The EMV (ISO/IEC 7816-3) standard allows for a change PIN function that will take a 6 digit PIN. Some banks around the world operate with a 6-digit PIN.

This article explains the difference between the Scottish NHS and other parts of the UK. This is becoming a political hot potato in the run up to the 2014 Referendum for Scottish independence from the UK because whilst the English NHS is suffering huge setbacks after much of the service was privatised, Scotland's NHS was more tightly controlled by the devolved Scottish Government and less was outsourced to private consortia.

Even though Scottish tax payers pay the same as those south of the border; they receive much better treatment, free prescription drugs and many other benefits.

at my local OWASP chapter meeting some months ago, we did a show of hands about how many people had reported via the pay-for-security-bug middlemen organisations rather than contacting the vendor/website directly. About 30% put their hands up. I was quite astounded although, having been threatened legally myself when I was called in a bug found on an eComm website then I would no longer go directly to the owner of the system unless I had a contract in place already. The money is apparently quite good; so long as you don't care who is using the bug...

why would you bother storing hashed and salted credit card information? The only thing you could do is match it against the credit card used on the next transaction - but what does that really get you? The hashed/salted card number would be usable again (if hashed+salted properly)

I'd agree with this analysis because there were some massive interuptions with middle eastern internet comms when the SEA-ME-WE_4 cable was apparently snagged by ships at anchor of Alexandria. Interestingly, Egypt actually arrested 3 men for cutting though cable off Alexandria in March this year. makes you wonder what they were actually doing.

luckily computing power and searching ability has increased a little bit in the last decade. Sure, the pilot programme was able to take clear photos of the football fans as they went in (I seem to remember the volunteers were given free stuff as an incentive). In 2005, the London Underground tried out the technology with not great results but that was an awfully long time ago.

even older news! I saw the anglo-dutch company Logica demonstrate this at a PSV Eindhoven football (soccer) match where it picked a dozen volunteers (who were photo'd before the match) out of the 20,000 strong crowd using the stadiums own crappy cctv footage - this was in the early to mid 2000's. It wasn't perfect but was above 90%.

Sadly, the UK is way ahead when it comes to CCTV technology.

I used to be a tech interviewer at a large UK technical consultancy in the 2000's and we frequently received CV's from Indian nationals that you could hold up to the light and see that the CV's were exactly the same and had exactly the same cut 'n paste text. This led to a pretty massive review of the recruitment process.

We also discovered fake UK companies setup purely to "employ" young middle class Indian graduates so they could get their Visa and then jump over to a large UK firm. These firms were on their CV's with faked up job roles - it was a total abuse of the visa system.

That's definitely true. A UK political programme on TV last night that was focussed on the thorny issue of Scottish independence ended up talking about the US and their spying intentions. Even the politically mixed audience, who had been arguing from different positions all through the programme, joined in condemnation of the US for unwarranted spying on personal communications.

The ECU is usually on the passenger side of the car near the glove box. There's well known augmentations to the ECU (or replacement ECU) attacks in order to drive a car away. Even BMW had a flaw in their ECU that allowed an unauthenticated person to create a key (from a blank) in the car. That attack (if you look at the CCTV images on the link at pistonheads) had attackers using the passenger door to enter.

my thought was that the ECU is usually in the passenger footwell and perhaps they are able to open the doors but not start the engine without an ECU mod; either a piggyback board or indeed complete replacement ECU.

I'd struggle to see how the owner of the rootkit could disclaim responsibility in a corporate scenario - especially if lives were lost (e.g. a member of staff, not knowingly, installs a rootkit-installing version of Greys Anatomy into a hospital Citrix system). There's quite a cultural and legal difference between consuming media using devices and installing software that intends to change the behaviour of the end user device.

Also, the sheer volume of test-case and conditions could have hard to predict outcomes (e.g. watching a rootkit-installing DVD on a car infotainment system). Whilst I would think that some software organisations would be daft enough to produce software like this on behalf of the large media organisations I can't see how the business case could stack up given the huge amount of risk of doing this given that there is no way on most legal frameworks that responsibility could be disclaimed.

you can get married at all sorts of locations in Scotland - some really cool like the vaults under Edinburgh and in all sorts of buildings. As it happens we got married at Stirling Castle and had full run of the place which was a great laugh, she didn't like the idea of getting wedding photos straddling the huge cannons. I thought it would be funny. she not.

You may be aware - Scotland is due to have a referendum in 2014 to become an independent country and leave the rest of the UK. Whilst Scotland has it's own parliament and is a "country" - it is still controlled by a "union of parliaments" by Westminster, London. If Scotland votes yes then Scotland will be able to finance herself and make her own decisions. One of the key plans is to have a written constitution, although we helped write the USA's constitution, we were never allowed to have one by the UK. Scottish attitudes towards the human rights convention and the EU in general are quite different to that of the UK.

It is worth noting that there is a massive campaign of hate from the Unionist (i.e. "British") entities in Scotland which includes the state broadcaster. Scotland gets endless documentaries on "why Britain is great" etc and the BBC is heavily biased towards the Union.

here in Scotland, I always have a handful of Huawei USB 3g modems. Useful for home-office broadband as a backup (plugs directly into the Vigor Draytek router); I have one in a battery backed portable wifi hotspot (which is great for camping or whilst on the road) and usually a few in my bag when I'm out on client site. I use them with Fedora Linux; they work very well out of the box through networkmanager.

Top tip, use an external antenna and you'll get much better performance.

And then watch prices rise and choice narrowed as the homebuild market is eventually extinguished due to uefi non-compliance. It's what monopolies do.