Capri-Sun - like hope in a silver sachet

[alexsarll]

Technically adept types: would it theoretically be possible to make an Oyster card virus?

When I first saw that Virgin 1 was on Freeview, I was mainly excited about The Riches. Then I saw a trailer, and...I'm meant to take that accent of Eddie Izzard's seriously? Like I am Hugh Laurie's in House? There's no punchline? Yeah, maybe not. If I couldn't bear My Fair Lady or The Lady From Shanghai, no way can I take it in an ongoing series. So then I was excited about Battlestar Galactica until I realised it was the crappy original, and while I'd love to see Boston Legal, they've scheduled it against The Sopranos. But just before I dismissed this new channel as a bust, I remembered why I was recognising the name The Unit. It's the collaboration between Shawn "The Shield" Ryan and David Mamet about a US covert ops group (I would say Delta Force except these guys appear to be competent, so maybe think of them just as a US SAS), starring President Palmer from 24 as the operational commander and the T-1000 running things back at base. Tense and manly decisions are made, and stuff blows up. The other plot strand is basically Desperate Housewives except not achingly sh1t, with the unit's wives attempting to maintain both a semblance of normal domestic life, and the pretence that their husbands are in some boring logistics division and certainly not off about to get themselves killed in deniable ops behind enemy lines.
It is on Wednesday evenings. Thus far I have only seen one episode (the second of the first series), but I strongly recommend it.

Phonogram readers and the more-or-less sane will note that everyone interviewed in this piece about the Britpop revival is one of the era's war criminals. Why aren't Menswear touring? Why wasn't the return of Marion met with this sort of mainstream coverage?
(Still, even reading a Northern Uproar interview in 2007 can't be as sure a sign of the End Times as a really rather witty piece appearing in Observer Woman magazine)

Am more excited about Black Plastic later than I've been about a club in a while. I think it helps that this month's cover is the front of John Foxx's Metamatic, an album I somehow only discovered this month.

Comments

[p-dan-tic.livejournal.com]

osyster cards are magnetic so there's no place you could put code in for a virus - if that's what you're asking

[perfectlyvague.livejournal.com]

What if you uploaded it via a fridge door?

[p-dan-tic.livejournal.com]

it would have to be a *dirty* fridge door

[barrysarll.livejournal.com]

Sort of. I think I was considering it all too abstractly, just in terms of information rather than the actual technology. Thanks.

[p-dan-tic.livejournal.com]

well in theory you could code the computer so that a virus was set off my someone swiping their osyter, however the malicious code would be residing on the system that reads the oyster not the oyster itself

[barrysarll.livejournal.com]

So you couldn't render the card itself infectious to other readers, right?

[p-dan-tic.livejournal.com]

right

[p-dan-tic.livejournal.com]

basically the osyter is nothing more than a barcode, only communicate through magnets rather than black lines and a scanner

[barrysarll.livejournal.com]

Gotcha.