July 16, 2016

Man has travel chip implanted in his hand

Filed under: Technology,Weird by Orangemaster @ 9:37 am

Tom van Oudenaaarden from Utrecht has has a public transport chip implanted in his right hand. The photos of it are nasty because the work has just been done, but the chip works fine, as this very short video proves. So far he has only used his implant to check in and out of ports, and has yet to encounter train staff who would need to check what would normally be a chip card in a handheld device to be sure he’s paid his fare.

And Van Oudenaaarden is no stranger to implants, piercings or tattoos either. He’s had a LED-lamp implanted in his arm and has implanted chips that will start his motorbike and car, open his laptop and his shop. The idea was to get rid of his wallet and a big bunch of keys and show what technology can do.

If you’re wondering, his chip is good to go until 2021. Listen to more about it in Dutch.

(Link: nos.nl, Photo by Franklin Heijnen, some rights reserved)

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October 2, 2014

Dutch Rail sings to shafted train travellers

Filed under: Music,Weird by Orangemaster @ 12:18 pm

Why say sorry if you can sing it, make people smile and rip them off even more? That is exactly what Dutch Rail decided to do when they apparently hired jazz singer songwriter Baer Traa to pose (!) as fictitious train conductor Job van Gils.

Dutch Rail has been making a veritable fortune by not paying back any money owed to people who forgot to check out with their public transport chip card. Now subscriptions holders who forget their pass card and have had to pay a fine cannot ask for their money back either. Even the Dutch Rail employees are appalled and somehow somewhere Baer Traa dressed up as a train conductor got a gig telling people ‘sorry’, or in less polite and more accurate terms, how Dutch Rail is screwing them over easy.

Traa gives ‘peddling excuses’ a whole new meaning at Amsterdam Central Station in this video. He starts singing again at 1:08, as the beginning of the video was the end of one song. He actually tries to explain that Dutch Rail has a new policy that shafts more people than even before.

(Link: brekend.nl, Photo by Flickr user UggBoy hearts UggGirl, some rights reserved)

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March 10, 2011

Public transport chip card nabs two privacy breach awards

Filed under: General,IT by Orangemaster @ 11:55 am

The Big Brother Awards 2010 for the ‘worse breacher of privacy’ was awarded to Trans Link Systems (TLS), the folks who brought to you the disaster of a public transport chip card here in the Netherlands. Even the public’s choice award went to them for the double whammy. The card has been cracked every which way possible, but the makers pretend they have the situation under control, but they don’t.

From unnecessarily fingerprinting the Dutch for a passport to forcing visitors of the city of Haarlem to register their comings and goings by car with their licence plates, breaching people’s privacy in the name of safety is illegal as well as a very slippery slope. In the Netherlands, citizens’ movement Bits of Freedom continues to draw attention to these problems and has had some success.

What a weird idea: the government breaks its own privacy laws made to protect citizens in order to check whether citizens are breaking the law. That can’t be good.

(Link: nu.nl)

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January 26, 2011

Free and undetected travel with public transport chip card

Filed under: Technology by Orangemaster @ 1:24 pm

After a series of nasty blows, like bludgeoning some game monster that just won’t die, the Dutch public transport chip card has been given what mainstream media see as the kiss of death.

With a computer running Windows and a hacker’s program called LogicAnalyz3r, not only can you top up your chip card like there’s no tomorrow, but travel without any kind of detection. If you put fake money on a proper card, check in or out normally while it doesn’t register, you have yourself a ticket to ride.

“The gates and top-up devices don’t check whether actual money was transferred from the bank to your chip card. Cracking the card takes about an hour, after that, it’s just a matter of seconds.”

Yes, it’s in Dutch, but computer magazine PC-Active has written up the entire how to in a handy PDF.

TLS, the company responsible for the chip card kept saying this was ‘a hacker thing, and not for ordinary people’. If that’s not begging to be bludgeoned by hackers, I don’t know what it. TLS’ Financial Director was pathetically (yes, value judgement) quoted on telly yesterday as saying, “It’s forbidden, why would anybody do that?” Sure dude, nobody downloads from the Internet, that would be wrong.

Yes, NOS Dutch news item is in Dutch, but it’s all about the tech shown in the video.
‘Tampering with balance on chipcard is easy’

UPDATE: TLS is currently looking for a Security Officer & Fraud Manager (Thanks @AlexanderNL, @gronical!)

(Link: webwereld, Photo by Franklin Heijnen, some rights reserved)

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May 28, 2010

Dustbins open with any magnetic strip card

Filed under: General,Weird by Orangemaster @ 10:08 am

After posting a video a on how a public transport chip card opens dustbins in Eindhoven, now there’s a sequel and prequel of dustbins in Amsterdam North that can be opened with a selection of cards.

In the video, the dustbin in question can be opened with any card that has a magnetic strip, even without a chip in it.

Big hairy deal? Well, if you lose your dustbin pass, you have to pay some 20-30 euro to get a new one, one of the guys in the video explains. You also need to pay money to actually get extra ones for your household. The point is to pay to put out your trash, as some municipalities let people pay this way instead of collecting taxes for rubbish. In Nijmegen we used to have to buy special bags at one guilder (pre-euro currency) a pop to use for rubbish, otherwise we could have been fined.

And the fun doesn’t stop there. A few days before this video, Amsterdam telly station AT5 also shot a nice video of a five-year-old working some dustbin pass magic, using a discarded public transport chip card. The whole point of the Amsterdam North district installing these dustbins was so that the locals could dump their trash in it and not just anybody. In this video, which was more about the privacy issues surrounding the public transport chip card, you’ll see that someone managed to order a legit card using a foto of Osama Ben Laden.

The little boy sums it up well: ‘It just crazy that it can be opened that way.”

(Link: at5.nl, Photo by Franklin Heijnen, some rights reserved)

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January 21, 2010

Public transport chip card opens dustbins

Filed under: Technology,Weird by Orangemaster @ 11:34 am

To add to the problems and weirdness surrounding the country’s new public transport chip card, a circus that is in its second year, students at the University of Eindhoven have a nice video for you in Dutch.

Students got their special, reduced rate cards not long ago and lo and behold, they don’t work with certain bus companies, can’t be topped up properly sometimes or too much is often deducted from the card and a whole list of other issues.

Just like magic, in this video, you can see the erratic public transport chip card open the city’s underground dustbins that can apparently only be opened with a special city pass that is linked to one’s postal code, as to only dump trash in your own ‘hood.

(Link: rtl.nl)

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