Archive for September 2015

'SafePay': First anti-fraud system to use existing credit card readers

System transforms disposable credit card information to electrical current and drives a magnetic card chip to simulate the behavior of a ph...

isn't this amazing a 27-year-old computer to the web

BDxoul 4:39 AM

BDxoul

Orginally Posted on : http://www.keacher.com/1216/how-i-introduced-a-27-year-old-computer-to-the-web/ Reviving an old computer is like res...

Subscribe to: Posts (Atom)

'SafePay': First anti-fraud system to use existing credit card readers

BDxoul 0 security Thursday, September 24, 2015

<h2 class="subtitle" id="subtitle" style="background-color: white; border-radius: 0px !important; box-sizing: border-box; color: #333333; font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 18px; font-weight: 500; line-height: 1.1; margin: 5px 0px 0px;">
System transforms disposable credit card information to electrical current and drives a magnetic card chip to simulate the behavior of a physical magnetic card</h2>
<dl class="dl-horizontal dl-custom" style="background-color: white; border-radius: 0px !important; box-sizing: border-box; color: #333333; font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 20px; margin: 20px 0px 0px;">
<dt style="border-radius: 0px !important; box-sizing: border-box; clear: left; float: left; font-style: italic; line-height: 1.42857; overflow: hidden; padding-bottom: 5px; text-align: right; text-overflow: ellipsis; white-space: nowrap; width: 70px;">Date:</dt>
<dd id="date_posted" style="border-radius: 0px !important; box-sizing: border-box; line-height: 1.42857; margin-left: 90px; padding-bottom: 5px;">September 21, 2015</dd>
<dt style="border-radius: 0px !important; box-sizing: border-box; clear: left; float: left; font-style: italic; line-height: 1.42857; overflow: hidden; padding-bottom: 5px; text-align: right; text-overflow: ellipsis; white-space: nowrap; width: 70px;">Source:</dt>
<dd id="source" style="border-radius: 0px !important; box-sizing: border-box; line-height: 1.42857; margin-left: 90px; padding-bottom: 5px;">Lehigh University</dd>
<dt style="border-radius: 0px !important; box-sizing: border-box; clear: left; float: left; font-style: italic; line-height: 1.42857; overflow: hidden; padding-bottom: 5px; text-align: right; text-overflow: ellipsis; white-space: nowrap; width: 70px;">Summary:</dt>
<dd id="abstract" style="border-radius: 0px !important; box-sizing: border-box; line-height: 1.42857; margin-bottom: 15px; margin-left: 90px; padding-bottom: 5px;">For the first time, researchers have developed an inexpensive, secure method to prevent mass credit card fraud using existing magnetic card readers. The novel technique -- called SafePay -- works by transforming disposable credit card information to electrical current and driving a magnetic card chip to simulate the behavior of a physical magnetic card.</dd><div style="border-radius: 0px !important; box-sizing: border-box; line-height: 1.42857; margin-bottom: 15px; margin-left: 90px; padding-bottom: 5px;">
<br /></div>
<div style="border-radius: 0px !important; box-sizing: border-box; line-height: 1.42857; margin-bottom: 15px; margin-left: 90px; padding-bottom: 5px;">
<img src="http://images.sciencedaily.com/2015/09/150921095144_1_540x360.jpg" /></div>
<div class="hyphenate" id="story_photo" style="border-radius: 0px !important; box-sizing: border-box; margin-top: 15px; word-break: break-word; word-wrap: break-word;">
<div class="photo-caption" style="background-color: #f2f3f4; border-radius: 0px !important; box-sizing: border-box; padding: 10px 10px 5px;">
This is a picture of the "SafePay" prototype system (In real-world implementation, the amplifier and the solenoid can be combined together into one single chip, which can be directly plugged into the audio jack without a wire or connected with the phone through bluetooth).</div>
<div class="photo-credit" style="background-color: #f2f3f4; border-radius: 0px !important; box-sizing: border-box; font-style: italic; padding: 5px 10px 10px;">
<em style="border-radius: 0px !important; box-sizing: border-box;">Credit: Yinzhi Cao, Xiang Pan, Yan Chen</em></div>
<div class="clearfix" style="border-radius: 0px !important; box-sizing: border-box;">
</div>
</div>
<div class="clearfix" style="border-radius: 0px !important; box-sizing: border-box;">
</div>
<div class="hyphenate" id="story_text" style="border-radius: 0px !important; box-sizing: border-box; margin-top: 15px; word-break: break-word; word-wrap: break-word;">
<div class="lead" id="first" style="border-radius: 0px !important; box-sizing: border-box; font-size: 21px; line-height: 1.4; margin-bottom: 20px;">
From large-scale data breaches such as the 2013 Target case to local schemes that use skimming devices to steal data at the gas pump, credit card fraud is becoming commonplace. The key challenge is that existing magnetic card readers use plain text to store confidential information, which makes them vulnerable to an untrusted card reader or skimming device. Analyst firm Alite Group estimates that this vulnerability is adding up to $8 billion in incurred losses per year in the U.S.</div>
<div id="text" style="border-radius: 0px !important; box-sizing: border-box;">
<div style="border-radius: 0px !important; box-sizing: border-box; margin-bottom: 10px;">
Solutions have been proposed--such as integrated circuit cards and mobile wallets systems. However, they are incompatible with current systems making them too costly and time-consuming for retailers to implement.</div>
<div style="border-radius: 0px !important; box-sizing: border-box; margin-bottom: 10px;">
For the first time, researchers have developed an inexpensive, secure method to prevent mass credit card fraud using existing magnetic card readers. The novel technique--called SafePay--works by transforming disposable credit card information to electrical current and driving a magnetic card chip to simulate the behavior of a physical magnetic card.</div>
<div style="border-radius: 0px !important; box-sizing: border-box; margin-bottom: 10px;">
The research, led by Yinzhi Cao assistant professor of computer science and engineering at Lehigh University (Bethlehem, PA) with coauthors Xiang Pan and Yan Chen from Northwestern University, will be presented at the IEEE Conference on Communications and Network Security which takes place next week, September 28-30, in Florence, Italy and published as paper: SafePay: Protecting against Credit Card Forgery with Existing Magnetic Card Readers.</div>
<div style="border-radius: 0px !important; box-sizing: border-box; margin-bottom: 10px;">
"Because SafePay is backward compatible with existing magnetic card readers, it will greatly relieve the burden of merchants in replacing card readers and at the same time protect cardholders from mass data breaches," said Cao.</div>
<div style="border-radius: 0px !important; box-sizing: border-box; margin-bottom: 10px;">
Broadly speaking, SafePay is related to Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS), which are systems consisting of computational elements that control physical entities. The computational elements in SafePay consist of a mobile device and a server which distributes disposable credit card numbers. The physical entity is the magnetic credit card chip controlled by a mobile application inside a customer's mobile device.</div>
<div style="border-radius: 0px !important; box-sizing: border-box; margin-bottom: 10px;">
The paper outlines the overall architecture and server-side deployment model, the design of SafePay, prototype implementation and security analysis.</div>
<div style="border-radius: 0px !important; box-sizing: border-box; margin-bottom: 10px;">
Here's how it works: First, the user downloads and executes the mobile banking application which communicates with the bank server. During transactions, the mobile application acquires disposable credit card numbers from the bank server, generates a wave file, plays the file to generate electrical current, and then drives the magnetic card chip via an audio jack or Bluetooth</div>
<div style="border-radius: 0px !important; box-sizing: border-box; margin-bottom: 10px;">
<strong style="border-radius: 0px !important; box-sizing: border-box;">The critical elements that make SafePay unique are:</strong></div>
<ul style="border-radius: 0px !important; box-sizing: border-box; margin-bottom: 10px; margin-top: 0px;">
<li style="border-radius: 0px !important; box-sizing: border-box;">Disposable credit card information that expires after a limited time or number of usages (i.e., just one time) so, even if the information is leaked, it cannot be used for future transactions.</li>
<li style="border-radius: 0px !important; box-sizing: border-box;">A magnetic credit card chip that makes it completely compatible with existing readers. In the evaluation, the researchers show that the cost of the magnetic card chip is about $0.5, and could be even lower if manufactured in large scale.</li>
<li style="border-radius: 0px !important; box-sizing: border-box;">A mobile banking application that automates the process making it extremely user-friendly.</li>
</ul>
<div style="border-radius: 0px !important; box-sizing: border-box; margin-bottom: 10px;">
Cao and his colleagues conducted real-world experiments with the SafePay technology performing transactions with a vending machine, a gas station, and a university coffee shop. During the experiments, they used a bank application, cell phone application, and magnetic credit card chip. The disposable credit card information was acquired from ShopSafe by registering several disposable credit card numbers with Bank of America. In all three scenarios, the SafePay method worked and the transactions were successful.</div>
</div>
<div class="mobile-top-rectangle" style="border-radius: 0px !important; box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px; text-align: center; width: 489.984px;">
</div>
<hr style="border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-radius: 0px !important; border-right-width: 0px; border-top-color: rgb(238, 238, 238); border-top-style: solid; box-sizing: content-box; height: 0px; margin-bottom: 20px; margin-top: 20px;" />
<div id="story_source" style="border-radius: 0px !important; box-sizing: border-box;">
<div style="border-radius: 0px !important; box-sizing: border-box; margin-bottom: 10px;">
<strong style="border-radius: 0px !important; box-sizing: border-box;">Story Source:</strong></div>
<div style="border-radius: 0px !important; box-sizing: border-box; margin-bottom: 10px;">
The above post is reprinted from <a href="http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2015-09/lu-f091815.php" rel="nofollow" style="background-color: transparent; border-radius: 0px !important; box-sizing: border-box; color: #4c7a9f; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank">materials</a> provided by <a href="http://www.lehigh.edu/" rel="nofollow" style="background-color: transparent; border-radius: 0px !important; box-sizing: border-box; color: #4c7a9f; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank"><strong style="border-radius: 0px !important; box-sizing: border-box;">Lehigh University</strong></a>.<em style="border-radius: 0px !important; box-sizing: border-box;">Note: Materials may be edited for content and length.</em></div>
</div>
</div>
<div class="hyphenate" id="story_text" style="border-radius: 0px !important; box-sizing: border-box; margin-top: 15px; word-break: break-word; word-wrap: break-word;">
<div style="border-radius: 0px !important; box-sizing: border-box; margin-bottom: 10px;">
<em style="border-radius: 0px !important; box-sizing: border-box;"><br /></em></div>
</div>
</dl>

'SafePay': First anti-fraud system to use existing credit card readers

System transforms disposable credit card information to electrical current and drives a magnetic card chip to simulate the behavior of a ph...

isn't this amazing a 27-year-old computer to the web

BDxoul 0 news

Orginally Posted on : http://www.keacher.com/1216/how-i-introduced-a-27-year-old-computer-to-the-web/<br />
<div style="background-color: white; color: #111111; font-family: Verdana, 'BitStream vera Sans', Tahoma, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 12px; line-height: 17.4px; margin-bottom: 10px; padding: 0px;">
Reviving an old computer is like restoring a classic car: there’s a thrill from bringing the ancient into the modern world. So it was with my first “real” computer, my Mac Plus, when I decided to bring it forward three decades and introduce it to the modern web.</div>
<div class="wp-caption aligncenter" style="background: rgb(247, 247, 247); border: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); color: #111111; font-family: Verdana, 'BitStream vera Sans', Tahoma, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 12px; line-height: 17.4px; margin: 0px auto 5px; padding: 5px 0px; text-align: center; width: 510px;">
<a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/teuobk/9732490257/" style="color: #2970a6; text-decoration: none;"><img alt="" class=" " height="333" src="http://www.keacher.com/files/dir5/mac_plus.jpg" style="border: 0px; margin: 0px 5px; max-width: 600px;" width="500" /></a><div class="wp-caption-text" style="padding: 0px 5px !important;">
My Macintosh Plus. Spoiler alert: here it is surfing Wikipedia.</div>
</div>
<div style="background-color: white; color: #111111; font-family: Verdana, 'BitStream vera Sans', Tahoma, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 12px; line-height: 17.4px; margin-bottom: 10px; padding: 0px;">
It’s a lowly machine, my Mac. The specs pale in comparison to even my Kindle: 8 MHz CPU, 4 MB RAM, 50 MB hard drive, and <del>512 x 384</del> 512 x 342 pixel black-and-white screen. My current desktop PC is <a href="http://staging.mactech.com/articles/mactech/Vol.03/03.09/Benchmarks2/index.html" style="color: #2970a6; text-decoration: none;">on the order</a> of <a href="http://www.roylongbottom.org.uk/whetstone%20results.htm#anchorquad64" style="color: #2970a6; text-decoration: none;">200,000 times faster</a> — not even including the GPU. Still, that Mac Plus was where I cut my computing teeth as a child. It introduced me to C, hard drives, modems, and the internet.</div>
<div style="background-color: white; color: #111111; font-family: Verdana, 'BitStream vera Sans', Tahoma, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 12px; line-height: 17.4px; margin-bottom: 10px; padding: 0px;">
Yes, in a certain sense, my Mac has already been on the internet, first via BBSes and later via Lynx through a dial-up shell sessions. (There’s nothing quite like erotic literature at 2400 bps when you’re 13 years old.) What it never did was run a TCP/IP stack of its own. It was always just a dumb terminal on the ‘net, never a full-fledged member.</div>
<div style="background-color: white; color: #111111; font-family: Verdana, 'BitStream vera Sans', Tahoma, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 12px; line-height: 17.4px; margin-bottom: 10px; padding: 0px;">
How hard could it be to right that wrong?</div>
<div style="background-color: white; color: #111111; font-family: Verdana, 'BitStream vera Sans', Tahoma, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 12px; line-height: 17.4px; margin-bottom: 10px; padding: 0px;">
Everything went smoothly at first. I had my mom ship the computer to me. It arrived in good condition, having been stored undisturbed in her basement since the mid-1990s. I plugged it and its external hard drive in, flipped the power switches, and watched the happy Mac glow to life on the tiny CRT. Sure, the hard drive gave a groan of protest when it first spun up, but that quieted down, and everything seemed stable with the data intact. At least for the first few minutes.</div>
<div style="background-color: white; color: #111111; font-family: Verdana, 'BitStream vera Sans', Tahoma, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 12px; line-height: 17.4px; margin-bottom: 10px; padding: 0px;">
I was far down nostalgia lane playing a game of <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glider_PRO" style="color: #2970a6; text-decoration: none;">Glider</a> when all of a sudden there was a loud *POP* and the smell of smoke. Panicked, I slammed the power switches off and pulled the plugs. It didn’t take much sniffing to find the source of the acrid odor: the external hard drive.  The stress of current after years of disuse had proved too much for one of the filter caps in the external drive’s power supply.</div>
<div class="wp-caption aligncenter" style="background: rgb(247, 247, 247); border: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); color: #111111; font-family: Verdana, 'BitStream vera Sans', Tahoma, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 12px; line-height: 17.4px; margin: 0px auto 5px; padding: 5px 0px; text-align: center; width: 510px;">
<img alt="" height="333" src="http://www.keacher.com/files/dir5/resized-1847.jpg" style="border: 0px; margin: 0px 5px; max-width: 600px;" width="500" /><div class="wp-caption-text" style="padding: 0px 5px !important;">
A cracked XY cap from the external hard drive’s power supply.</div>
</div>
<div style="background-color: white; color: #111111; font-family: Verdana, 'BitStream vera Sans', Tahoma, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 12px; line-height: 17.4px; margin-bottom: 10px; padding: 0px;">
Fortunately, Digikey still sold those exact caps(!), and I’m handy with a soldering iron, so a few days later I was back in business. On to the networking!</div>
<div style="background-color: white; color: #111111; font-family: Verdana, 'BitStream vera Sans', Tahoma, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 12px; line-height: 17.4px; margin-bottom: 10px; padding: 0px;">
To accomplish my goal, I needed a web browser, a TCP/IP stack, and some way to connect the Mac to my home network.</div>
<div style="background-color: white; color: #111111; font-family: Verdana, 'BitStream vera Sans', Tahoma, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 12px; line-height: 17.4px; margin-bottom: 10px; padding: 0px;">
The web browser was relatively easy to find thanks to guys running long-forgotten FTP sites in the dusty corners of the internet. MacWeb 2.0 was both old enough to run on my Plus and new enough to render HTML and speak HTTP. Sort of. But we’ll get to that in a minute.</div>
<div class="wp-caption aligncenter" style="background: rgb(247, 247, 247); border: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); color: #111111; font-family: Verdana, 'BitStream vera Sans', Tahoma, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 12px; line-height: 17.4px; margin: 0px auto 5px; padding: 5px 0px; text-align: center; width: 522px;">
<img alt="" height="342" src="http://www.keacher.com/files/dir5/system_info.png" style="border: 0px; margin: 0px 5px; max-width: 600px;" width="512" /><div class="wp-caption-text" style="padding: 0px 5px !important;">
A whole 4 MB of RAM to play with! Good thing, because MacWeb required 2 MB.</div>
</div>
<div style="background-color: white; color: #111111; font-family: Verdana, 'BitStream vera Sans', Tahoma, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 12px; line-height: 17.4px; margin-bottom: 10px; padding: 0px;">
Likewise, MacTCP existed in a version just barely able to run on System 7.0.  It didn’t support niceties like DHCP, but MacWeb was happy to use it, and it installed without problems, so there was the TCP/IP stack.</div>
<div style="background-color: white; color: #111111; font-family: Verdana, 'BitStream vera Sans', Tahoma, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 12px; line-height: 17.4px; margin-bottom: 10px; padding: 0px;">
Getting the Mac physically hooked to the network was a bigger challenge. The Mac Plus didn’t have an Ethernet port, and things like WiFi were years from being invented when it was manufactured. A couple of companies made SCSI-to-Ethernet adapters about 15 years ago, but those were rare and expensive. I thought about the problem for a while, and it occurred to me that I could channel the early days again: I could use the serial port and PPP or SLIP to bridge to the outside world. Like dialup without the modem.</div>
<div style="background-color: white; color: #111111; font-family: Verdana, 'BitStream vera Sans', Tahoma, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 12px; line-height: 17.4px; margin-bottom: 10px; padding: 0px;">
I set up my Raspberry Pi and ran some Cat-5 to it from the router.  Using a level shifter and a variety of old adapters, I managed to get a serial cable working between the Pi and the Mac. That took care of the hardware.</div>
<div style="background-color: white; color: #111111; font-family: Verdana, 'BitStream vera Sans', Tahoma, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 12px; line-height: 17.4px; margin-bottom: 10px; padding: 0px;">
On the software side, I scrounged around and after several failed attempts found a PPP client that would run on the Plus and a super-simple PPP server called SLiRP for the Pi. Documentation for the combination of MacTCP, MacPPP, and SLiRP was, surprisingly, <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20120304072622/http://students.engr.scu.edu/~dwelch/slirp/config.html" style="color: #2970a6; text-decoration: none;">still available</a>.  After a bit of tinkering with the <a href="http://www.keacher.com/files/dir8/slirp.sh" style="color: #2970a6; text-decoration: none;">configuration</a>, I was able to get MacTCP to talk to MacPPP, MacPPP to talk to SLiRP, SLiRP to use the Ethernet connection, and so on through my router and out to the internet.  Since serial I/O on the Mac Plus was processor-intensive, throughput was limited to about 19 kbits/s, but 19 was a lot higher than 0.</div>
<div class="wp-caption aligncenter" style="background: rgb(247, 247, 247); border: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); color: #111111; font-family: Verdana, 'BitStream vera Sans', Tahoma, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 12px; line-height: 17.4px; margin: 0px auto 5px; padding: 5px 0px; text-align: center; width: 510px;">
<img alt="" height="333" src="http://www.keacher.com/files/dir5/resized-1895.jpg" style="border: 0px; margin: 0px 5px; max-width: 600px;" width="500" /><div class="wp-caption-text" style="padding: 0px 5px !important;">
A Raspberry Pi doing the heavy lifting for the computer that’s tens of thousands of times slower. The mess in the upper right is a level shifter, a null modem, a DB-9 to DB-25 adapter, and a serial cable.</div>
</div>
<div style="background-color: white; color: #111111; font-family: Verdana, 'BitStream vera Sans', Tahoma, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 12px; line-height: 17.4px; margin-bottom: 10px; padding: 0px;">
Now, you might be wondering, “Wait, how did you get all of that abandonware on there in the first place?”  Good question! The Mac’s floppy drive was old enough to be fundamentally incompatible with PC drives, and I didn’t have any floppy drives in my modern computers anyway.</div>
<div style="background-color: white; color: #111111; font-family: Verdana, 'BitStream vera Sans', Tahoma, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 12px; line-height: 17.4px; margin-bottom: 10px; padding: 0px;">
I tried going down the avenue of 100 MB ZIP disks, since ZIP drives were made in both USB and SCSI-1 versions. While I did manage to get the Mac to use the ZIP disks (and in fact switched to one for the primary boot drive), and even got my Windows PC reading the HFS formatted disks using some nifty tools, every attempt to move data from the PC to the Plus resulted in nothing but corrupted files on the Zip disk.</div>
<div style="background-color: white; color: #111111; font-family: Verdana, 'BitStream vera Sans', Tahoma, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 12px; line-height: 17.4px; margin-bottom: 10px; padding: 0px;">
That left the serial port. I happened to have an old terminal emulator called Microphone already installed on the Mac. Microphone supported ZMODEM for file transfers, which you’re probably nodding your head about if you remember BBSes. Thus, to transfer files to the Mac, I SFTPed the questionably legal  files I needed from my PC onto the Raspberry Pi, plugged the Pi into the serial port, fired up Microphone on the Mac as a terminal, and launched Minicom on the Pi from the Mac. I nervously struck the keys to initiate a ZMODEM transfer from Minicom, selected the files, and hit enter. Minicom obliged, there was a BEEP! and a “Save incoming file?” dialog popped up on the Mac. Some un-binhexing later, I found myself running new software on my old Plus. Huzzah!</div>
<div style="background-color: white; color: #111111; font-family: Verdana, 'BitStream vera Sans', Tahoma, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 12px; line-height: 17.4px; margin-bottom: 10px; padding: 0px;">
So, with the Raspberry Pi, MacTCP, and MacWeb all in place, it was time to surf the web! Right? Right?!</div>
<div style="background-color: white; color: #111111; font-family: Verdana, 'BitStream vera Sans', Tahoma, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 12px; line-height: 17.4px; margin-bottom: 10px; padding: 0px;">
No. No surfing yet.</div>
<div style="background-color: white; color: #111111; font-family: Verdana, 'BitStream vera Sans', Tahoma, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 12px; line-height: 17.4px; margin-bottom: 10px; padding: 0px;">
The MacWeb developers apparently took a look at the HTTP 1.0 spec, decided, “Who would ever need name-based virtual hosting?” and left out the feature that 99% of the sites on the modern web relied on. No support for virtual hostnames meant you got whatever you saw when you used the server’s IP address alone in the HTTP request, and for most sites, that was jack squat. Oh, and HTTPS, cookies, and CSS hadn’t been invented yet.</div>
<div style="background-color: white; color: #111111; font-family: Verdana, 'BitStream vera Sans', Tahoma, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 12px; line-height: 17.4px; margin-bottom: 10px; padding: 0px;">
AAARGH!!!</div>
<div style="background-color: white; color: #111111; font-family: Verdana, 'BitStream vera Sans', Tahoma, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 12px; line-height: 17.4px; margin-bottom: 10px; padding: 0px;">
I vented about the problems to <a href="http://www.tghw.com/" style="color: #2970a6; text-decoration: none;">Tyler</a>, mentioned that I was in for a long stretch of coding to solve it, and was surprised when he whipped up a filtering proxy solution in about 20 minutes using Python,<a href="http://www.python-requests.org/en/latest/" style="color: #2970a6; text-decoration: none;">Requests</a>, <a href="http://flask.pocoo.org/" style="color: #2970a6; text-decoration: none;">Flask</a>, and <a href="http://www.crummy.com/software/BeautifulSoup/" style="color: #2970a6; text-decoration: none;">Beautiful Soup</a>.  (Update 12/16: <a href="https://github.com/tghw/macproxy" style="color: #2970a6; text-decoration: none;">here’s the code from Tyler</a>.) The key to it all was that MacWeb would include the full URL, with the hostname, when making a proxy request.  Requests fetched the URL, stripped SSL and managed any cookies. BeautifulSoup stripped out things that MacWeb couldn’t understand, like CSS, Javascript, images, and DIVs. Flask pulled proxy duties, reading the request and sending the filtered result back to the Mac.</div>
<div style="background-color: white; color: #111111; font-family: Verdana, 'BitStream vera Sans', Tahoma, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 12px; line-height: 17.4px; margin-bottom: 10px; padding: 0px;">
And that, friends, was sufficient to surf the web. It even looked surprisingly decent, almost like a mobile browser:</div>
<div class="wp-caption aligncenter" style="background: rgb(247, 247, 247); border: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); color: #111111; font-family: Verdana, 'BitStream vera Sans', Tahoma, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 12px; line-height: 17.4px; margin: 0px auto 5px; padding: 5px 0px; text-align: center; width: 522px;">
<img alt="" height="342" src="http://www.keacher.com/files/dir5/macplus_wiki.png" style="border: 0px; margin: 0px 5px; max-width: 600px;" width="512" /><div class="wp-caption-text" style="padding: 0px 5px !important;">
The Mac Plus Wikipedia page, as viewed on my Mac Plus</div>
</div>
<div style="background-color: white; color: #111111; font-family: Verdana, 'BitStream vera Sans', Tahoma, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 12px; line-height: 17.4px; margin-bottom: 10px; padding: 0px;">
<br /></div>
<div class="wp-caption aligncenter" style="background: rgb(247, 247, 247); border: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); color: #111111; font-family: Verdana, 'BitStream vera Sans', Tahoma, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 12px; line-height: 17.4px; margin: 0px auto 5px; padding: 5px 0px; text-align: center; width: 522px;">
<img alt="" height="342" src="http://www.keacher.com/files/dir5/hackernews.png" style="border: 0px; margin: 0px 5px; max-width: 600px;" width="512" /><div class="wp-caption-text" style="padding: 0px 5px !important;">
Hacker News as viewed by the Mac. Surprisingly readable given that MacWeb doesn’t support CSS</div>
</div>
<div style="background-color: white; color: #111111; font-family: Verdana, 'BitStream vera Sans', Tahoma, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 12px; line-height: 17.4px; margin-bottom: 10px; padding: 0px;">
Sure, it was slow as hell, but it worked! Data loaded, pages rendered, and links were clickable. Even forms sort of worked.</div>
<div style="background-color: white; color: #111111; font-family: Verdana, 'BitStream vera Sans', Tahoma, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 12px; line-height: 17.4px; margin-bottom: 10px; padding: 0px;">
Did I mention it was slow? It was slow. Soooo sloooow. Slow slow slow.  Like, minutes to read and render a page slow. Here’s a video showing how slow:</div>
<div style="background-color: white; color: #111111; font-family: Verdana, 'BitStream vera Sans', Tahoma, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 12px; line-height: 17.4px; margin-bottom: 10px; padding: 0px;">
<iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="281" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/5UBRUyofiiU?feature=oembed" width="500"></iframe></div>
<div style="background-color: white; color: #111111; font-family: Verdana, 'BitStream vera Sans', Tahoma, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 12px; line-height: 17.4px; margin-bottom: 10px; padding: 0px;">
Whatever. The goal was simply to introduce the Mac to the web.</div>
<div style="background-color: white; color: #111111; font-family: Verdana, 'BitStream vera Sans', Tahoma, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 12px; line-height: 17.4px; margin-bottom: 10px; padding: 0px;">
The meet-and-greet was successful</div>

isn't this amazing a 27-year-old computer to the web

Orginally Posted on : http://www.keacher.com/1216/how-i-introduced-a-27-year-old-computer-to-the-web/ Reviving an old computer is like res...

Socialize

Breaking News

'SafePay': First anti-fraud system to use existing credit card readers

isn't this amazing a 27-year-old computer to the web

'SafePay': First anti-fraud system to use existing credit card readers

isn't this amazing a 27-year-old computer to the web