Viewing magnetic recordings with magnetic particles used to be a standard maintenance tool. It was used to check tape drive head alignment. There was a liquid with iron particles in suspension into which you could dip a strip of tape. When the solvent evaporated, you could see the data tracks. A non-destructive version was a hand-held viewer, with a window on top and a thin plate on the bottom, filled with a fluid containing iron particles. You could press this against a tape and view it.
These were sometimes used in data centers during the transition from 7 to 9 track tape drives, when an incoming tape had an unknown format.
The very first time I wrote an interrupt handler, it was in octal, entered by a numeric keypad into an LSI-11 with DEC's ODT - "Octal Debugging Technique".
I wish I could say I was paid to do that but it was for UC Davis' Intro to Computer Architecture Class.
A beautiful story about the inner workings of a patent-pending species-specific insect repellent based on a small strip of magnetic strip. As one might guess, it involves encoding the words "FLEA" and "TICK" on the strip. Or maybe "AELF" and "KCIT" to properly actuate the quantum polarity? The story was written in 2010 while the patent was still pending. But surely it's been rejected by now. Nope. Also as one might guess, the patent was granted by the USPTO with the the main claim intact: https://www.google.gg/patents/US8382001
Have you ever thought to yourself "Sure, this advertisement says 'patent-pending', but that only means that someone was able to scrape together enough money to file a patent. It's not like someone has vetted the technology and actually granted them a patent." Well, now you see that you can safely shorten that to "Sure, this advertisement says 'patented', but that only means that someone was able to scrape together enough money to file a patent. It's not like someone has vetted the technology."
This is probably not surprising to anyone who understands the role of patents. They aren't designed to act as evidence that a technology is useful, or even possible. Instead, they are designed to "promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts", which seems to be interpreted as to "create a secondary market for dubious patents". I was surprised though to see that they had been granted a second patent, covering the ornamental design of the tag: http://www.google.com/patents/USD626704
I was aware that design patents existed to cover essential innovations such as the rounded corners of a "portable display device" (http://www.google.com/patents/USD670286), but I hadn't realized how broadly they could be applied. Is there a threshold that needs to be exceeded when determining how much the grant of a design patent will "promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts"? Or can one expect to receive design patents for any design variation you can dream up?
The article is from 2010. Amazingly shootag is still on sale at Amazon. $35 for two! They have 150 reviews. 42% 5 star, 12% 4 stars and 31% 1 star.
The reviews seem to have many genuine people who absolutely believe these work - even though these things clearly can't work. Reading the reviews makes me a bit angry and a bit sad.
It's really sad to see this company taking advantage of all those poor people who want to help their animals but have had problems with other treatments. Taking advantage of these gullible people does a lot of harm, because now they think their animals are protected and don't seek out actual effective treatments. I wonder how many pets might have avoided lyme disease if their owners hadn't been swindled by these ass-holes; and I wonder how much cash these criminals are taking home :(
I'm actually more worried about the anti-mosquito tags for humans. And not because some clueless tourist may go unprotected into mosquito-transmitted diseases. With those two patents and their marketing, I worry someone will get a grant for deploying those tags in malaria-ridden places, meaning a lot of money that could save actual lives will go down the drain, further reducing both effectiveness and trust in charitable efforts.
Running a business like this while knowing the product is bullshit is what I would call sociopathic.
It's already happening. Austin based ShooTag maker Energetic Solutions is supplying earthquake survivors and relief workers in Haiti with their odious cards.
I'd be inclined to agree it's sociopathic except I've met too many woo-believers that are just loony.
Rational wiki points out that it is vaugly possible they do work, although not by the mechanism claimed. if they were heavily coated with chemicals they might work... while possibly poisoning the pet they are being used on.
Some of those Amazon reviews suggest that the tags only work when "fresh", which might support that theory. Still I expect confirmation bias is more likely.
> shoo!TAG is a revolutionary chemical-free way to protect your pets from fleas and ticks
I don't think so. But I highly doubt the card is actually chemical-free, so they're lying either way. Also, I think they would be more afraid of lawsuits by people whose pets were poisoned than for false advertising.
Frankly, he sounds dangerous. If he honestly thinks a magstripe can repel insects, do you really want to use other biomedical tech he's had anything to do with?
I guess Texas A&M give degrees out like candy... can I have one? Need firelighters.
Another fun thing you can do is put the iron filings in a jar with mineral oil. Give it a good shake, then put a strong magnet on the side. You'll be able to see the magnetic field in 3D.
What I'm confused about here is why the ShooTag actually has any data on it at all. Surely it would be cheaper to just make part of the plastic card black, instead of actually going to the trouble of encoding something on it.
> In an apparent effort to deflect criticism of the above investigations, as of April 2011 the ShooTag FAQ has carried a claim that "Customers can take their shoo!TAG® to any retailer that carries a magstripe (credit card) reader and swipe it through. The type of tag (i.e. fly, mosquito, tick) will show up when scanned." This is demonstrably a blatant lie. The card, when swiped, will, on standard credit card readers, throw a card read error. The FAQ continues: "If there is no name, then the shoo!TAG® tag has lost its efficacy." What this means in effect, is that anyone who doesn't know better will swipe the card and assume their card has expired. It seems self-evident that the manufacturers of ShooTag would not find such a test desirable, in any case. As most people know, credit cards will last for a lot longer than 4 months, the stated maximum period of effectiveness of the ShooTag. In addition to this, the ShooTag patent application explicitly says that "…the trivector data stored on the three tracks (of the tag's magnetic strip) is not readable by a conventional credit card reader."[8][28]
One thing to consider is that the creators might very well believe it works themselves.
It's easy to fool yourself into believing something you want to believe. They might even have done some informal, poorly structured tests and gotten the results they were expecting for other reasons, reinforcing their beliefs. Hell, I've done this to myself (ie when debugging) so I can totally empathize.
If you question it, you might find a way that works better. Then you have to redo all of it, and that's more work, so just keep plugging away, blissfully ignorant!
It's an example of a time when I'm fooling myself into believing that some stupid little thing has an effect on my code. It probably won't break if I remove it, but this is how those situations go down:
1. Something is broken
2. Try to fix it. Still broken.
3. Try to fix it. Still broken.
4. Sleep on it. Try to fix it in the morning. Still broken.
5. Refactor. Still broken.
6. Make a whole bunch of changes, including adding x = x.
7. It works! x=x must have fixed it! Stupid programming language.
8. Add x=x to all future code because it works because Python sucks and is stupid.
9. (optional) Go on Stack Exchange and HN and tell everyone that you need to say x=1.5 and follow it with x=x because Python is stupid and I am so smart to have figured this out.
Suppose Fred is given a programming assignment. Fred types in some code, tries it, and it seems to work. Fred types in some more code, tries it, and it still seems to work. After several weeks of coding this way, the program suddenly stops working, and after hours of trying to fix it, he still doesn’t know why. Fred may well spend a significant amount of time chasing this piece of code around without ever being able to fix it. No matter what he does, it just doesn’t ever seem to work right.
Fred doesn’t know why the code is failing because he didn’t know why it worked in the first place. It seemed to work, given the limited “testing” that Fred did, but that was just a coincidence. Buoyed by false confidence, Fred charged ahead into oblivion. Now, most intelligent people may know someone like Fred, but we know better. We don’t rely on coincidences—do we?
Sometimes we might. Sometimes it can be pretty easy to confuse a happy coincidence with a purposeful plan
That's perfect! I program by coincidence all the time. The very definition of a hacker... "it works, I must have done it right". And if it doesn't work, keep adding more console.println statements until you find something unexpected, then add a "x = x" to fix it and BOOM I just wrote Snapchat give me lots of money.
I'm joking, but it hits a little close to home because all of us have done that before. You're at the end of your rope and just need this thing to fucking work and you'll deal with the "why" later. For now, x = x works dammit, and it doesn't matter why. Meanwhile the console is filling up with all of your variables being printed out because you couldn't figure out where the value of x was being corrupted.
The next morning you switch to functional programming and forget that day ever existed.
To be fair, as science becomes a parody of itself in the general populace, informal poorly structured tests are becoming the norm. E.g., that's what all of mythbusters is.
According to Amazon this product's dimensions are 1.1x2.1 in. ISO/IEC 7810 cards (your average card with a magnetic stripe) is 3.370 × 2.125 in. I would bet that they get thrown out/ defect cards (probably not bank cards), clean and reprint the surface and cut them into three pieces.
Probably for inventory control so they don't send something out for Fleas when a customer purchased one for Ticks.
Anyone interested in slightly used magnetic bracelets? I don't think my dog will ever forgive me for having him wear them. LOL! ...... ok, just kidding.
It's definitely re-encoded. There are words "FLEA" and "TICK" encoded on the cards for respective insects. My bet is on recycling mag cards by cleaning them up, cutting in three and reencoding.
For the same reason, the ferromagnetic nature of the magstripe, it is possible to read, store and playback the data information on the stripe. You need only few $ for the reader or a simple Square reader. This is an alternative solution to spoof Magnetic stripe cards on Android: http://cosmodro.me/blog/2011/mar/25/rhombus-square-iskewedi/
Hey, cool, it's nice to see my stuff get referenced by someone that isn't me!
Rhombus only _reads_ magnetic stripe data. It won't write it. But yes, you could totally write to a low-coercivity stripe with the right hardware.
Before you run out and get a Square reader, they're all encrypted now and don't return the raw data necessary for Rhombus to work. You can still get unencrypted readers from China on alibaba pretty easily.
I actually read your thing a long while ago too! I took it a step further, and made a small coil and amp, and played the recorded data back through the coil, and placed the coil next to a one-track card reader. It actually worked, which was neat.
I remember requesting a stripe reader when I first saw something about them just spitting out the info, and by the time I got it they were already encrypted.
Will this interfer with their invisible fence collars?
Answer:
I wouldn't know the answer to that for sure - but would not
hesitate to use with an invisible fence. This is not an electric
type mechanism but rather one of kinetic energy - thus based
on the dogs movement...as they move they create body energy
and the tag works to keep critters away...not related to any
electrical devices etc. I believe on the Shoo Tag site you can
reach out to them and there are FAQ's, I'm sure they can
clarify 100%.
In one of my experimental physics courses we built a circuit to digitize the data on magnetic cards. It really blew my mind when I realized how it was designed to allow variable swipe speeds. If you think about it, it's very cool.
You can use laser printer toners to get same effect! They are magnetic as well and might be easier to get.
It's also easy to get better contrast - apply transparent tape to magnetic strip, remove the tape and put it on top of white paper. You can clearly see strips.
I downvoted your comment, but then noticed that you have only made two comments here, so this felt needlessly cruel. So I upvoted your first comment as recompense. Your first one was a fine comment. This one is not.
I'd be glad to hear more about using this technique to check alignment of floppies. In fact, the top rated comment on this page is about that. But saying "Nothing new here" is unwarranted and crass. While this may be old hat to you, it's interesting to many who might not have considered it.
Perhaps more importantly, only the first part of the article is about visually checking the magnetic strip. The rest is about enhancing it using image enhancement, decoding it by guessing likely parity codes, and then detailing years of unsuccessful attempts to discourage people from buying this fraudulent product.
Anyway, welcome to HN and please stick around to share your experience by make more comments like your first one.
Is there a learning here that something so simple and reliable can work so well for 60+ years despite constant ridicule from in-the-know tech and supposed "insecurity"?
If it's stolen as often as it is, it doesn't really "work so well". It worked well up until it started being used and stored on Internet-accessible machines. As soon as that happened, it utterly failed to "work so well".
If you want to know about its "supposed" insecurity, maybe read any of the hundreds of articles online about Target, Staples, Home Depot, PF Changs, Neiman Marcus, Goodwill, Global Payments, UPS, Michaels, and dozens more. I'm not sure what you're arguing, that magstripe is safe enough?
Magnetic stripe is about as secure as your door key. It's all great as long as it sits in your pocket, but post a close-up photo of it accompanied by your address to Twitter and see how long it takes until the things from your flat start mysteriously appearing on Craigslist.
Viewing magnetic recordings with magnetic particles used to be a standard maintenance tool. It was used to check tape drive head alignment. There was a liquid with iron particles in suspension into which you could dip a strip of tape. When the solvent evaporated, you could see the data tracks. A non-destructive version was a hand-held viewer, with a window on top and a thin plate on the bottom, filled with a fluid containing iron particles. You could press this against a tape and view it.
These were sometimes used in data centers during the transition from 7 to 9 track tape drives, when an incoming tape had an unknown format.