I know what you’re thinking – What the frak is Byteside? Put simply, it’s a live show happening in Sydney where some of Australia’s top tech and gaming journos and pundits get together and have a chat about some of the hottest industry news and products over a couple of beers. It’s the brainchild of ex-Giz AU editor Seamus Byrne and Atomic magazine founder Ben Mansill and it’s launching at the Shelbourne Hotel on September 15.
Hot on the back of today’s Entertainment Geekly column that the Star Trek world premiere is happening in Sydney and we’re going, comes word from Paramount that a limited number of seats to the April 7 premiere will be available to purchase at 9am on Monday March 30 (AEDT).
Ticketing red light runners is standard practice in many big cities, but Chicago is considering doing one better and scanning every car going by for up to date insurance.
In North Dakota, oddly enough, hackers have hit on a new way to infect innocent computers: fake parking tickets that direct car owners to a site where they are instructed to download malicious software.
An Italian programmer and over 100 other individuals, including public figures, policemen, and government officials, are currently being investigated for what seems to be a traffic-light-rigging conspiracy.
No matter the fuss about RFID hacking, France’s national train operator SNCF is trialling a single-user RFID payment system for journeys on its network. The Weneo card is no flimsy card with a simple embedded chip however: it’s a thick gizmo with 4GB aboard and a USB plug. Shoving it into a PC takes the user directly to SNCF’s website, where they can charge up the card’s credit. Sounds all very groovy, but since the card also contains a chunk of personal data, like status as a student or senior citizen or “amount of money the cardholder has available for purchases” (why the heck is that there?) it strikes me as something that’d be pretty worrying to lose/get hacked. On trial for 1,000 users currently. [RFIDJournal via Nowhereelse—in French]
