Crossed Wires

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Archive for November 14th, 2009

Safe, secure, terrifying, VISA

Nov 14

Posted by Vic in Life | View Comments

I listen to a few netcasts from Leo Laporte’s TWiT network.  For a while about 18-24 months ago a few shows on the network were sponsored by VISA, flogging their fraud protection capabilities.  ”Safe, Secure, VISA” was something I heard ad-nauseum a while ago (and started hearing it again recently, as I listen to old Security Now episodes).

While my Thalys journey to Paris was coming to an end, I got a phone call.  I wasn’t going to answer it for the combined reasons of being in a foreign country, being on a train in a foreign country, and being in a small room not normally associated with telephone communication while on a train in a foreign country.  Something made me answer the damned thing though.

It was someone claiming to be from my bank in Australia, asking me if I’d just used my credit card to buy something from the Apple Store in the US.  Now I did very nearly say yes, and to stop bothering me with such stuff: this was the card that had been associated with my Apple ID, and there was a chance that N had picked up my iPod and stumbled through and found the App Store and bought something.  They’d never contacted me before about App Store purchases however, and then I remembered that card was not on my Apple ID any more.  So I replied non-committally (and very helpfully, in hindsight)…

“Well, maybe.”

“This was only in the last couple of minutes,” said the bank.

“Oh,” said I.  That changed things.  Knowing that the card was not linked to my Apple ID any more, there was very little chance that N might have done something.  It definitely wasn’t me either, given where I had been during the few minutes in question.  ”No, then,” I replied.

At this, the VISA machinery sprang into action.  Within seconds I had been recited the standard dialogue about how my card(s) had now been cancelled and that I would soon receive new card(s) and PIN(s), so on and so on.  Being none too happy about having to re-arrange scheduled charges to the account (the only use that particular card gets, as it turns out) I started to think about how the number had got into the wild.

In spite of knowing that there are card number generators that the bad guys use to generate valid card numbers to try on unsuspecting e-commerce sites, something gave me the thought that it was more likely I had lost the small wallet that card was kept in.  I started thinking about the other cards that were in that case.  Hotel/car loyalty cards: painful, but not a problem.  Unused AMEX: cancellation drama only.  Travel-backup credit card: hmm, that might be a problem.  What else…

Oh, wait a minute…

OH CRAP.

Last I saw that wallet it was wrapped around…

O. M. F. G.

My PASSPORT.

Instantly I understood the feeling described by the term “heart in my mouth”.  There I was, standing on a train pulling into Paris Gare du Nord with my knees buckling contemplating the possibility that my passport was lost.

I started to look through the bags I was carrying, the places where I knew the wallet should have been.  Nothing.  By this time the train had stopped, and I alighted the train with the other passengers and took my frantic search to the Gare du Nord platform.  Still nothing.

My mind was racing.  Do I continue my journey to Montpellier as planned, and sort out the passport later?  Maybe ironically, the thing I was most upset about was having lost all the stamps in my passport!

I decided that I couldn’t think properly standing on a train platform and that I had to get to my hotel and sort it out there.  I managed to find the subway that links the SNCF station to the RER, but halfway through the subway I realised that I couldn’t go any further without having a proper search.  So in the middle of a railway station subway in Paris I started rifling my luggage like a sniffer-dog looking for the stash (and it wasn’t until later that I realised how much trouble that might have got me into).

FOUND.

The wallet, all cards secure and still encasing my passport, had worked its way into the lowest portion of the wheeled laptop bag I use.  I suffered the joyous feeling of my heart returning to its rightful place, combined with the return of my ability to breathe.  As I put stuff back into my bags and resumed my journey, I tried to concentrate on the task of getting the right ticket, the right RER line and the right train to get me to Gare de Lyon (thanks to the signage in the station, this was made very easy).

Once I was on the RER, with other commuters around me and me trying to marshall my luggage, I realised how I could not have done the trip thinking that I had lost my stuff.  I also realised that that was the closest I ever want to come to actually losing my passport while overseas.

Oh, and the credit card?  Like I said, it was in the wallet all along.  The card hasn’t been out of that same wallet for over twelve months, and the regular deductions (and my automatic payment to cover them) have been the only transactions on the account for at least that long, so I guess a card generator just happened to get lucky with my number.

So if you happen to get that phone call from your bank, think seriously about your card’s whereabouts and recent activity… and for heaven’s sake don’t do what I did and jump to the conclusion that the card was lost or stolen — your imagination might just take you someplace you really don’t want to go.

Update: Before I left Australia I had asked the bank to reissue the card for a promotion they were having, but the new one didn’t reach me before I left the country. When I got home, I had a look at the card that had been issued — the one that got hacked.  I think I know now why I got pinged: the CVV number (the three-digit printed number on the back of the card that is supposed to increase security) was the last digit of the card number followed by “00″ — I’d have to think that would be about the weakest CVV number the card could possibly have had! I feel much better now that this was simply a random selection by a card-number generator, facilitated by a stupidly-insecure CVV.

Travel update: Riding the rails of Europe

Nov 14

Posted by Vic in Life, Travel | View Comments

When last you heard from me, I had arrived in my Amsterdam hotel.  The weather was a bit rainy, so I postponed the planned orientation walk and caught a bit of a kip, had some dinner, and made sure I was ready for the presentation the next day.

I’m not going to talk about the work stuff in these updates: for one, this is not actually a work blog so I probably shouldn’t anyway.  Secondly, it’s a bit on the boring side of things and I’d rather talk about the travel.  So, with that decided, let’s continue…

So Monday arrived and I did my presentation, then picked up my bags from the hotel and went to Schiphol.  I made use of the NS HiSpeed lounge (a little bit like an airline club lounge, but on a smaller scale) to have a refreshment before heading down to the platform for my train.  My final destination was Montpellier, France, but because of the time I thought I had to be there I had to overnight in Paris: so it was Thalys to Paris on Monday, then TGV to Montpellier on Tuesday morning.

I feel the need here to reiterate what I mentioned in the previous post: I’m a rail-fan.  When TGV was introduced in the 1980s, I made it one of my life’s goals to make a TGV journey one day.  I marked the goal halfway complete when a colleague and I travelled on Thalys in 2006: half-complete because we only went from Amsterdam to Brussels, which is not true high-speed (although I saw that it has been upgraded, and Thalys will run high-speed to Amsterdam from December 2009).

As I boarded Thalys for Paris that Monday night, I realised that my goal was about to become fully-complete.  I settled in as the train departed into the Dutch night, and started to enjoy the comforts of Thalys “Comfort 1″.  I hooked up to the Wi-Fi and made a couple of silly Facebook updates, and saw a nice little map feature they provided on their portal page:

My train was just south of Antwerp at this time... Cool, eh!

My train was just south of Antwerp at this time... Cool, eh!

Due to the dark outside, it was difficult to get a sense of how fast the train was moving: the only way to know for sure was the occasional lit-up building or car that went by.  As I said, having travelled on Thalys before I knew that the best was yet to come (in other words, after we went through Brussels).

Eventually we pulled into Brussels, and my excitement built a little more.  The wait in Brussels-Midi station was almost unbearable!  Finally though, we got moving again.

I read an article by a UK travel reviewer when the TGV first ran.  He described a dramatic surge of acceleration as the 1k5V standard French pantograph was lowered and the 25kV circuit was activated on the high-speed line to Lyon.  I didn’t experience any such hard surge, but as we picked up speed out of Brussels I just knew that something was different.  I guess I was seeing enough points-of-reference outside to know that we were moving much faster than before, but whatever it was I could tell that now we were really moving.

I sat and enjoyed it all for a while: the surreal feeling of approaching the continuous lights of a stream of traffic on a road or highway impossibly fast, and realising that the train was actually going to pass over it…  and then the lights were gone as the train flashed over the highway.  The thrilling hum and vibration of the train itself: not disturbing at all, just the feeling of being on board a piece of machinery that was working hard.  After a while I checked back on the ThalysNet map, and realised that the map was clickable…  I clicked, and was rewarded with an enlarged view, with a speedometer! I refreshed the view a couple of times to make sure it wasn’t something static…

I did see refresh and get one that said 300km/h, but it looked a bit staged ;-)

I did refresh and get one that said 300km/h, but it looked a bit staged ;-)

I refreshed each time I felt a large change in speed (and before anyone asks, no at 300km/h you can’t tell a change of 5km/h), and saw enough change in the display to be confident that it was a real representation of the train’s speed.

Unfortunately the journey had to come to an end.  I’ll write a separate post about the terrible experience I had as I arrived in Paris, but once I got over that I worked on the task of getting myself from Gare du Nord (where Thalys operates from) across town to Gare de Lyon (where the southbound TGVs run from, near which I’d booked my room for the night).  I ended up managing very easily to find the way to the RER station, buy my ticket, find the right train — a direct train, where my research had told me I’d need to change trains — and hop off at Gare de Lyon.  After a little mixed-up street navigation (unbeknownst to me I’d left the station from the back entrance, and ended up walking all the way around to the front) I made it to my hotel, checked in, and negotiated an old-style elevator (with a swinging outer door!) to my floor and my room.

The next morning I went for a little walk.  I realised I was quite close to the River Seine, so thought I couldn’t go home without seeing it.  What can I say: yes, it’s a river.  I thought I’d be able to see perhaps just the top of the Eiffel Tower, but there were too many buildings in the way.  Back to the hotel then, to check out and go to the station.

When I got to the plaza in front of the station, I had to pause.  There I was, actually standing in front of Paris Gare de Lyon!  Okay, a railway station… but which railway station!  This is where TGV basically started it’s first passenger services.  I was having another one of those dream-about-to-come-true moments.  Then I went inside and saw a real TGV! If you’ve seen the movie Cars, you’ll know the scene at the end when the Michael-Schumacher-Ferrari drives into Luigi’s Casa Della Tires and Luigi ends up fainting (“a REAL FERRARI!”).  For me, seeing not one but at least five TGVs was much like that.  Okay, they aren’t the old TGV Orange that I knew when I was a kid, and the design is a bit updated, but they’re TGV and they’re where modern high-speed commuter rail began.

Next update I’ll describe more of my TGV experience, as well as my first European drive!

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