The SmartSwipe Online Security, Shopping and Technology Blog

Phonebusters published some interesting information on their web site and I thought that I should share it with all of you. They released their statistics for December 2009 and those stats include a snapshot of the year in identity theft. Those statistics seem to indicate that fewer people fell victim to identity theft, but the average loss was much greater.

In 2008, 11,511 reported being the victims of identity theft. These people were victimized out of a total of $9,697,199.05. In 2009, only 11,135 people reported being the victims of identity theft but they lost a total of $10,993, 348.72. If you do the math, this means that in 2009, the average identity theft victim lost $987.28.

It is time to take our swiping discussion to the next level. I wrote part 1 way back in July of 2009 – please refer to it for basic swiping techniques and safety. I am going to break up part 2 into 2 parts. Part one of part 2 will cover more elementary advanced techniques, while part 2 of part 2 will cover middle, advanced-advanced and trick techniques. Then second half of part 2 of part 2, the advanced-advanced techniques, I will begin part 1 of my own past professional exploits. This will likely take 3 parts. The first part will be included in the second half of part 2’s second half – my amateur start and progression into the first part of my professional career. Part 2 of this 3 part series will focus on the second and most exciting part of my 3 part career, professional competition. Part 3 of the 3 part series will talk about the third part of my 3 part career, the last part of my competitive career and first 2 parts of my teaching career. I believe I still have one part of my third part of my 3 part career left to be told.

In the first part of part 1 we will be discussing elementary-advanced techniques and in the second part of each of the parts I will share some memories I have of these wonderful swipes.

I have some great news from world swipe quarters - SmartSwipe version 1.7.3 is now available for download! This version is a major step forward in the history of SmartSwipe and we encourage all of our users to upgrade. To upgrade, you can either use the pop-up that appears in your version of Internet Explorer, or you can go to our downloads page to download the full version.

Happy holidays!

From all of us here on the SmartSwipe team, have a safe and happy holiday season!

Between a bad case of writers' block and an extremely busy work schedule, I have not updated this blog in a very long time. However, I was digging around in Google Analytics, noticed an interesting trend and thought I would write about it on this blog.

It seems that a number of people reach our site when they are trying to figure out whether they have a 32-bit operating system or a 64-bit operating system. When I dig around online, I find a series of often confusing instructions. So, I wanted to draw attention to a simple web-based tool that one of my co-workers came up with. If you are trying to figure out whether you have a 32-bit or 64-bit browser, please open up Internet Explorer and click on this link. Please note - depending on what version of Internet Explorer you use, you may have to hold down the CTRL key while you click that link!

When you click on that link, a popup window will appear that will tell you whether you use a 32-bit operating system or a 64-bit operating system. Based on our testing, this popup is incredibly accurate, but if you have another experience, please let us know.

While I have been following online scams for quite awhile, every once in a while, I read about one that makes my blood boil. Yesterday, I heard about a phishing scam that made me pretty angry and today, I got enough confirmation to write an article about it.

There is a phishing email going around right now that says that people who were vaccinated against H1N1 have to go to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's (CDC) web site to create a "Personal H1N1 Vaccination Profile". And, when people click on the link to create their profile, they are directed to a site which will steal their personal health information and (in some cases) try to infect their computers with malicious software.

Coremetrics, the web site sales tracking firm, announced some exciting numbers from Cyber Monday 2009. According to their numbers, consumers bought 30% more items on Cyber Monday 2009 than on Cyber Monday 2008! Moreover, total sales were up 13.7% when compared to 2008.

These are some incredibly encouraging numbers from the world of online retailing. However, not all of Coremetrics numbers were quite so good. One particularly important metric (shopping cart conversions) was 3.11% lower than in 2008. And both sports retailers and department stores saw their average order volume drop when compared to Cyber Monday 2008.

Once upon a time, there existed this little lovely town called Cybera. People in Cybera were using open source systems happily while having trust in those systems as they could see all what is happening to their precious data. But one day, the big ugly Googa monster came into Cybera with a very very open source platform called ComatOSe. Cybera's wise guys sat together and went through the ComatOSe source code. Here is what they found there:

And here is how the wise guys changed the ComatOSe:

And then they asked all Cybera people not to use it! Why? Because the ugly Googa monster was so strong that he could break any "encrypt" function and he could also filter any noise added. Not mentioning he could monitor all the onion activities too!