Make sure you're an American though, or else you might end up at Guantánamo- well, pre-Obama you might have.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/02/us/nationalspecial3/02gitm...
551 karma · joined April 14, 2008
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/02/us/nationalspecial3/02gitm...
The benefit to him is his increased reputation. You can't survive in these circles unless people vouch for you. That's why, when you read articles about darkmarket, they talk about reviewers who inspect products from vendors. This guy just sold products that netted $9,000,000. Everyone is going to want to buy from him now.
Don't think that there's nothing in it for the vendor. ATM skimmers sell for $7,000. If he pulls this off again, people may just buy the cards from him for $10,000 each for a 700% return. That's not too shabby for sitting on your ass and not taking the risk of being on the streets.
I just don't believe that this was structured like a traditional gang. This level of organization in online fraud is completely unprecedented. There were more than 6 cities hit in numerous countries, I don't see them recruiting that many random people to participate and having profit sharing since gangs are tight-knit.
Yes, you can often hire a cashier. Typically, this guy has some plastic and an encoder, but he doesn't have a steady supply of data to encode the cards. He's working with you because you have data to cards with a high limit and you can verify that they're valid. Most of the time, he's not even on the street. He'll encode them in the car and have someone else run up to the ATMs.
[1] http://web.archive.org/web/20061115154615/http://smallworldp...
$9,000,000 / 130 ATMS = $69,230.8 or roughly 692 $100 bills.
The US government requirement for currency paper is: "the thickness of the paper shall be 124 micrometers [...]."[1]
124 micrometers * 692 bills = 0.085808 meters or 3.38 inches thick. Not bad at all.
People involved in online fraud rarely collaborate with each other. You never know who's on the other end and your anonymity is your biggest strength. It's more of a marketplace where you buy cards, skimmers, or accounts from vendors and then go out and use them on your own.
Some guy probably sold these cards (or just the data to encode them) at a hefty price with the disclaimer that they had to be used on a certain date and time at any ATM.
I think you're just so out of touch with how a 10-year-old learns that you can't comprehend what the article is addressing. A kid that age doesn't pick up programming the same way that a person in their 20's does. He's still mastering reading, figuring out the fundamentals of his operating system, and making real-world analogies for objects on his computer that you might already have at 24. He doesn't understand what an algorithm is, he doesn't even really know what a programming language does or what role it plays. He doesn't know algebra.
Most kids are not scholarly. They don't seek out information and work through tutorials. They're never going to hear about alice/scratch/squeak/LÖVE. They stumble upon things and their curiosity drives them, but their attention span is relatively small. They do things because they're fun and not because they want to learn.
When you began programming you probably read books and tutorials, followed-up on documentation, and relied heavily on examples. Learning through your teenage years is evolutionary. It's almost all trial-and-error at that stage. Computers are a incredibly complex place to start, that's why so many of these anecdotes are about programming BASIC.
Deciding that you need a programming language installed and then picking one and installing it is a very big step. It was a fluke that many of the people posting in this thread discovered programming. They stumbled upon the editor, tapped out a couple lines, and something happened. Cool!
Python is certainly accessible to an experienced developer, but a 10-year-old's curiosity is superficial. They need to tinker and receive instant gratification without the barriers of setting up an environment. Programming isn't integrated and exposed in a dead-simple way to foster experimentation these days.
BASIC on TI calculators is very popular among kids because they can figure out how to write a program during their math class. You don't need much reference to write a text-based game or a program to help you cheat on a geometry quiz.
The majority of today's 10 year olds are not writing twitter scripts. It requires a significant amount of understanding and time to do so. You need to pick a programming language, install it, figure out how to write your program and how to execute it. The barrier is a lot higher than writing a program for your calculator during math class.
It'd be much easier for you to find people who wrote trivial programs on their Commodore when they were 10 than it would be to find 10 year olds who are writing python.
Why not wait until Monday to post official pictures/specs/pricing? Visit Engadget if you want rumors.
Submit an article or ask a question.
VMWare is open sourcing this product because thin clients tend to run on exotic hardware and they want to allow manufacturers to easily port and install their client. That ensures that they'll be locked into VMWare's server product.
VMWare is open sourcing VMware View, a product intended for thin client manufacturers.
They're open sourcing VMWare View (formerly called VMWare VDI) not VMWare Workstation. View is thin client software for remote desktop delivery.