Recently my card details were taken when a major ticket retailer’s website was hacked.

This is irritating anyway, but I didn’t think about it until my bank phoned to say the card had been used and would I confirm whether a selection of transactions were made by myself. Amazingly (to me, at least) the card details had been used in the United States, United Kingdom and Turkey within a matter of days.

The person(s) had been to the Carphone Warehouse, T-Mobile, iTunes, Tesco Online and a few other independant retailers. Walking through town last week I started to think about the music this person might have downloaded, who they called and send text messages to and what food they were buying.

It’s made me more interested in this sort of crime. As a consumer I did everything right; I used a very reputable retailer with SSL on the order process, I never gave my card to anyone else, I never wrote down the PIN and know I don’t have anything like a keylogger. Yet someone (in an age of CVV2 digits and chip and pin) was able to charge hundreds of pounds against my name. The user can’t have had the correct PIN or CVV2 digits, and the retailers still processed the transactions.

Interesting stuff!

(Oh, and. How did I know it would have been taken in London when I saw it?)

Not much to comment on recently, but today I was shown some excellent tips for editing images, particularly those taken at night or with a washed out feeling. With all of the photos I felt disappointed with what I came away with, especially as some of them really are once in a life time chances to get a decent photo.

I need some more practice with the tools and settings, but I’m impressed with the difference.

Original Photo

After removing noise and changing contrast in Neat Image

Some final tweaks in Picasa to bring out some colour

There’s a lot of photos from the night that can’t be saved, and the improvement on this set isn’t as obvious as some others I’ve tried. The tools are Neat Image and Picasa.

Original

Final

Picasa is a really impressive tool. I have photos scattered everywhere from camera phones, my camera, photos I’ve been given and can never find them quickly. I’d recommend it to anyone who has a lot of photos stored locally, and it’s also made me think about saving all my photos to the external drive before touching them with any tool.

I’ve also never done anything with my photos after they’ve been taken. This has made me think more about what can be done to improve photos.