickOnce, you dopey fucks. Users don’t like it, and I can’t even use it now.

Review complete.

This is wrong.

It seems the sites that are reporting the story that tens of thousands of account details have been publicly published aren’t being clear. These details have been obtained due to phishing, and not due to details being leaked from the respective services.

If you haven’t been stupid and entered your account details where you shouldn’t have (on a website; the most popular one being some thing where you can see who has blocked you on MSN Messenger), then you are fine – no need to change your password or anything.

Alcohol is the liquid of choice for people that want to die. At least that’s how I think the tag line should go. I sort of bypassed the whole drinking-til-you-spew phase that so many teenagers go through, which is why I haven’t accepted the alcoholic taste as something a human should have to endure without torture of the plums being involved.

I watched a 3-part TV programme called Neil Morrissey’s Risky Business that had wot’s-his-face and some chef I never heard of called Richard Fox embark on a dream of theirs to get a new beer/ale into the UK market. It began with them setting out to buy a pub with the facility of having an on-site micro-brewery all the way up to pushing the beer-cum-ale onto the market via a supermarket chain – Tesco, in this case. The series seemed to end abruptly for some reason, but anyway, I decided to give their Blonde Ale a go. While purchasing, I thought I might as well grab a couple of others while I was at it to give me an excuse of writing this very post you’re reading right now.

I only bought three: Morrissey Fox Blonde Ale, Strongbow Sirrus, and Guinness Stout. I didn’t bother with any more as I was pretty certain that they’d go down the sink in the end. Okay, let’s start with…

Morrissey Fox – Blonde Ale

Off came the cap so I could give it a quick smell, and, yeah, it’s that standard beer whiff. So I’m already not looking forward to it, unfortunately. It’s supposedly very weak as a beer or ale, so this is one of the reasons why I decided to try it first.

Truly disgusting. Even worse, the after taste! Oh my friggin’ god! It’s like someone has boiled a whole load of compost and bottled the ploppy liquids. The label on the bottle says it’s “Light and refreshing with a full body and flowery nose”. It should probably say “Distilled donkey cack with the aromatic after-taste of rotting corpse”.

I don’t suppose I can entirely pin the minging taste on the beer/ale itself as they all seem to have that initial spunky cock explosion of taste, but the after-taste on this one is entirely new. After a few minutes it gets really bitter, bitter to the point I can only describe it as if I had been chewing on a bike’s warm inner-tube after a bout of furious cycling.

I left the bottles of Satan’s Piss in the fridge for a few days to ensure they were all nice and cool as I know how well the cold dulls flavours. I can’t imagine the horror of Morrissey Fox’s Blonde Ale if it wasn’t fridged up the wazoo. It would be like warm cack ‘n’ corpse, I’d guess.

I managed to drink under 100ml of the 500ml bottle before I had to pour it down the bog. I’m going to have to find myself a Toilet Grenade to purify the crapper, now.

Strongbow Sirrus (Cider)

Cider, hay? Okay, I’m not looking forward to this as cider has the stigma of being the alcohol of choice for chavvy-pikey scum and we all know the dodgy crud they like to shove down their gobs. Plus, I’m fairly sure I’ve had cider before and I hated it. But, enough of the preamble, let’s try this mother out…

Cap removed, quick sniff and yeah – it smells like your standard alcohol. The clear glass bottle and bright orange liquid give the impression that you’re about to drink a citrus nectar from the gods themselves. Oh sir, how wrong I was. The very first small sip I took didn’t taste too bad; the alcoholic taste was there, but less pronounced. I wrote the above paragraph and then took a much bigger gulp and, aye, it tasted like a standard disgusting weirdly-sweet lager.

Sirrus seems to activate the gag reflex in me quite easily; I suspect this is the alcoholic equivalent of sucking off a tramp with a big warty cock.

The vapour seemed to hang around in my throat for a few seconds after swallowing, and each time I was sure I was going to be sick. The alcohol taste seems to get much stronger each time I took a drink; I’m banking on being to power a car with my piss at this rate once I’ve finished the bottle.

Except I poured it down the sink. There’s no way I’m even going to attempt to finish this. Eugh.

Pimm’s & Lemonade

We have a bonus girlie drink! It was there, so I took it. Wanna fight about it? This is apparently the No1 Cup they do. I’ve read about the cups thing they did, and No1 is based on gin. Which I’ve never had before. The can has been designed to sort of look like a standard soft-drink, so how bad can it be?

Holy christ, it can be damn bad. I opened it and bubbles came pouring it – and like a good panic-ee, I stuck my gob over it. And coughed. Just the weedy little bubbles tasted like pure concentrated rape, so actually drinking this mess is going to be fun. Oh yes, there we go… the familiar spirit taste. The initial glug isn’t that bad; it’s just the after-taste that makes it taste like a hobo’s hair-matted armpit.

Hello sink; once again we meet under stressful conditions.