As the cost of living increases and the dream of home ownership seems like an unachievable goal, how can we ensure we have the right tools in place to encourage GenY to build a financially sustainable future and make the most of their personal finances?
On Tuesday, August 23, a group of us will be meeting at Forresters Hotel at the Cnr. Riley & Foveaux St. in Surry Hills to brainstorm some ideas. I will be there, along with at least 11 others. Feel free to bump into me and say “Hi!”.
A major PCI-related deadline came and went on the 1st of October that many PCI/PA DSS compliant people may not have even felt fly past, in fact most merchants were not even aware of the details, even though they’ve been given an entire year to get up to speed.
It is known as “Phase III” of the PA DSS compliance mandates, and it is the first major push to get Level 3 and 4 merchants to wake up to the importance of PCI. Like other PCI related mandates, the drive to be compliant is being driven by Visa, through the all of the card acquirers.
This new push requires that card acquirers not board (ie, sign up) any new merchants that are not EITHER PCI compliant OR running PA DSS compliant payment applications. This is designed to stop merchants from switching from “tough” to “easy” acquirers, among other objectives.
What does this mean to appication developers and merchants? Well, merchants have either two options (as stated above) and that is to either be PCI-DSS compliant or be running an application that is certified to be PA-DSS.
Complying with the PCI Data Security Standard (PCI DSS) is vital for all merchants who accept credit cards, online or offline, because nothing is more important than keeping payment card data secure. The size of your business will determine the specific compliance requirements that must be met, however all levels require the same basic set of requirements (that is, make sure that data will not escape the corporate network unless it is specifically required to. Make sure that employees are trusted and log everything).
From the world’s largest corporations to small Internet stores, everyone is required to comply. Fines are even issued to organisations that do not comply! There is a whole list of things that are being added to the requirements to pass the PCI DSS compliency, including ensuring that access is restricted by secure PIN Entry Devices (PEDs). PCI hell is only going to get bigger in the coming years! What this space.
PCI, or the Payment Card Industry Security Standards Council was created in September 2006 by the major card issuers, such as Visa, MasterCard and AMEX.
The standards, PCI-DSS (Data Security Standard) were developed to ensure that card holder’s data security was always kept to the highest possible standards.
To reduce the scope of assessment for any network that involves credit card data, it is extremely important that as little credit card data as possible is stored – and if that credit card data is actually stored on a network, that as few machines as possible have direct access to that credit card data.
This could be done in many particular ways. For example, any remote machines cannot access credit card information once encrypted. Storing the data on a separate network then that of the public network (read: internet) will ensure that your scope of assessment area.
If possible, never transmit credit card data over a wireless network. Seriously. The second that you add a wireless network into the credit card mix, your PCI assessments become much more complex – and much more expensive. When possible, keep the credit card data over wires. Wires are easy to see and difficult to listen in on.
There are 12 requirements inside the PCI DSS document. (more…)
At the moment, a new release of MyBanco is done every one to two months. The reason that there are not more updates to the MyBanco software is because do a new release is a complicated job. Queue in makeRelease.sh and updateRelease.sh.
makeRelease.sh is an application that automatically clones the repository, automatically detects what the new version is, grabs a copy of the last release, and makes a patch for the last release. It also zips, tars and md5′s all the files and uploads them to the MyBanco release server.
updateRelease.sh is an application that sits in the core directory of MyBanco, detects what the current running version is, and then downloads and applies all the patches to bring it up to the latest version.
What this all means is that now making MyBanco releases are easy, everything is fully automated, and also updating to the latest version of MyBanco is a breeze, because you only have to run one command.
A new update to MyBanco, MyBanco-0.10 is due in the next three to four days, which will include the new updateRelease.sh application, and also will fix up a few issues with the installer when configuration already exists (where at the moment it just crashes out.)
Also, a new wiki is going to be on the MyBanco website soon that will act as a location for users to describe their MyBanco setups, and also provide tips and tricks to get MyBanco performance to the best numbers possible.
MyBanco Phone Banking will also get a fresh new look in this release, with an easy to setup configuration file, so that doing things such as changing the voice and deactivating Lumenvox text-to-speech will be just a few minutes. I hope that later today when I open the MyBanco wiki up that people will help to add tips etc.
Thanks,
- Tim
A few months ago, when I started working on MyBanco, I wrote a special RPC, or Remote procedure call protocol, a network protocol that allows a computer program running on one host to cause code to be executed on another host. This protocol, which uses HTTP/HTTPS and JSON is called MyInfo.
MyInfo was designed so that it could be used for anything, and be self-documenting. It’s not perfect (yet), but it does work.
With the help of researchers Robert Marks, Blake LeBaron and John Holland, I have been able to start implementing an algorithm for a “self operating” stock exchange. Called MyStocko, it is an application that will be able to operate a simulated stock exchange automatically without any user or operator intervention.
It records all buy/sell transactions, and works out figures such as the high and low sell price of any stocks. It is not yet complete at all, but it is coming there.
There is no user interface for buying or selling shares, but when it is done manually in the MyInfo database (from MyBanco) most of the other figures are worked out automatically. Already it is starting to draw graphs showing the history of buy and sell prices, and I can’t wait for it to be released.
More about it later 