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Dark Times

The New York Times plans to eliminate about 100 newsroom jobs, as well as a smaller number of positions from its editorial and business operations, offering buyouts and resorting to layoffs if enough people do not leave voluntarily, the newspaper announced on Wednesday.

Arthur Sulzberger Jr., the newspaper’s publisher, and Mark Thompson, its chief executive, said that in addition to the job cuts, NYT Opinion, a new mobile app dedicated to opinion content, was shutting down because it was not attracting enough subscribers.

The reductions, they said, were intended to safeguard the newspaper’s long-term profitability.

“The job losses are necessary to control our costs and to allow us to continue to invest in the digital future of The New York Times, but we know that they will be painful both for the individuals affected and for their colleagues,” the note said.

The Times’s executive editor, Dean Baquet, sent a separate note to the newsroom staff. “I will use this as an opportunity to seriously reconsider some of what we do — from the number of sections we produce to the amount we spend on freelance content,” he said.

The Times is not alone in eliminating newsroom jobs. Newspapers across the country have slashed positions this year. The Wall Street Journal cut dozens of jobs this summer, USA Today eliminated 70 positions in September, and Freedom Communications carried out layoffs in January at two smaller local newspapers, The Orange County Register and The Press-Enterprise of Riverside.

Mr. Sulzberger and Mr. Thompson said that even with the cutbacks — 100 positions comprise about 7.5 percent of the newsroom staff — The Times would continue to expand and invest heavily in initiatives that supported its growth strategy, like digital technology, audience development and mobile offerings.

by Ravisomiya, NY Times |  Read more:

Image:Wikipedia

The Teenage Thieves of Tumblr

The wonderful thing about Tumblr is that it can generate a subculture for just about anything. One prime example is Tumblr’s shoplifting community.

Shoplifting bloggers came under the media spotlight in April and May this year, when a Jezebel writer stumbled upon a Tumblr post listing various shoplifting accounts. And yes, a shoplifting blog is exactly what it sounds like: Tumblrs where people write about their shoplifting exploits and posts photos of what appear to be stolen goods. Many of them use Tumblr tags like “shoplifting,” so it doesn’t exactly take Sherlock Holmes to track them down.

These posts share a lot of similarities with haul videos, where young women show off the results of their latest shopping spree. “Heres my haul for today!” reads the text post for this photo, tagged #shoplifting and #stealing. “I got like two more dresses but I gave them to my friend lol. The total is about $2,613. Hopefully I can sell some and make some monaay (´∇ﾉ｀*)ノ”

Four months after Jezebel’s “Tumblr Bling Ring” story was picked up by media outlets like the Daily Mail and the BBC, Tumblr’s shoplifting bloggers are still going strong. That sudden burst of unwanted outsider attention now seems like the kind of storm-in-a-teacup drama that happens in any Tumblr community or fandom. The main difference is that most shoplifting bloggers now post disclaimers saying that they’re not really stealing, they’re just roleplaying. “I post things I purchase with my own money and claim that they were stolen,” reads one. “It’s nothing more than a fun hobby.”

But while some blogs claim that shoplifting Tumblr is entirely populated by roleplayers, others are more critical of what one shoplifting blogger describes as “inconsistently applying the roleplaying excuse.”

“If you think that people truly believe that crock of shit you are only too gullible yourself,” they add.

Since all of the relevant Tumblr accounts are anonymous, it’s entirely possible that every single shoplifting blog really is a roleplay account. In some cases, the haul is so impressive that it surely has to be a hoax. Case in point, this post, in which someone claims to have shoplifted two live lobsters.

(People have actually managed to shoplift live lobsters in the past, so maybe this is less implausible than it seems.)

If we were to take all of those disclaimers at face value, then the idea of a thriving roleplay community might be even weirder than the assumption that they’re all the real deal. It would mean that people are going to stores, buying hundreds of dollars worth of clothes and makeup on a regular basis, and then claiming online that all of it was stolen.

Not only that, but they’re offering each other (allegedly fictional) shoplifting advice about how to find CCTV blind spots and deal with RFID tags, as well as discussing their philosophies of why it’s OK to steal. By the time you get to the in-depth walkthroughs of how to deal with certain shoplifting issues at certain stores, the roleplay excuse seems tenuous at best.

by Gavia Baker-Whitelaw, Daily Dot | Read more:

Images: gaylifting and emes/Tumblr

DDiArte, Crazy Kitchen
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It's The End of the World As We Know It

In addition to being the most-watched basic cable network for the quarter in primetime, Fox News Channel saw across-the-board growth vs. Q3 2013. FNC was up +2% in viewers and up +4% in the A25-54 demo for total day viewing and up +10% in viewers and up +11% in the demo in primetime.

by Chris Ariens, TVNewser | Read more:

Reality Check On Car-Care Myths

To paraphrase Mark Twain, it's not what you don't know that can come back to bite you; it's what you know for sure that ain't true. When it comes to maintaining your car, misconceptions abound. And even the best intentions can lead you to spend more money than necessary or even compromise your safety. Here are common myths that can do more harm than good:

Myth Engine oil should be changed every 3,000 miles.
Reality Despite what oil companies and quick-lube shops often claim, it's usually not necessary. Stick to the service intervals in your car's owner's manual. Under normal driving conditions, most vehicles are designed to go 7,500 miles or more between oil changes. Changing oil more often doesn't hurt the engine, but it can cost you a lot of extra money. Automakers often recommend 3,000-mile intervals for severe driving conditions, such as constant stop-and-go driving, frequent trailer-towing, mountainous terrain, or dusty conditions.

Myth Inflate tires to the pressure shown on the tire's sidewall.
Reality The pounds-per-square-inch figure on the side of the tire is the maximum pressure that the tire can safely hold, not the automaker's recommended pressure, which provides the best balance of braking, handling, gas mileage, and ride comfort. That figure is usually found on a doorjamb sticker, in the glove box, or on the fuel-filler door. Perform a monthly pressure check when tires are cold or after the car has been parked for a few hours.

Myth If the brake fluid is low, topping it off will fix the problem.
Reality As brake pads wear, the level in the brake-fluid reservoir drops a bit. That helps you monitor brake wear. If the fluid level drops to or below the Low mark on the reservoir, then either your brakes are worn out or fluid is leaking. Either way, get the brake system serviced immediately. You should also get a routine brake inspection when you rotate the tires, about every 6,000 to 7,000 miles.

Myth If regular-grade fuel is good, premium must be better.

Reality Most vehicles run just fine on regular-grade (87 octane) fuel. Using premium in these cars won't hurt, but it won't improve performance, either. A higher-octane number simply means that the fuel is less prone to pre-ignition problems, so it's often specified for hotter running, high-compression engines. So if your car is designed for 87-octane fuel, don't waste money on premium.

Myth Flush the coolant with every oil change.
Reality Radiator coolant doesn't need to be replaced very often. Most owner's manuals recommend changing the coolant every five years or 60,000 miles. Of course, if the level in the coolant reservoir is chronically low, check for a leak and get service as soon as possible.

Myth Let your engine warm up for several minutes before driving.
Reality That might have been good advice for yesteryear's cars but is less so today. Modern engines warm up more quickly when they're driven. And the sooner they warm up, the sooner they reach maximum efficiency and deliver the best fuel economy and performance. But don't rev the engine high over the first few miles while it's warming up.

by Consumer Reports |  Read more:

Image: uncredited

Pacific Remote Islands Marine National Monument Expanded

[ed. Good news! Bad news!]

US President Barack Obama has vastly increased marine protection in the Pacific by declaring 1 million square kilometres of ocean part of a giant marine reserve.

Obama’s declaration on 25 September increased from 210,000 square kilometres to 1.3 million km2 the size of the protected area around a group of small islands in the central Pacific, stretching from Wake Atoll to Jarvis Island. This makes the Pacific Remote Islands Marine National Monument (PRINM), originally created by former president George W. Bush, one of the largest marine protected areas in the world. Thousands of sea birds, turtles, sharks and other marine life will now be fully protected from commercial, if not from recreational, fishing over this extended area.

The expansion was not as large as some researchers and conservationists were hoping. It had been suggested that the reserve could have been expanded by 1.8 million km2, and the scale-down seems to be a concession to the tuna fishing industry, which is active in the region.

Still, the expansion means Obama has put more of the planet under protection than has any other world leader, says Elliott Norse, chief scientist at the Marine Conservation Institute, a non-governmental organization in Seattle, Washington, that has played a central part in the creation and expansion of PRIMNM.

by Daniel Cressey, Nature | Read more:
Image:USFWS

Jane Maxwell, 3 Walking Girls
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The Woman’s Heart Attack

In medical circles, they call it the Hollywood Heart Attack. You’ve seen it: grimace of agony, clutching of chest, sudden collapse, the whole purple-prose panoply.

For my husband, Harold Lear, a doctor who became a patient just that suddenly, it was the first stop in a five-year medical odyssey, one cardiac crisis after another, ending with the ultimate stop in 1978.

Through all the years that followed, it remained my assumption that the Hollywood Heart Attack was it: the paradigm, the norm, the way heart attacks are supposed to happen.

I was relieved of this assumption two years ago, when I had one of my own.

Mine went like this: altogether well one moment, vaguely unwell the next; fluttery sensation at the sternum, rising into the throat; mild chest pressure; then chills, sudden nausea, vomiting, some diarrhea. No high drama, just a mixed bag of somethings that added up to nothing you could name. Maybe flu, maybe a bad mussel, maybe too much wine, but the chest pressure caused me to say to my second husband, “Could this be a heart attack?” “Of course not,” he said. “It’s a stomach bug.”

Still, that pressure, slight but there, nagged at me. I called my doctor and reported my symptoms. The mention of diarrhea, almost never a presenting symptom in heart attacks, skewed the picture. He said, “It doesn’t sound like your heart. I can’t say a thousand percent that it’s not, but it doesn’t seem necessary to go racing to the emergency room with the way you feel now. Just see it through and come in for an EKG in the morning.”

The pressure eased. I slept, and woke the next morning feeling well. I went for the test mainly because I had said that I would, fully expecting to be told that I was healthy. First the EKG and then the echocardiogram told a different story: a substantial heart attack, “less than massive,” my doctor said, “but more than mild.” We were both stunned.

Suddenly I found myself living in a sequel: same hospital where Hal had worked and died, same coronary unit, same cardiologist, same everything; different husband wheeling me in my wheelchair through the corridors where I had wheeled Hal in his. Ghosts in every corner.

With a stent implanted in an occluded artery, I recovered fast and was cleared to leave in four days, but a bad hospital-acquired infection kept me there four weeks — time enough for a revelatory education about women and hearts.

Surprise No. 1: The biggest killer of American women is not breast cancer, as many people believe. It is heart disease. Should I have been surprised? Of course not. The American Heart Association keeps telling us about our hearts and we keep not listening, possibly because we are so fearful of cancer that we have no fear to spare, as we lie on our beds dutifully palpating ourselves for the lumps that we pray not to find.

Our hearts kill more of us than all kinds of cancer combined.

Surprise No. 2: I learn that Hal’s attack and mine are textbook illustrations of how vivid the gender differences can be. I learn that men more typically have “crushing” pain; women, nausea. That women are likelier to have early warning signs, such as unaccustomed fatigue or insomnia (unaccustomed: That’s the key word here). That we are likelier — this spooked me and kept me, for months, glued to calendars — to die within a year of a heart attack. That our symptoms can be so varied and nuanced that we feel no fear, seek no help, and possibly die — which may be why, although more men have heart attacks, a greater percentage of women die of them. (...)

Until shockingly recently — in fact, until this millennium — there was minimal research on women’s heart attacks because of widespread belief in the medical community that women did not have heart attacks. (When the American Heart Association introduced its Prudent Diet in the 1950s, it issued a pamphlet titled “The Way to a Man’s Heart.”

Research studies commonly used all-male subjects. Men with abnormal test results were treated far more aggressively than women with the same results. Women reporting the same symptoms as men were at least twice as likely to receive — no surprise here — a psychiatric diagnosis.

In a 1996 national survey of doctors, two-thirds were unaware of gender differences in symptoms and warning signs of heart attacks.

by Martha Weinman Lear, NY Times |  Read more:

Image: Rachel Levit

Oyster Run 2014

[ed. I love it when this sleepy little town goes insane one day each year (for the last 33 years). Tens of thousands of bikers pour in to celebrate everything bike-related. It's the annual Oyster Run (here are a few photos from my first OR).  Always a great time.]

photos: markk

Byron Barrett, Rush Hour, 2009
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When Blogging Becomes a Slog

[ed. Sometimes you're inspired, sometimes you're not. It must be grueling to produce original content every day. Much of what you see on the web today is derivative, so even with curation/aggregation blogs like this one, it takes time to separate the wheat from the chaff. But, since revenue generation has never been an issue here, no worries. Our motto: all the news you need, whenever we feel like printing it.]

Is the first generation of design bloggers aging out of the blogosphere? Or is this just a new twist on an old business story, updated for the Internet age?

Pam Kueber, the midcentury design expert behind the blog Retro Renovation, is 55, and she sees the Petersiks’ escalating stress levels and unhappiness simply as evidence of the latter: A passion turns into a hobby, which becomes a full-time career. “And in some predictable period of time, it consumes your life and sucks the joy out if it,” said Ms. Kueber, finishing the arc. “That last part of the Shakespearean tragedy is what you have to be mindful of not letting happen.”

A tricky thing to avoid as a full-time blogger, considering that the Internet never sleeps, readers want fresh content daily and new social media platforms must be mastered and added to the already demanding workload. Add to that the economic challenges of blogging full time. As Grace Bonney of Design Sponge lamented earlier this year in a “State of the Blog Union,” advertising rates have dropped significantly because advertisers are flooded with options.

To earn money, many bloggers have had to embrace sponsored content, breeding distrust among readers. Several Young House Love readers, for instance, thought the giveaways were product placements in disguise, even though the Petersiks maintained they weren’t compensated for doing them.

“If readers begin to suspect that your content is heavy on product placement, if they see excessive amounts of sponsored posts, you risk losing what’s most important, which is trust and authenticity,” said Ms. Kueber, who still relies largely on banner ads and has so far done only two sponsored posts.

And blogs that focus on the home come with their own particular set of challenges. Unlike a personal style blog, in which generating new content can be as simple as getting dressed in the morning, producing a decorating or D.I.Y. blog involves considerable time, expense and domestic upheaval. (...)

The Petersiks were early adopters of the blog format and hardly could have anticipated the success and opportunities that would result from telling strangers about redoing the dreary den of their starter home. But from the outset, the couple forged an intimate bond with their audience that went beyond fix-it projects. When they staged their D.I.Y. wedding in the backyard in 2007, they posted an album’s worth of photos, complete with a cost breakdown (cupcakes and s’mores: $125). And when Ms. Petersik had life-threatening complications during the birth of their first child, she shared the emotional story online.

The couple also worked tirelessly. Barely had they finished one total home redo when they bought another fixer-upper and then a third, as if they were trapped on a house-jumping hamster wheel by the need to generate blog content. Last November, the couple posted a to-do list for their latest home, a stately brick four-bedroom with a showcase lawn. If you print the list, it runs to 20 pages. You could exhaust yourself just reading it.

Erin Loechner, who publishes the blog Design for Mankind, said that professional bloggers like herself take on very demanding, self-imposed workloads. “I think there’s a fear that if we post less, our readers will find that content elsewhere,” she said. And yet many bloggers don’t want to complain for fear of sounding whiny or ungrateful.

by Steven Kurutz, NY Times |  Read more:

Image: Michelle Litvin

Marco Battaglini, Gentlemen prefer blondes
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Ello, Goodbye

[ed. See also: What is Ello and Should I Even Bother?]

Here’s how venture capital works: you go to an investor, before you’ve even built the thing you’re building and you tell them how you’re going to exit. It’s called an exit plan or exit strategy. You tell them, for example: “Hey, we’re going to get 100 million people using our new platform in two years time, how much will you give me for 100 million people?” And they go “Umm, we’ll give you this much for 100 million people because we’re pretty sure we can get that amount back several times over when we sell those 100 million people in an exit either to another company or in an IPO.”

When you take venture capital, it is not a matter of if you’re going to sell your users, you already have. It’s called an exit plan. And no investor will give you venture capital without one. In the myopic and upside-down world of venture capital, exits precede the building of the actual thing itself. It would be a comedy if the repercussions of this toxic system were not so tragic.

Let me put it bluntly: if a company has taken venture capital, you have already been sold. It’s not a matter of if, it’s simply a matter of when. (Unless the company goes under before it can exit, that is.)

A venture-capital funded startup is a temporary company that has to convince enough people into using their platform so that they can make good on the exit they promised their investors at the very beginning. It is the opposite of a long-term, sustainable business.

by Aral Balkan |  Read more:

Image: Ello

Liberalism and Gentrification

When I want to examine the limits of liberal ideology, I look for class struggle; when I want to find some class struggle, I simply step outside my door. You don’t have to live in Washington, DC, like I do, but it helps.

Like a lot of cities, Washington is really two cities in the same space. We’ve got “Washington,” the place of popular imagination, gleaming white marble monuments and Aaron Sorkin speechifiers, the mostly-from-out-of-town professional class keeping the rusty wheels of state administration turning.

We’ve also got “DC,” the city distinct from the operations of the federal government, made up of “residents,” who are mostly poor and mostly black. These two cities are locked in a one-sided war of attrition, with affluent “newcomers” and their local allies conducting clear-and-hold operations against their less well-heeled neighbors. I can watch from what Forbes magazine, that barometer of bohemianism, has labeled the sixth-hippest neighborhood in the US, where I live.

This is gentrification, which, if you’re reading this and live in a city, is a process you’re caught up in. There’s a violent side of gentrification — think Rudy Giuliani and his “broken windows” alibi for crackdowns on petty crime. But there’s a softer side to this war as well, the liberal project of city governance whose patron saint is the activist Jane Jacobs, author of Death and Life of American Cities.

In the face of rampant suburbanization and slash-and-burn urban renewal, Jacobs emphasized the attractions of urban life in all its diversity, revealing the support networks that lent resiliency and quality of life to neighborhoods otherwise deemed undesirable. She was also a fierce critic of the monumental architecture of public housing, in favor of the historic charms of low-density buildings. Jacobs’ once-revolutionary ideas are now liberal urbanist common sense: pedestrian traffic, mixed-use development, a heterogeneous mix of architectural styles, businesses, and people. My city councilman’s slogan, “A Livable, Walkable City,” comes straight out of the Jacobs playbook, and it is difficult to find it objectionable.

However, as urban sociologist Sharon Zukin has pointed out again and again, Jacobs’ aesthetic insights can’t make up for her avoiding of class realities. Lambasting “planners” while ignoring the far more powerful real estate developers, Jacobs’ polemic has been turned against even her prized East Village neighborhood, a site of rapacious gentrification stretching back to the 1980s. (...)

The speed and rapacity of Washington gentrification lets you see clearly who’s responsible, without Richard Florida nostrums about “creatives.” We don’t have creatives. We have bureaucrats and IT workers with a few more years of beards and bong hits in them, and really, isn’t this what most “creatives” are? The sheer expense of living in Washington, and the squareness of your average fed worker, mitigates against the hipster bohemianism we’ve come to associate with the first wave of “neighborhood revitalization.”

Gentrification has always been a top-down affair, not a spontaneous hipster influx, orchestrated by the real estate developers and investors who pull the strings of city policy, with individual home-buyers deployed in mopping up operations. (...)

The first installment of DC gentrification began as the smoke lifted after the riots following Martin Luther King’s assassination. Large parts of the black areas of the city (at the time, everything east of Rock Creek Park, including what is now “downtown”) were burned. With the fear of urban insurrection hanging in the air, property values plummeted, paving the way for local real estate magnates to snap up hugely lucrative portfolios.

Developers succeeded in getting the city government and banks to assist in their purchases, promising community projects, like homeless shelters and hospitals, that they rarely delivered before they flipped the property. Often it was enough to throw chump change into Mayor Marion Barry’s re-election fund, or fly out some city council members on a junket to the Virgin Islands, to secure lucrative city projects and advantageous loans. Now the big operators, like Qatar’s sovereign wealth fund, simply bypass the city government: according to broker Jerry Coren, when it comes to DC real estate deals, “Politics is really not essential.”

by Gavin Mueller, Jacobin |  Read more:

Image: Mitchell Map

This Palm-Sized Laser Could Make Self-Driving Cars Way Cheaper

We don’t know how much self-driving cars will cost when they finally hit the market, but our best guess is, a lot. The technology needed to take the wheel out of your hands is frightfully expensive. Now, we can revise that estimate down a bit with the debut of a laser system that’s roughly the size and shape of a hockey puck and costs just eight grand.

Silicon Valley-based Velodyne Acoustics makes sound systems and a self-stabilizing boat said to prevent seasickness, but its most high profile product is the Lidar (Light Detection and Ranging) system spinning proudly atop each of Google’s self-driving cars. The device uses 64 lasers to map the physical the world. It can collect more than a million data points about its surroundings every second, crucial information for autonomous automobiles. It’s remarkably cool, and remarkably expensive: Each unit costs up to $85,000, far too pricey to be used in vehicles the rest of us might one day buy.

Which brings us to the Puck, Velodyne’s miniaturized version of that technology. Instead of 64 lasers, it has just 16, resulting in a tenfold reduction in price. It’s also smaller, just 4 inches tall and 1.3 pounds—compared to 10 inches tall and 29 pounds for the unit on each of Google’s robocars. At $7,999, it’s small and cheap enough for mass-market vehicles, a big help for automakers intent on offering cars that drive themselves in the next decade.

by Alex Davies, Wired |  Read more:

Image: Velodyne

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Jonas Wood, Interior with Fireplace, 2012

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Occupational Hazards of Working on Wall Street

A few times in the past several decades it has sounded as if big Wall Street banks were losing their hold on the graduates of the world’s most selective universities: the early 1990s, the dot-com boom and the immediate aftermath of the global financial crisis (Teach for America!). Each time the graduating class of Harvard and Yale looked as if it might decide, en masse, that it wanted to do something with its life other than work for Morgan Stanley.

Each time it turned out that it didn’t.

Silicon Valley is once again bubbling, and, in response, big Wall Street banks are raising starting salaries, and reducing the work hours of new recruits. But it’s hard to see why this time should be any different from the others.

Technology entrepreneurship will never have the power to displace big Wall Street banks in the central nervous system of America’s youth, in part because tech entrepreneurship requires the practitioner to have an original idea, or at least to know something about computers, but also because entrepreneurship doesn’t offer the sort of people who wind up at elite universities what a lot of them obviously crave: status certainty.

“I’m going to Goldman,” is still about as close as it gets in the real world to “I’m going to Harvard,” at least for the fiercely ambitious young person who is ambitious to do nothing in particular.

The question I’ve always had about this army of young people with seemingly endless career options who wind up in finance is: What happens next to them? People like to think they have a “character,” and that this character of theirs will endure, no matter the situation. It’s not really so. People are vulnerable to the incentives of their environment, and often the best a person can do, if he wants to behave in a certain manner, is to choose carefully the environment that will go to work on his character.

One moment this herd of graduates of the nation’s best universities are young people -- ambitious yes, but still young people -- with young people’s ideals and hopes to live a meaningful life. The next they are essentially old people, at work gaming ratings companies, and designing securities to fail so they might make a killing off the investors they dupe into buying them, and rigging various markets at the expense of the wider society, and encouraging all sorts of people to do stuff with their capital and their companies that they never should do.

Not everyone on Wall Street does stuff that would have horrified them, had it been described to them in plain English, when they were 20. But enough do that it makes you wonder. What happens between then and now?

All occupations have hazards. An occupational hazard of the Internet columnist, for instance, is that he becomes the sort of person who says whatever he thinks will get him the most attention rather than what he thinks is true, so often that he forgets the difference.

The occupational hazards of Wall Street are more interesting -- and not just because half the graduating class of Harvard still wants to work there. Some are obvious -- for instance, the temptation, when deciding how to behave, to place too much weight on the very short term and not enough on the long term. Or the temptation, if you make a lot of money, to deploy financial success as an excuse for failure in other aspects of your life. But some of the occupational hazards on Wall Street are less obvious.

Here’s a few that seem, just now, particularly relevant:

by Michael Lewis, Bloomberg |  Read more:

Image: Jin Lee

Why the Heyday of Credit Card Fraud Is Almost Over

In 1960, an IBM engineer named Forrest Parry was developing a new type of ID card for the CIA when he had an epiphany: Why not make each card a tiny data storage device in and of itself? He cut a short length of half-inch wide magnetic tape from a reel and wrapped it around a blank plastic card, secured it with Scotch tape, and then, at his wife’s suggestion, pressed it on with a warm iron.

The magnetic stripe card was born.

Today magstripes are on the backs of millions of US-issued credit and debit cards, where they hold all the information needed to produce a flawless counterfeit card—account number, expiration date, and a secret code called a CVV. That has made Forrest Parry’s invention one of the computer underground’s most prized targets—more valuable than anything on your hard drive. We were reminded of that last week, when Home Depot confirmed that 56 million shoppers had their credit card data siphoned from the big box retailer’s point-of-sale systems over six months. That’s 3,000 miles of magstripe, stolen three inches at a time.

The announcement makes the Home Depot breach the single largest known theft of credit card data in history, edging out the 40 million cards stolen from Target late last year, and about the same number taken from TJX in 2006. It may also be one of the last major credit card heists.

But more on that in a moment.

First, a bit of history: What happens to stolen bank card data hasn’t changed in 15 years—the hackers package it and sell it in bulk to the underground’s third-party resellers. Ten years ago it was the Ukranian known as “Maksik”; today it’s the Ukrainian known as “Rescator.” If Parry’s innovation was to take a bulk storage medium and literally slice it into a wallet-sized one, the computer underground has perfected the opposite process, compiling all those squirts of information into a big data play that would make Mark Zuckerberg envious.

Once it’s in an underground shop, card counterfeiters buy the magstripes they need—sometimes ordering by bank or ZIP code—and copy it onto fake cards using their own magstripe encoding machines. Then they use the cards to buy goods they can resell or dispatch crews to do the shopping for them in exchange for a cut of the profits.

Since about 2001, stolen magstripe swipes, or “dumps,” have been the pork bellies of a massive hacker commodities market, centered in Eastern Europe and stretching around the globe. Beyond the hackers who breach stores like Home Depot, and the resellers like Rescator who market the cards, there are vendors specializing in the hardware and material—plastic embossers, fake holograms, blank cards, magstripe encoders—needed to use the data and others who crank out professional fake IDs to help pass the fake cards. By the most conservative estimates, it all adds up to $11 billion in losses annually.

But the golden age of credit card fraud is drawing to a close, and history will regard Home Depot, TJX, Target, and all other breaches as a single massive exploit against one catastrophic security hole: The banks’ use of roughly 23 characters of magnetically encoded data as the sole authentication mechanism for a consumer payment infrastructure that generated 26.2 billion transactions in 2012 alone. Engineering students will study that gaffe with the astonished bemusement with which they view old footage of the Tacoma Narrows Bridge twisting in the wind.

The fatal problem with the credit card magstripe is that it’s only a container for unchanging, static data. And if static data is compromised anywhere in the processing chain, it can be passed around, copied, bought and sold at will.

The solution has been available for years: Put logic in the card. Thanks to Moore’s Law, an inexpensive tamper-resistant microprocessor fits comfortably in a space smaller than your driver’s license photo. With a computer on both edges of the transaction, you can employ cryptography and authenticate the card interactively, so that eavesdropping on the transaction gains you nothing. Just as IBM’s Parry made our wallets smarter by adding computer storage, a modern card is smarter still by having an entire computer onboard.

Now, after resisting it for 10 years because of the formidable transition costs, the US is about to finally embrace the secure chip-based authentication system called EMV—the standard was pioneered by Europay, MasterCard, and Visa—that the rest of the world has already adopted. Pushed by mounting fraud costs, credit card companies have crafted incentives for merchants to switch to the sophisticated readers needed to accept the cards. “There was a lot of skepticism about whether it would ever happen in the US,” says Michael Misasi, an analyst with the Mercator Advisory Group. “All of the data breaches that have happened have woken people up, and progress has been accelerating this year.” The first serious milestone is October 2015. By 2020 the swipe-and-sign magstripe reader will be as hard to find as the credit card impression rollers they supplanted.

By then, it’s probably safe to say, the entire idea of a credit or debit “card” will be quaint. With the newly announced Apple Pay joining Google Wallet as a real-life payment system, even the chip-based credit cards will be little more than a backup technology. Apple took some ribbing for announcing Apple Pay while its iCloud celebrity breaches were still in the news. But unlike cloud storage, the state of the art of retail payment is so poor today that Apple can’t possibly fail to improve it.

by Kevin Poulsen, Wired |  Read more:
Image: The first magstripe card. Jerome Svigals via Wikimedia Commons