196 DEAR HACKER

196 DEAR HACKER

birthdates (010203 for January 2, 1903). Of course, it leads many of us to wonder why the IDs still exist, but schools’ mentalities are clearly not something for “ordinary” humans to fathom.

Sekicho-sensei And when they come up with a reason why having your birthdate on these cards is

necessary, let us know.

Dear 2600: Just walking on campus, and what do I see but a group of elementary

schoolers with barcoded photo ID cards. How infinitely sad. data refill

Wait till you see the tots with imbedded chips.

Dear 2600: At school we went on a walking field trip to some play or something,

and on the way we saw an ATM. And I told my friends that I had read an article in 2600 that said if you press the right buttons you can get to a hidden menu. So I went over to the standalone ATM and pressed all four corner buttons and the menu came up and it started beeping (like a PC does). It beeped eight times. All my friends were laughing and we still make jokes about it to this day. Thanks for the laughs, 2600!

Satch379 We’re always happy to provide amusement. And the fact that you probably have no

idea at all what your field trip was supposed to be about is just icing on the cake. e

TECHNOLOGY

Dear 2600: After reading all the letters about insecure systems in the previous

issue, I wanted to write to you and share the wonderful experience that I had in setting up my voicemail at school this past year. I go to Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute ( www.rpi.edu ) and everyone who works there is stupid beyond belief for a number of reasons. One of those reasons is the handling of the voicemail system. In order to ini- tialize your voicemail, you have to pick up any phone on campus, dial the voicemail number (6006), then dial your phone number (for instance, 4002), then input the default password (122456), then use the menus to enter a real password, set your greeting, etc. The problem with this system, as I’m sure you’ve already guessed, is that anyone can set up anyone’s voicemail. When I first set mine up, I accidentally dialed the wrong number and set my own password and greeting to my neighbor’s phone. I could easily have gotten to school a day early and set every voicemail on campus to profanity or something equally juvenile and damaging. The point of this is many large organizations like schools and corporations seem to go instantly stupid when issues of security come up. The fact that voicemail exists is apparently good enough for them. Any concerns about security or impersonation are just ignored.

ManiacDan Even 20 years ago this would have been considered absurdly dumb. But we’re

impressed that they deviated from the 123456 default password string. We smell a Darwin Award.

Dear 2600:

I was recently at a Wal-Mart in Mountain View, California, and I noticed that they had gotten some shiny new carts for the customers to push around. On the left front wheel of all carts is a very boxy cover that none of the other three wheels has. On inspection of the