darksaber - Slashdot User

Submission + - Researcher Discovers ATM Hack, Get's Silenced (technologyreview.com)

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on Friday July 10, 2009 @09:51AM

Al writes: "A researcher working for networking company Juniper has been forced to cancel a Black Hat presentation that would have revealed a way to hack into ATM machines. The presentation would have focused on exploiting vulnerabilities in devices running the Windows CE operating system, including some ATMs. The decision to cancel was taken to give the vendor concerned time to patch the problem, although the company was notified many months ago. The article above mentions a growing trend in ATM hacking. In November 2008 thieves stole nearly $9 million from more than 130 cash machines in 49 cities worldwide, and in January of this year, the second biggest maker of ATMs, Diebold, warned customers in an advisory that certain cash machines in Eastern Europe had been loaded with malicious software capable of stealing financial information and the secret PINs from customers performing ATM transactions."

Submission + - What is the best algorithm for HAND sorting? 2

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EricHsu

on Friday July 10, 2009 @02:52AM

EricHsu writes: "I'm a teacher and I've often had to sort stacks of 20-100 papers by last name. For I while I did what I suppose most hand sorters do: I made a new stack and added new papers in order. I believe this is basically insertion sort, right?

After a while, this felt inefficient, particular since it's relatively slow to flip through the papers. So I tried a kind of bucket sort where I first sorted papers into four piles of lead letter ranges, like [A-F][G-M][N-S][T-Z], and then did an insertion sort on the piles. This seemed to go faster, but it was a bit confusing to remember which letters bounded each pile.

It seemed to me that someone must have thought about this harder that I have and that such a geek could be found on Slashdot. In particular, it seems to me that one could do a somewhat detailed study of hand-sorting algorithms by modifying analyses of computer sorting algorithms, which usually take into account number of comparisons and memory usage etc, taking into account human parameters like difficulty of flipping papers, difficulty of remembering the algorithm, how many papers one can hold easily in a single hand, difficulty of accessing piles as the number grows.

So, any careful analyses out there? Or failing that, any great hand sorting algorithms?"

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