Can a credit card be used in a store without the card being present?

A few months ago, my credit card company called and told me that there has been an unauthorized transaction on my card and cancelled the present card and sent me a new one with a new number. What they caught was a transaction of $0.75 and what was lurking beneath was a transaction for $93 which had happened at a Kroger grocery store in Michigan. Once I noticed it, I reported the same and the company took care of this problem and refunded me the money.

I wouldn’t have been writing this post if it were just that. Below is a pic of the transaction record as shown on my card statement. 

If you observe closely, the transaction hasn’t happened online but at a specific grocery store and the person has also taken cash from the card. My cards are never lost and on the day of this transaction, I was in Austin getting a car wash. I have never visited Michigan.

Question is, how did this person manage to use the card in a store without the card being present?, I myself do not know the pin number to draw money on the card, how did this guy figure it out. I have been looking to see if one can just use a card number for a transaction without the card being present and haven’t come across anybody saying yes it is possible.

One possibility is, the card company made a mistake in processing transactions and the charge appeared on my account instead of the other. But I have had this card for last 11 years and they have changed the number multiple times and such a thing has never happened.  I can’t think of any other way, wonder if the blog readers can shed some light on this. 

Another PC problem/solution

When we moved to a new apartment the physical location of the router and desktop at home essentially prevented any form of wired communication between them. So, I went and bought a Linksys PCI wireless adapter and plugged it to the desktop. At that time I had a Linksys router and both the adapter and the router played well with each other.

Eventually the Linksys router went kaput and I replaced it with a Trendnet router (for it was the cheaper option). The PC had some trouble adjusting to the different router but the problem was not too too bad. Over time the problem became bad and sometimes so bad that it was a chance if the net was working more than an hour without dropping the connection. I tried all the tricks in the book, like using Windows zero configuration instead of Linksys network manager, adjusting the antenna, dropping the wireless mode to b/g instead of b/g/n and so on, but all yielded limited results.

After struggling with the problem for a while and searching between forums I found the solution. The trend net router allows multiple (11 to be precise) channels to communicate and default setting was to use ‘Auto Channel” select, the solution was to pick channel 1 or 11 and I went with 1. For the last 3 to 4 days I haven’t had a dropped connection and all is finally back to well. But since I have restricted to 1 channel for transmitting from the router I can see my signal strength varying over time (instead of 5 bars, I now get 4 or 3 bars some times). The variation hasn’t caused any disruption to my experience of surfing the net.

The theory behind is that the dropping of the connection is happening due to interference from neighboring routers and solutions were to reduce the frequency of transmission (which is apparently possible with other routers) or use the channel that gives maximum isolation (1 or 6 or 11 in Trendnet). Come to think of it, the problem became worse when my neighbors changed and couple of Indian techies moved next door.

Of course the router has its own problem, once every 3 weeks or once a month I need to disable and enable wireless mode. I don’t know why that is the case but the problem is livable and  I haven’t tried debugging.    

It’s not always Microsoft’s fault

Just when I thought that my ordeal of dealing with HD videos is over, I came across the crashing of software problem when working with larger video files (~800MB). I noticed that working with HD videos, both the cores of my system gets pegged to 100% and running at this rate for a few minutes either crashed my system completely or killed the software running. The typical Microsoft response was to check the last installed driver and blah and blah all led to dead ends with no solution in sight.

Out of curiosity. I ran a CPU stress test and started monitoring the temperature of the cores. Sure enough with both cores running at 100%, the core temperatures rose up to 93C and couple of minutes running at that temperature the stress test started giving errors. I used the compressed air cleaner and that cleaned out some of the dust but the temperature did not come down much (came down to 87C). Running at reduced temperature got me a couple of minutes with the videos but not enough to complete the job in hand.

As a last resort, I opened the system up and used an air blower (electric, not the manual one) to blow air over the CPU heat sink and fan. Sure enough a ton of dust came up and longer I blew air more dust came out. After a few minutes of this process and when I was convinced that I have cleaned up as much as I can, I plugged the system back in ran the same stress tests and monitor the temperature. The max temperature had come down to 60C with both cores pegged at 100% for more than 30minutes and I could edit and work the large video files without any problems.

At the beginning of the July 4th weekend I was convinced that the system I have is not good enough to work with HD videos and by the end of the weekend, thanks to my air blower, I am fairly happy with my system. I could have taken my system to one of those places to do a power cleaning but I think the electric air blower is a much cheaper and better option.

It’s not always Microsoft’s fault, some times it is the dust. Although I hold them responsible for not providing better debug tools with their OS.

In this process I found out couple of new things. Since the Klite codecs had been uninstalled, PICASA3 can play AVHCD videos and it can export videos to .wmv files (played by windows media player) without any loss in quality of the video.