The first ever HantsLUG Christmas Lecture was held on Saturday 1 
December in the Zepler Building at Southampton University.
The speaker was Mike Bond (
http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mkb23/), of the 
Computer Laboratory at Cambridge University, where he has been 
researching security in the banking system for 10 or more years.
He gave us a talk on "Hacking bank cards: 10 years of tools." – a 
subject that sounded distinctly illegal to me.  In fact the work on 
computer security done at Cambridge has been an important tool for 
improving the complex security measures that banks need to use. 
Although publicly criticising any attempts to break their systems, the 
banks do in fact cooperate with this type of research because it helps 
them to develop better ones.
Mike went into a lot of technical detail about how PIN numbers and ATMs 
work – and how it's possible in some circumstances to bypass the 
security entirely.
Although only about ten members were present, the talk was well received 
and provoked some interesting questions and discussion.
The lecture was followed by dinner at the Mercure Dolphin Hotel in 
Southampton, where a select group indulged in food and wine and some 
quality conversation.
Hopefully this was just the first of a new tradition of Christmas 
Lectures at HantsLUG.
cheers
Chris
-- 
Chris Dennis                                  cgdennis@???
Fordingbridge, Hampshire, UK
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