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

[amuchmoreexotic.livejournal.com]

Oyster cards have a chip which does apparently store a small amount of data including your balance or ticket. It has to work like that, because you couldn't instantly look up the balance associated with a given card in a central database at every transaction - especially on a bus with no data link available - so what happens is that they periodically check that your balance matches up with the transactions on record.

Presumably if your balance suddenly shoots up 20 quid with no associated payment transaction, they will realise and ban your card.

If the readers were badly programmed enough, you could fill an Oyster chip with nonsense data and crash the reader. In theory you could try to trick the readers into running code you had put on the Oyster chip (which is what this cartoon (http://xkcd.com/327/) is on about). I doubt there would be enough space on the 1Kbyte Oyster chip to store anywhere near enough code to reprogram the terminal and make it "evil", though.

However, since other companies are making Oyster cards (e.g. that Pulse credit card), they might conceivably use a bigger chip (because it served a dual purpose) and give you more room to store evil code. Even then you couldn't really make a virus because there wouldn't be enough room to store the evil code on normal Oyster cards. You could conceivably have the reader put a reader-crashing nonsense value onto normal Oyster cards, or blank their balance.

The people designing the system would have to be naive to let any of this happen.

[barrysarll.livejournal.com]

Which wouldn't be a first in a major project of this sort but yeah, I take your point, it would need real dedication on the hacker's part and utter cluelessness on the system's. I think it must have been Charles Stross' Glasshouse which got me thinking about this, because what you describe there sounds very like the book's Curious Yellow virus.