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dallaskorben

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Everything posted by dallaskorben

  1. I think that in theory at least it should be possible to write onto a card using homebrew equipment, but I haven't seen any projects or websites describing it exactly. Also I think that depending on if the card is high-coercivity or low-coercivity will make a difference (the wikipedia entry for Magnetic_stripe_card explains a bit about different types of magstripes). Maybe a record head from a tape recorder could work, I am not sure - I haven't seen a definitive answer to that question yet. Another issue to deal with for writing cards would be timing - maybe it will be difficult to accurately write to a card when it is hand-swiped (a motorized writing mechanism to move the write head over the stripe at a steady speed could solve this issue). A homebrew magstripe writer would be an interesting project, but probably quite complex to get it working successfully and reliably.
  2. Hi guys, sorry it took me a while but I updated the link in my previous post to a working download. (no longer on rapidshare, now on a personal server so the link shouldn't expire anymore) You can get the file here: http://www.dakorb.com/files/mag-20090201.zip
  3. Does anybody know of a flat-rate shipping option in Canada? All I've been able to find are eBay Canada Post flat rate boxes, but I think you can only use shipping labels from ebay auctions on the box. Canada Post's parcel rate looks ok, but it would be nice to know a flat rate in advance. Anyway, I am putting together another box of junk - the Hak5 Box of Junk Canadian Edition, eh. ;) It could be sent across the border also, but it will probably be cheaper to keep it in Canada. If there is anybody interested, PM me.
  4. Port 25 can often be blocked, you can try port 587 on smtp.live.com. (I can telnet to smtp.live.com:587 and talk to the server, but not port 25 - I guess my isp is blocking it?) edit: I see your Python code is using port 587 - so I don't know what the problem is there, sorry.
  5. The mag.c program is a console app, you need to run it from the command line. The command "mag decode sample.wav" will output: ";6006491630003757904=161211069586096?4". mag.c is quite limited, it only understands track 2 data, I wrote it as a learning exercise - don't expect a lot from it. (but if it helps you understand how the data is stored on a magstripe, great!) I don't know about anybody else (I'm quite surprised how many people have downloaded the file from my post in this thread), my interest in this was just to see how easy it was to read magnetic data with a magnetic head. I agree that buying a reader is a better way to go about reading the data from most cards. But I still like to be able to do it this primitive way, just 'because I can'. :)
  6. I re-uploaded the file and adjusted the link in post #22 - it should be ok now.
  7. The time that RAM will hold data without power can be affected by a few factors. Some variables may include the type of memory and temperature. The 'data remanence' article on Wikipedia has a very brief description. I haven't done any experiments with DRAM in a PC, so I don't know firsthand how long data might last and under what circumstances. I have experimented a little bit with SRAM (in my case a smaller capacity chip used with a microcontroller) and in some cases data can last for a while (even seconds), though as time goes on more and more bits become corrupted. Cooling the chip can make a big difference - Sergei Skorobogatov published a paper about some experiments he did with cooling SRAM chips to retain their data (footnote #7 on the wikipedia article is a link to Skorobogatov's paper - http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/techreports/UCAM-CL-TR-536.html) DRAM will have different characteristics than SRAM - the DRAM should have much shorter retention time because it has to be frequently refreshed - but I have no idea of actual numbers. If you do some experiments with this, it would be interesting if you recorded and posted your results!
  8. I got the data from $_POST["buttonaction"]. I think it should work fine the way you say, using your javascript.
  9. I wanted to do something similar (have button/keypresses control something without having to reload the page). I played around a little bit with some AJAX stuff, in fact some of it is very simple. (much easier than I had expected it to be) Here's part of a page I made that uses AJAX to send button presses to the server. The ajax() function will do a POST to "buttonpress.php" with the variable buttonaction= whatever we pass ajax(). The buttonpress.php will execute the requested action depending on what buttonaction was passed to it. (so there are two .php files - the main one for the page, and buttonpress.php to take action on the pressed button) (in this example anything output by buttonpress.php will be ignored - the http request is sent, but no attempt to receive a response is made) Javascript for AJAX: <script type="text/javascript"> function ajax(buttonaction) { var request = new XMLHttpRequest(); request.open("POST", "buttonpress.php", true); request.setRequestHeader("Content-Type", "application/x-www-form-urlencoded"); request.send("buttonaction="+buttonaction); } </script> HTML that uses the above ajax() function: <form> <button name="buttonaction" onclick="ajax('1');">1</button> <button name="buttonaction" onclick="ajax('2');">2</button> <button name="buttonaction" onclick="ajax('3');">3</button><br> <button name="buttonaction" onclick="ajax('4');">4</button> <button name="buttonaction" onclick="ajax('5');">5</button> <button name="buttonaction" onclick="ajax('6');">6</button><br> <button name="buttonaction" onclick="ajax('7');">7</button> <button name="buttonaction" onclick="ajax('8');">8</button> <button name="buttonaction" onclick="ajax('9');">9</button><br> <button name="buttonaction" onclick="ajax('0');">0</button> </form>
  10. Are you familiar with 419 Eater? Several funny stories and photos sent to them by scammers. (the hall of fame is hilarious)
  11. I don't know what the best choice might be, I imagine it will have to be a 32-bit platform (like ARM, or AVR32). I have one of these: http://www.atmel.com/dyn/products/tools_ca...sp?tool_id=4102 - ATNGW100 development board for AVR32. It runs Linux and is quite powerful and small, but not as inexpensive as something like an Arduino. (ATNGW100 sells for about $90, and I think you might have to add some hardware to interface between the video source and the ATNGW100) There are also various ARM development boards that may be interesting. (AVR32 is relatively new and is Atmel-only, ARM is more widespread and different manufacturers make ARM chips) Maybe a small form factor PC would do the job? (something with a nano-ITX board or something else small) That would sure make the USB stuff and video capture easy to put together. What resolution of video do you want to capture, and at what framerate?
  12. I'm pretty sure the Arduino is not powerful enough to handle video. Maybe there is a chip or board that can handle the conversion from analog to digital video, which the Arduino could control. But I don't think you could pass all the data through the Arduino, I don't think it's fast enough to keep up - even if you had a codec that was feeding the Arduino compressed video, I think the Arduino would still be too slow. (and probably the speed it can write to a memory stick isn't very fast)
  13. If you want to connect a USB key to the microcontroller, the microcontroller will need to be able to act as a USB host. I don't know if there is a real cheap/simple way to do that. If you're willing to use an SD card, I think they usually are simple to interface with microcontrollers. A quick google found a thread on the Arduino forum that seems to cover reading/writing an SD card. (I have only played with an Arduino Duemilanove a bit, I'm not familiar with the other Arduino devices, and I haven't tried interfacing SD with it) An Arduino would work well for the USB connection to PC (as would a Teensy - it's also small and cheap). You might want to look around on Avrfreaks.net, it's a great site to check for information and projects using AVR chips (there may be a project similar to what you want, that you can modify) and the forums are very helpful too. To read/write a USB key is possible but I think it would require more hardware than just an Arduino (a USB host), and I think in most cases it would be considerably more cost/trouble compared to using SD.
  14. Are cards for the system available somewhere? I am curious about them, but I don't know of any laundry machines near me that use the system.
  15. I edited my previous post (#22 in this thread) with a new rapidshare link, it should be working again.
  16. When I searched on eBay for 'blue laser', the first result is: 150mW 405nm Blue-Violet "blu-ray" Laser Diode in Module Class 3b burning laser. FREE Driver Kit Included! Is this what you are looking for?
  17. I've never seen a key like that before, it looks very interesting. Do you have any information about the manufacturer of the key or the locks?
  18. If nothing else, I think the pictures we get to see of major cities around the world gone black are worth turning the lights off for an hour. (here's a link I found with a few pictures of Toronto taken during last year's Earth Hour. I remember on the news last year they showed satellite photos comparing cities on a normal night to what they looked like during Earth Hour and it was quite impressive.
  19. I have an account with a lab chemical supplier, I pay about a hundred bucks for 250 mL. Most commonly available nitric acid is 69%, which will cause damage to chips - for work with ICs 90% or higher is used (or even >99%). Nitric acid is pretty aggressive stuff, it can burn your skin and the fumes cause lung problems. Some things, when mixed with nitric acid, ignite. Nitric acid can be used in explosives, in some areas purchasing high purity nitric acid may get you put on some kind of watch list, at the least.
  20. I use nitric acid to remove the plastic packaging around the chip, which leaves a nice clean silicon die (still working). I use the ultrasonic bath for cleaning the chip. The chip is a silicon base with metal and insulating layers deposited on top, with a glass-like protective layer on top of all that. As long as no chemicals are used which damage the exposed surfaces, the chip continues working. Or sometimes I use other chemicals to etch away some of the metal and insulating layers, to be able to study the lower layers of interconnects or the silicon base itself. (of course once part of the chip is removed, it will no longer work) This picture shows a chip (the same as the link in my previous post) with the bonding wires that connected the die to the pins on the plastic package. The plastic package has been removed (dissolved in nitric acid), but the wires are still attached to the die.
  21. I haven't built one, but I am interested in the design of processors (and other ICs). I have decapsulated many chips to study under microscope (but I have never fully reverse-engineered a chip, usually I am just interested in some design aspects and memory contents). Here's a flickr link of an older ROM chip (from a NES Super Mario Bros/Duck Hunt cartridge) I photographed. Are you going to implement the design on an FPGA, or is it simulation only?
  22. I don't know for sure (I haven't tried it), but I think to use a regular modem with a cell phone (through the handsfree connection) will have a lot more trouble than using a cordless phone. With the cell phone, it is doing an analog->digital conversion (to send the digital data to the cell tower), and from what I understand the digital compression is optimized for voice, and will probably cut out important frequencies for a modem. Your modem can probably be forced to ignore dialtone. I am not up-to-date on modem AT-commands, but I'm pretty sure I remember that at least some modems had an AT command to ignore dialtone - it's probably standard in most (all?) modems now. I'd suggest trying to get it working with a cordless phone first, it should be easier than a cell phone. Then if you can make the cordless phone work, you'll probably be very close to making a cell phone work.
  23. I don't know if what you want to do is possible. I think the basic idea is fine - the modem signal is sound, so it could be possible to pass it through a cordless phone. But - I think the line levels between a phone outlet, and a phone's headset connection are different - I don't think the modem and the cordless phone will be happy talking to each other. Another issue that I think may come up is signal quality - there may be too much degradation in the phone signal by the cordless phone for the modem to be able to cope with it. (a bit of noise in the signal should be easy enough for the modem to cope with, it can drop to a lower speed to compensate, but a cordless phone may not pass all the frequencies used by modems - I am not sure the frequencies are the same range as DTMF signals, modems may use a wider range) Really I don't know how hard it will be to make your project work. If you can find out if the line levels and the signal quality/frequency range is ok then I think you can make it work.
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