Mythbusters Gagged: Credit Card Companies Kill Episode Exposing RFID Security Flaws

The Consumerist ^ | 8/30/08 | The Consumerist

[MichiganMan]

Credit card companies successfully nixed a Mythbusters segment exposing RFID's security flaws, according to Arbiter of Truth and Mythbusters co-host, Adam Savage.

Texas Instruments comes on along with chief legal counsel for American Express, Visa, Discover, and everybody else... They were way, way outgunned and they absolutely made it really clear to Discovery that they were not going to air this episode talking about how hackable this stuff was, and Discovery backed way down being a large corporation that depends upon the revenue of the advertisers. Now it's on Discovery's radar and they won't let us go near it.

[Hyzenthlay]

Well, unless your passport is less than a year or two old, then it likely doesn't have the chips. The symbol highlighted with the red arrow in this image indicates that the passport has an RFID chip, although the chip itself is actually somewhere in the back cover.

[Hyzenthlay]

Oh, and fortunately for people who would like to destroy the RFID chips in your credit card, PayPass or other RFID-enabled cards can be swiped like standard credit or debit cards - I do that at work all the time when our PayPass readers aren’t working (which is more often than not). As long as it’s got the black stripe, the card can be almost broken in half and it’ll still work. However, I think the easiest way to disable or at least mess up the chips would be to slip the credit cards into the freezer for a bit, since on my passport it clearly said to avoid having it in ‘extreme’ heat or cold for extended periods of time (apparently ‘extreme’ is something like ‘more than 20 degrees away from room temperature’).

*disclaimer: I am not advocating tampering with your passport, as that is illegal.

[packrat35]

Cause she’s pregnant in most of the episodes.

[MediaMole]

That was Scottie. She left the show when they went to the build-team/Adam-Jamie format. She has been back on the show occasionally.

http://dsc.discovery.com/fansites/mythbusters/meet/scottie-chapman.html

[usconservative]

I haven’t seen the show in ..... more than a year now? So my comment wasn’t based on her being pregnant this season. My comment was based more on all the stupid things she’s done with her hair the last few seasons and how she’s ‘dressed down’ in really crappy clothing.