Archive for June, 2005

Anti Phishing measures

Anti-phishing measures are being introduced by banks to prevent phishing attacks.

Recently I was doing a routine transfer of money from one of my accounts to another using ICICI’s Internet banking facility. Normally, the system asks for the transaction password to complete the money transfer. But this time, after entering the transaction password, the system showed me a weird screen. First, I thought ….ah.. some new shit or an error, which is pretty common with ICICI’s online banking (yeah.. press the back button, you are doomed, press the reload button, you are thrown out!……..really painful). But, later I realised that this was a safety measure.

The system showed me a screen which asked me to enter some digits of my ATM card number. (the digits at position 4, 6 and 7 - again, I guess, its pretty much random).

That’s really good. If a phisher had actually got hold of my Internet banking userid and password, he or she wouldn’t be able to transfer the money out so easily!! Cool. One more point is, this is triggered only for transaction above a threshold amount.

Will have to wait and watch for how long this method to prevent phishing or protecting the bank account works. If the phishers manage to steal the ATM card number too, then…………….:)

Need more info on Anti-phishing at : http://www.antiphishing.org/

3 comments | June 7th, 2005 at 12:50pm

State of Roads in Mangalore

Is a real sad scene when it comes to the roads in Mangalore. The rains are on time this year, and its going to rain cats and dogs in the next few days for a couple of months. But the situation of roads has gone from bad to worse.

The roads were dug for (re)laying drainage lines, telecom cables etc starting Feb/March, I guess, and not properly covered up at many of the places, which can be quite dangerous. I was hoping that they would do at-least (re)tar the roads before it rained, but it turned out to be much more worse than I had hoped for. Forget the tar, they haven’t even covered the trenches properly. At some places, they have done some patch up work, but its clearly of sub-standard quality, and already the patch work has disappeared at many of the places. (in just 5 days!!!).

The city corporation has issued a notification banning digging of roads in the next three months starting June 1st to telecom companies etc.., but it has not bothered to close the trenches that have been dug right about in April / May. Even after the notification, today, since it was a bit sunny, I saw some MAJOR digging happening on at-least 4 roads. (i.e., almost all the roads i traveled today!!)

The next three/four months would be really bad, causing major problem to public. But who cares? The municipal folks are not bothered at all. They are just worried about their pockets! Hopeless people. All it needs is a little bit of planning. Don’t know when our country will improve.

6 comments | June 6th, 2005 at 03:20pm

Getting Traffic

Was reading the post by Kiruba on making your blog more popular, getting traffic to your blog, and that led me write this post. For the past week or two, i have been getting quite a lot of traffic to my blog! The traffic is almost tripled! Thanks to BlogExplosion!

Its a site which gets traffic to your site. You browse other sites, earn credits, and use those credits to get traffic to your site. Thats pretty boring and painful. Agreed. But, off late, they have come up with variety games like blogRocket, battle of blogs etc., which is kind of fun! :) Do sign up @ BlogExplosion and try it out!

Add comment | June 5th, 2005 at 07:32pm