punched cards

A DEF CON 21 talk by Karl Koscher and Eric Butler on how SIM cards work, including Java Card applets, the SIM toolkit and the OS running on the card. It shows how much control the network and the card have independent of the phone.

CuriousMarc and colleagues at the Computer History Museum try to compile and run a FORTRAN II program on a 1959 IBM 1401. The machine has only 16k of memory and a CPU not meant for scientific work, so success is far from guaranteed.

Linus Tech Tips looks at whether buying a used GPU that was previously used for crypto mining is a good idea, as miners prepare to sell off cards. The video discusses how mining affects wear on cards and what to watch for.

A 2007 clip in which immigration attorneys describe how they help employers run classified ads designed not to find qualified American applicants, so they can secure green cards for H-1B workers. It is presented as an exposé of the PERM process.

Episode 4 of James Burke's Connections series, tracing how commercialism, climate change and the Black Death shaped the move to the Renaissance. It follows threads through waterpower, the printing press, the Jacquard loom and the Hollerith punch card toward modern computing.

At DEF CON 27, Nina Kollars tells how buying Nespresso capsules on eBay led her to investigate fraudsters reselling goods bought with stolen credit cards. She describes her non-technical tracking and reporting efforts.

A Wendover Productions explainer arguing that major airlines make much of their profit from loyalty programs and co-branded credit cards rather than flying. It frames airlines as quasi-banks that sell points in bulk, using United's pandemic-era loan as a hook.

Persi Diaconis explains on Numberphile the mathematics of card shuffling, including why seven riffle shuffles are needed to randomize a deck and how different shuffles compare.

Kevin Spacey, giving the MacTaggart Lecture at the Edinburgh Television Festival, urges TV channels to give viewers control. He points to Netflix's House of Cards release as evidence that audiences want to watch on their own terms.

The business card scene from the film American Psycho, in which characters compare their business cards.

The business card scene from the film American Psycho, in which executives compare increasingly refined business cards with escalating envy. It is a two-minute clip of a classic dark comedy moment.

Frank Abagnale, the real subject of Catch Me If You Can, speaks at Google about his life as a con man turned FBI fraud and cybersecurity expert, including advice on fraud, breaches and credit cards.

Kitboga baits tech-support scammers into believing they will get $3,000, wasting hours of their time while he plays along and screen-shares. The scammers become frustrated as it becomes clear the money will not reach them.

A 2006 Saturday Night Live fake infomercial with Steve Martin and Amy Poehler selling the sure-fire way out of debt: don't buy stuff.

Guy Steele's Strange Loop 2010 talk argues that programmers should not have to think about parallelism, and that languages should support algorithms built on independence and divide-and-conquer. He also recounts fitting a program onto a single punch card.

EposVox reviews a very cheap USB 2.0 HDMI capture dongle sold under names like BlueAVS/Goodan, testing whether it works as an alternative to the Elgato Cam Link. He covers its quality and limits for webcam-style and camera capture use.

Kyle Hill of Because Science explains and demonstrates, using real cards, how Magic: The Gathering can be used to build a Turing machine, a computer inside the card game.

A no-death, no-bomb run of Touhou 8 Imperishable Night Stage 6A on Lunatic difficulty, capturing all spellcards. The player describes how Eirin's dense, crisscrossing patterns work and how to manipulate the bosses' positioning.

Linus Tech Tips tests a Chinese mining-only Nvidia card, hacked with a modified driver so it can render games and output video through an integrated GPU.