ncyoung.com

A client who uses Authorize.net started seeing a bunch of one cent transactions show up in their merchant interface. There's no way for someone to buy something for a penny at the site, so this was troubling.

We immediately changed the site passwords and the authorize.net account passwords. I audited the scripts to make sure that no-one had changed anything (made a bit harder to do by a recent design update of the site). I updated the scripts to use authorize.net's newer protocol which allows for an MD5 hash to be attached to the transaction as it is sent from our server to the authorize.net server.

I never did figure out exactly where the 1c transactions were coming from, which is a tiny bit troubling. But they have stopped.

As for the why, I can only think that someone had a big batch of stolen credit card numbers and was trying to figure out which ones were good accounts. We live in interesting times.

Authorize.net had stopped supporting an older version of their protocol which the site used. So I updated the site to use the then-current equivalent.

A short time later we began having problems with that equivalent (which authorize.net is now phasing out because of security problems). See The Mover's Friend Authorize.net Security Update

Provide ASP front end for making SNMP queries, displaying query results as options in a configuration form, then sending configuration information to another server via remote procedure calls.

Configuration information is then used by a Perl script to write an MRTG configuration file so that the user can see the information they'd like to see graphed for that device.

ASP front end and Perl backend communicate later to provide further customization of reports by the user, and to organize links to the MRTG reports.

started: 2001-05-29

Ended: 2001-06-26

RealUser.com was a company that offered an authentication service based on face recognition. (I assume the past tense is appropriate here, I can no longer get to their web site.) When you signed up for the service, you were assigned 4 people and you went through a short "introduction" to them via an image of each of their faces.

It was amazing how quick it was to learn the faces and how unerringly I could pick them out of a grid of unfamiliar faces. Apparently facial recognition is evolutionarily important and we therefore have large portions of grey matter devoted to the task.

Anyway, the idea was that to provide universal secure login for web applications, kind of like passport with a friendly face (groan).

I helped them develop a simple SDK for ASP (the coding was mostly done when I got there), and document installing and configuring it so that webmasters could integrate realuser logins with their own websites.

Web site for a hotel information and reservation service based in Santa Barbara, California.

started: 1999-04-05

Ended:

Website for the AFI's celebration of the first century of movie history.

started: 1998-05-01

Ended: 1998-07-01