"Check your ego at the door. No gods, no rockstars. Only n00bs." --thegibson

I try to go off the grid every couple of months to get away from everything and free up compute cycles for messing around with stuff. For whatever reason I find it helpful to go off to someplace quiet, possibly because it means that I can be nonverbal for a while. It definitely helps with my ADD. At any rate, that's my opportunity to teach myself some new things without having to multitask. When last I did this a couple of weeks back I brought with me …

When manufacturers of ATMs started using Windows to run them, you just knew that no good would come of it.

Eastern European banks discovered this the hard way when the security companies Sophos and SpiderLabs discovered strains of malware tailored for automated teller machines that record the second data track of banking cards inserted into the reader slot along with the PIN entered by the machine's user. That's really all you need to make a copy of the card and loot the account. As if that's not enough, the malware also makes it possible for anyone carrying a specially encoded …