April 20, 2014

New Greetings from Holland

Filed under: Photography by Branko Collin @ 9:21 am

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In 2009 four organisations decided it was time to reboot Dutch travel postcards, the ones containing cheese, windmills, cows, cheese, wooden shoes, cheese, cheese, tulips and cheese, amongst others. Have I mentioned cheese?

They asked the public to come up with new iconic images of the Netherlands and some 8,000 people responded by sending in photos, often reproducing, referencing or riffing off the same old icons. The resulting postcards were displayed in a travelling exhibition called Nieuwe Groeten Uit… and writer-photographer Hans Aarsman and writer Anna Woltz collected a selection of the cards in an almost-postcard-sized book of the same name.

Hans Aarsman told his publisher Nieuw Amsterdam in the video interview shown here: “You see a lot of family photography. For instance, there is picture of a father and son peeing off a boat together, taken from the back—you just know the mother took that photo. […] You [to Woltz, ed.] wrote about how people photographed their pets, believing the result to be iconic images of the Netherlands. And the funny thing is sometimes that is true.”

The Nieuwe Groeten Uit… exhibit was organised by the short-lived Nationaal Historisch Museum and by FOAM, ANP Historisch Archief and BankGiro Loterij.

(Source photo: Flickr / Nationaal Historisch Museum)

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August 25, 2012

The least safe PIN is 2580

Filed under: Technology by Branko Collin @ 1:04 pm

Two students of the Eindhoven University of Technology have discovered that the least safe code for your bank card (PIN) is 2580.

They did this by estimating which hand movements are easiest to observe, then calculating the amount of fits for each series of movements. The PIN 2580 on a grid that consists of the rows 123, 456, 789 and x0x requires a continuous downward motion of the hand, and is the only code possible for that series of movements. A bad actor should be able to guess that PIN 100% of the time.

Eindhoven Dichtbij reports that 292 codes can be guessed in three goes after observing hand movements. This also produces a 100% success rate, assuming the bad actors get three attempts before access is blocked. Codes that are relatively safe require lots of back and forth movements. The code 1959 belongs to the same set of hand movements as 105 other PINs.

I wonder if making fake movements would help against PIN thieves?

The students, Anne Eggels and Aukje Boef, also considered other ways of hacking PINs:

  • Dabbing the keys in salts, and measuring which salts were gone after use of the keypad—especially useful for PINs in which the same key is used more than once.*
  • Camera surveillance.
  • Observing wear and tear of keys—useful in locations where the same PIN is shared my most users, such as nursing home wards.

Aukje Boef has a telling name by the way, as her last name means ‘crook’ in Dutch.

Update: found an article from last year that claims 2580 is the third most used PIN.

*) This is an old trick that I was aware of. To this day paranoid me wipes all keys with his fingers after entering a code.

(Photo by Flickr user Redspotted, some rights reserved. Link: Bright.)

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February 18, 2012

Dutch banks won’t employ anti-skimming hook

Filed under: Technology by Branko Collin @ 5:56 pm

Banks like ING, ABN Amro and Rabobank refuse to fit their ATMs with special anti-skimming devices that have proven successful on ticket vending machines, Webwereld reported last Wednesday.

This despite the fact that, according to the same publication, skimming is still very much a problem in the Netherlands. In January the police caught a Romanian gang of skimmers that stole from the bank accounts of thousands of people.

Dutch Rail and Amsterdam’s public transport company GVB claim that since they introduced the so-called anti-skimming hook, their ticket vending machines have no longer been misused by skimmers.

The hook lets you insert your bank or credit card. If skimmers manage to remove the hook, the entire machine shuts down.

ING and Rabobank claim that they employ their own anti-skimming technology, ABN Amro says that it isn’t easy to fit existing machines with the hooks. Bank cards both chips and magnetic strips on them, the latter being susceptible to misuse. Banks have started a campaign to encourage consumers to use the chip rather than the magnetic strip. The latter cannot fully be replaced, as magnetic strips are still required in countries like the USA which have yet to adopt the chip-based technology.

(Photo of an anti-skimming hook discovered during a police raid, by Politie Haaglanden)

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March 23, 2007

Pick of the day

Filed under: General by Orangemaster @ 11:53 am
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Dutch bank ABN Amro is currently having all its ATMs cleaned following the results of a nation-wide survey on nose-picking. The survey showed that ATMs and bankcard devices in shops are covered in bacteria coming from people’s noses.

The hygiene survey was conducted by Dutch health magazine GezondNU. Some 90% of the population admits picking their nose. Half of them do it once of several times a day. Men pick their noses much more than women do. Favourite nose-picking places include on the couch and in the car. More than 50% of people deposit their ‘findings’ in a handkerchief. Almost 10% eat them. One third of men roll them into a ball and then flick it away.

(Link)

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