Coles vs Woolworths… Why pay $10 when you can pay… $9.88?!
The supermarket war of Coles versus Safeway/Woolworths has heated up, with roast chicken.
First, Coles went to $10.
…then Safeway/Woolworths struck back with… $9.88.
These posters were prominently displayed en masse around the Bentleigh Woolworths last night.
“Why pay $10″ “Only $9.88″?
TWELVE CENTS DIFFERENCE?
Or to put it in percentage terms, Woolies are 1.2% cheaper.
And if you pay cash for just the chicken, the price will be rounded up to $9.90, so you’re only saving ten cents.
Did Woolworths design the poster before they knew what their price would be or something? It’s one thing to advertise your product — it’s quite another to highlight that the saving compared to your competition is a measly twelve cents.
If you are tempted by this extra special offer, don’t spend it all at once.
(I was not the first to notice this outstanding offer.)
Tags: advertising, chicken, Coles, Safeway, Woolworths
9 comments
Myki “hacking”, and jumping at shadows – DON’T PANIC!
Some people got just a little too hysterical last week when news of a security vulnerability in Myki came out.
The story broke on Monday, but it wasn’t until Wednesday that the mainstream media got hold of it, with the Melbourne Times running it first, spreading rapidly to The Age, AAP, 3AW and others — and along the way a good deal of misinformation came into play:
MORE than 1.1 million Myki cards are set to be phased out as hackers have found a method of cloning the tickets.
Two problems with this:
They weren’t hackers. “Hackers” implies bad guys sitting in darkened rooms trying to find a way to defraud the system.
They were actually scientists at a German university, doing cryptography research — what some refer to as “white hats”. They did the right thing and told the card manufacturers (NXP) about the problem some six months before publishing their results:
In April 2011 the University of Bochum, Germany, informed NXP that their cryptographic research group, led by Professor Paar, had successfully attacked the MF3ICD40. The research group also informed us of their intent to publish the attack at the annual Workshop on Cryptographic Hardware and Embedded Systems (CHES), held September 28 to October 1 2011.
What some of the reporting also missed is that it’s not a simple task to perform the hack and clone a card. It requires some sophisticated (and expensive; apparently costing $3000 or more) equipment and many hours of processing. It’s highly unlikely that in the short term, anybody will do it “in the wild”.
It’s possible the technology will get cheaper and more available, of course… that’s the nature of tech. But it’s specialised equipment that doesn’t work quite along the lines of Moore’s Law — it’s hard to conceive that within the next few years, high-end oscilloscopes will be common or cheap.
And it’s worth noting here that the earlier version of the same card, “Mifare Classic”, used in some systems including (until recently) the Transport for London network (eg Oyster card) and Brisbane and elsewhere got hacked many years ago, but these networks have not been subject to widespread fraud. In fact, a quick search around the place shows reported instances of it are very difficult to find.
Of course, it’s probable that authorities would be reluctant to make such fraud public if the offenders are not caught. Still, it doesn’t seem that fraudulent cards are common.
Putting the boot in
Among those putting the boot into Myki was regular Myki-kicker David Heath, in another of his “comment-disguised-as-journalism” pieces for IT Wire:
Picture this: you obtain a brand-new Myki (in some suitably anonymous name) and load a $1000 credit onto it. All fine (although a tiny bit crazy) thus far. Next, you clone the card 1,000 times and sell the clones for $200 each.
…iTWire has reported extensively on the whole Myki saga on numerous occasions. Through all this history, virtually nothing positive has come out of the entire project. We have seen function contraction, cost blow-out and foolishness time and time again.
– IT Wire
Now I’m all for kicking Myki when it deserves it (heaven knows I’ve done it often enough myself). But surely anybody writing in IT must realise by now that it’s here to stay, that most of the people currently using it actually don’t mind using it, and that we’re way past the point of scrapping it and buying Oyster instead.
More importantly, a little research and rational thinking wouldn’t have gone astray here.
Firstly, you can’t load $1000 onto a Myki card. They have a limit of $999.
Secondly, it should be fairly obvious that any ticketing system with a little basic security will have safeguards against something like lots of copies of the same card being used around the system. As soon as the fraud was detected, that card number would be blocked for travel (as already happens when a card is reported lost or stolen).
Thirdly, who with a little common sense would buy a dodgy card for that amount of money? Would you even pay $100? $50? Would you buy one at all, knowing that the chances of it being detected and blocked, and worse (for you) that the ticketholder might well be caught and prosecuted? Would these theoretical criminals ever get their thousands of dollars of investment money back?
Surely punters aren’t that gullible. Hardcore fare evaders don’t use fake or cloned tickets. They jump barriers and dodge inspectors and other staff.
Hysteria aside, what’s the real situation?
ZDNet has some good coverage, which notes that in Myki’s favour (who’d have thought!) they didn’t actually skimp on the security:
Although this could have been a cost-cutting method, the TTA appears to have avoided cutting corners with respect to card security. There are four security measures that can be installed for the cards relating to key diversification, fraud detection, card blocking and card information binding. The TTA elected to include all four, pointing the issue further up the chain to the manufacturer.
Despite the cards being theoretically vulnerable, however, there isn’t a need to replace the cards as a matter of urgency. NXP stated that even if the lab equipment required to pull off the vulnerability is obtained, it could still take hours to days for the analysis of a card to be completed.
So yes, there’s a problem. But there’s no need to panic.
My take on it
Given the information available so far, it doesn’t seem to me to be necessary to go and recall the million cards issued and replace them all with the newer version straight away. The existing cards are rated for a life of four years, and that means that unless it is shown that this or another attack are actually practicable outside a laboratory it would make more sense to just replace them with the more secure version as they come up for renewal, eg from late-2012, rather than panic and rush out replacements now.
After all, rush into it now (at great effort and expense) and you might find in 12 months that another theoretical attack becomes apparent, and have to do it all again for no good reason.
From the sounds of it, this is what the TTA is doing; planning a migration rather than rushing new cards out. Unless there’s a more major problem we’re not hearing about, this seems to me to be a pretty reasonable course of action.
PS. Thursday: I’ve had it confirmed that there is checking for duplicate Myki cards, with found duplicates being blocked from use (not immediately, but pretty quickly after detection).
Tags: hacking, Myki, security
12 comments
Brisbane day 5 – Surfers Paradise
Wednesday 5th October
The first job was to return the hire car. Similar to the circuitous route filling it up the night before, due to the one way streets, this involved a 750 metre drive (Google Maps estimated time: 4 minutes), and then a 170 metre walk back (estimated: 2 minutes). Turning out of Raff Street I also needed to remember the counter-intuitive instruction to Keep Right.
The plan for Wednesday was to head down to the Gold Coast — Surfers Paradise to be precise — to visit the beach and see where my sister and her family and another brood of cousins were staying.
Trains run on the “Gold Coast line”, but not to the actual coast. However the good people at Translink have got things organised so that — and I know this will come as a shock to Melburnians, who are not used to such concepts — the buses are actually timed to connect with the trains.
Wow.
So in our case, the Translink Journey Planner reckoned we could simply hop on a Gold Coast line train (every half-hour from Central), hop off at Nerang, and 7 minutes later the 745 bus would depart for Surfers Paradise.
Along with the integrated (Go Card) ticketing, it can’t be emphasised enough how important good connections are to make a wider variety of journeys (eg the many, many not possible using a single service) easier by public transport.
(It’s not perfect. Late on weekends, some of the connections from the bus onto the train are longer; in some cases around half-an-hour. But for the majority of trips, there are good connections.)
Even on holiday, I apparently gave the impression that I knew where I was going (or perhaps it was that my snapping pictures screamed “Transit nerd”), as a couple of guys at the bus interchange showed me their (paper) train tickets and asked if they’d work on the bus. I said I thought so, and evidently I was right, as the bus driver waved them aboard. Checking now, Brisbane/Central to Nerang is zones 1 to 14, and the bus is zones 14 to 13.
Come to think of it, I’d also been asked for directions in Brisbane, to the nearest supermarket, and was able to point the people in precisely the right direction.
Anyway, the bus journey allowed us to check out some of the Gold Coast architecture. It’s not exactly the Las Vegas scale of garish, but it certainly has the holiday vibe, with a diverse range of building styles (within the high-rise genre, I mean), and many buildings being hotels and thus having their names printed in big letters on the top — no doubt an aid to tourists trying to find their way back to their accommodation.
The bus pulled in at Surfers Paradise and we found our way to the Beachcomber building, a slightly disshevelled hotel/apartment block near the beach where the family was staying.
After checking out the view, which was excellent, we headed down to the beach. It was a bit cold for swimming, but we enjoyed some paddling, sand castle-building, burying peoples’ feet in the sand, all that kind of thing, for a while, before heading back upstairs and having some sandwiches for lunch.
My sister, being the wise Auntie that she is, let us know of a big arcade (in the “arcade games” sense of the word) nearby, and myself and Isaac and Jeremy headed up to look at it with bro-in-law Adrian and his kids.
It turned out to be another Timezone — and according to the signs, the biggest Timezone in the world, no less.
I’d believe that. It was vast. It took perhaps a good ten minutes just to walk around it initially to size up what it had, which included many many games (just about all newer stuff; little in the retro genre alas, though there were several pinball machines), dodgem cars, virtual reality thingies, shooting ranges, laser tag, a mini bowling alley, mini golf, and heaps more.
We scattered into various corners for a while to enjoy our preferred amusements — for me it was mostly pinball to be honest. True to form, my first game was the best, and I got steadily worse after that.
After a couple of hours the money loaded onto our cards started to run out, and the noises and flashing lights were beginning to be a bit much, so after retreating back to the apartment for afternoon tea and a rest, we headed out for dinner nearby — on a recommendation, a Turkish/Italian place around the corner, which served up some most delicious food.
Before too long we were back on the bus to Nerang, and then the train ride back into Brisbane. Just as in Melbourne, being an evening train there were copies of MX to be found to read along the way, and although the sign at the back said the toilet was out of order, it seemed to work just fine.
We rolled into Central about half-past eight, and headed back to our hotel for one last good night’s sleep.
Packet failure results in huge blackberry outage
(Actually there have been real, major Blackberry outages this week.)
Tags: blackberries
7 comments
General Motors: “Stop pedaling, start driving” vs Giant Bicycles’ comeback
General Motors’ campaign in US college newspapers:
(via Bike Portland)
Seems to be implying that driving is cooler than cycling. Pretty funny… to a lot of the younger generation (including Americans, at least in cities like Portland), there’s nothing cool about driving a huge truck.
Anyway, here’s Giant Bicycles’ comeback:
(via Justin Haugens)
GM have apparently now pulled the ad.
Tags: cycling, General Motors
3 comments
Brisbane day 4 – can you identify the animal?
Tuesday 4th October
It was time to go bush. We picked up a booked car at Europcar (around the corner from the hotel, though it turned out Thrifty was also close-by) and after some negotiating of central Brisbane’s one way streets, found the Pacific Motorway.
One way streets don’t affect one as a pedestrian, but certainly make themselves obvious in a car. It’s not something I think about in Melbourne, where thanks to Robert Hoddle all the main streets run in both directions, but from my observations, Hobart, Sydney and Brisbane all have narrower main streets, many of which over the years have been switched to one way.
We stopped off at Westfield Garden City (though finding it was not without its challenges — I had assumed it would be an easy detour off the motorway) to buy Isaac a hat, and also to see if we could locate the local Gametraders store, which I knew Jeremy would be keen to check out.
The hat was easily found, but the Gametraders had disappeared, despite being listed on Google Maps and in the directories inside the centre. (The authoritative source, the Gametraders web site is a Flash-dominated monstrosity that does not display properly on my phone.) The lady at the ABC shop, opposite where it should have been, said it had only recently gone.
On we journeyed, managing to go in a complete and lengthy circle around the lovely parkside suburb of Macgregor, and then back into the shopping centre before we found the entrance onto the motorway again.
No such geographically-challenged navigation on the rest of the trip to Mount Tamborine and the Rainforest Skywalk, though we did observe a bloke in a 4WD reversing out of a car park space bowl-over a sign, despite having being guided out of the spot by an attendant.
The Skywalk was quite enjoyable… initially along walkways high off the ground, among the treetops, and then heading back to the visitors centre along paths in the undergrowth. We had lunch there, and then headed onwards.
The lady at Europcar had recommended the cheese factory, which is co-located with the brewery. That looked interesting, and would have been a good spot for lunch if we hadn’t already eaten, so we headed for the next stop, the Witches Falls circuit walk.
This 3.1 kilometre walk took us all the day down from the top of a ridge to an area perhaps halfway up the mountain, in a zig-zag (like a giant, real-life Donkey Kong). There was some spectacular scenery, including those weird trees that grow around other trees — like a super-powered version of the creeper in my garden.
Along the way we saw a relative of the kangaroo… not sure what it is — don’t think it’s a wallaby, and it’s too big to be a potaroo. Can anybody identify it?
There were also several bush turkeys, and eventually we got to the very impressive waterfall lookout, before heading back up to the top.
We explored a few other spots around the mountain, stopping for ice-creams and then at a fudge shop, where a procession of kids who seemed to be constantly asking for samples of various flavours amazed me by actually buying some fudge. Sometimes I’m too cynical. Anyway, we bought some and then hit the road.
I had wondered if we could make it back up the highway to Logan Hyperdome, where during the day I had verified that there was still a Gametraders. I verified it by ringing them up and asking what time they closed. 5:30.
This would have worked, too, if we hadn’t encountered roadworks heading back to the highway, and then a dreaded portent: a sign warning of major delays near exit 41. Sure enough, it was major delays, and we probably spent the best part of an hour in stop-start traffic. The radio said rocks were on the road (presumably fallen from a truck) and they’d even called in a bobcat to clear it up.
Eventually we got past it, but it was right on 5:30, with no hope of getting to Logan on time. Oh well, we tried. Instead we pulled off the road, stretched our legs and ate some fudge as compensation.
The rest of the journey back to Brisbane was fairly uneventful, apart from some more (minor) delays on the Riverside Expressway, and more battling of the one-way streets to firstly fill up the car, and then get back to the hotel carpark — while the petrol station was only a stone’s throw from the hotel, in the car it was about ten times that far. In fact Google Maps reckons it’s 200 metres vs 1200 metres.
We spent the rest of the evening ordering and munching on pizza, watching TV and admiring the view.
Tags: Brisbane, fudge, holidays, Mount Tamborine
5 comments
Brisbane Day 3
Monday 3rd October
Day three in Brisbane, and it was time to get to the whole point of the trip: to visit my Dad’s memorial bench at the University of Queensland.
After waiting for my Uncle Frank (Dad’s last remaining sibling) to arrive (his bus was delayed), we headed down Adelaide Street to find the 109 — not the 109 tram I’m more familiar with, but the 109 bus to UQ’s St Lucia campus.
We probably should have checked which bus to catch down Adelaide Street, because it was a long walk to the relevant stop, but eventually we found it, and didn’t have long to wait.
The bus headed across the river, along Brisbane’s much-vaunted (at least by Bus Rapid Transit enthusiasts) and rather impressive (no matter who you are) bus ways. More about this, and Brisbane’s PT in general, in a later post.
We arrived at the UQ campus, and strolled over to where we thought the bench would be. As we approached, I noted a crowd around one bench, and remarked that it would be embarassing if that was the bench we sought.
It was.
A group of perhaps 30 students was crowded around it, having a picnic. Somehow my sister managed to find their leaders and ask politely if they’d mind moving… which they very gracefully did, though it appeared that rather than move, they broke up their party. Oops.
Anyway, there we finally were: the memorial bench.
It was a nice spot. Despite nearby building construction, a very peaceful location by the lake. Dad would have liked it, I think. The bench is nice too, and with a bit of luck should be there for a good few years into the future.
We had a small container with some of Dad’s ashes, and sat him on the bench, before scattering some of them into the lake, and snapped a few pictures. A passer-by helpfully took a photo of all of us.
Afterwards we headed for the ferry terminal, to catch the City Cat back to central Brisbane. The sun was shining, and (after touching our Go cards) we sat out on the back deck as we zoomed along the river, dropping the remaining ashes into the water as we sped along. (Most of the ashes remain at home in Melbourne. I expect they’ll go on the garden.)
Frank pointed out the Regatta Hotel (after which the Regatta wharf City Cat stop is named), and recounted the incident when Merle Thornton (mother of Sigrid) and Rosalie Bognor chained themselves to the bar in protest against men-only public bars. He reckoned Dad knew Merle and her husband, and had later been an occasional babysitter for the young Sigrid in London in the late-60s.
We got off the ferry at Southbank. Frank verified that it was indeed the same area that I remembered from visiting Expo 88 when I was but a teenager. It’s quite different now, though I recognised one of the towers from my earlier visit. We found some lunch (sandwiches or kebabs, according to preference) and ate while a rainshower came through, drenching anything and everything not undercover.
My sister and her family were keen to head towards the Gold Coast before too long, so we found South Brisbane Station and caught a train with them back to Central so they could collect their baggage. As we left Central, it started to pour down, and for a while we took cover and watched the rain come down. I took the opportunity to try out the slow-motion filming on my camera — very cool.
At some point Adrian and I decided to dash for the baggage, and everyone else went back into Central station to find a hot chocolate. We met up a little while later, and everyone boarded a train for the Gold Coast, with my mob and Frank getting off again at South Brisbane to go look at the science museum.
Alas, the science museum was closed, renovations until January.
Instead we headed over to GOMA — the Gallery of Modern Art, and had a look around there. We’d just missed the Surrealism exhibition, which would have been quite interesting, but instead had a look at an exhibit of modern art from the Torres Strait, which Frank noted was where our Chinese ancestors had initially settled before moving on to Brisbane during WW2. There was some interesting stuff, though the boys at one stage decided to just sit and chat on a comfy couch rather than walk around the gallery… fair enough.
After that we walked to the Cultural Centre busway stop, and thanks to the excellent Translink mobile journey planner web site (why doesn’t Metlink have that?), I was able to tell which buses we could catch to a stop back closer to the hotel than we’d set out from that morning.
We farewelled Frank and headed back to the hotel for pasta, TV and sleep.
Brisbane day 2
Sunday 2nd October
We started off with a walk around Brisbane’s CBD, heading down and around Queen Street Mall to look around the shops (nothing staggeringly surprising). Being the PT geek that I am, I guided us down into one of the underground bus stops I’d encountered on my only previous visit to Brisbane in 1988, when they must have been relatively new. Back then I seem to recall the routes were named after native animals — these days they seem to prefer the more conventional (and arguably more memorable) numbers.
At the end of Queen Street we found Reddacliff Place, which in some ways resembled Federation Square — complete with neighbouring garish-looking building. A lot of people appeared to be queuing up with suitcases, which I thought was slightly bizarre. Some kind of flashmob or cooperative art performance perhaps?
We also encountered some pretty cool street art, including some metal kangaroos. A block from Queen Street we found a Timezone arcade — remember when there were heaps of these? Towards the river we found a market, including a farmer’s stall with $5 for two enormous punnets of strawberries. Yum.
By this point my sister and her family had arrived in town, and we met up and headed to our apartment and made and ate sandwiches for lunch, then headed out for the afternoon.
Our destination: the Brisbane tramway museum. It’s only open on Sunday, so it was now or never. Back to Central station, where my sister bought train tickets (discovering that you can only buy single tickets, not daily/returns), while my brood used our Go Cards for the first time.
We boarded the train for Ferny Grove, and found it wasn’t packed like Melbourne’s weekend trains increasingly are, but it certainly wasn’t empty either. During the course of the trip, we never got to take a peak-hour ride, but Robert Dow tells me crowding is a problem at those times, and it’s not helped by services only being every half-hour outside the peaks, preventing the kind of load spread into shoulder-peak and off-peak that we see in Melbourne.
Arriving at Ferny Grove, we found the station in the midst of an upgrade, and had to walk the long way round to head to the tramway museum. All up it was about a 10ish minute walk, and when we eventually arrived, we got to ride a variety of trams, though unlike Bendigo and Sydney, they didn’t have a workshop you can look around inside.
The staff were in the legionaire-like uniforms, and they told us the story of the different classes of tram, including the Phoenix class, famous for having risen out of the ashes of the great depot fire of 1962, and only being run for a few years before the entire tram system was shut down in 1969.
I didn’t hear them refer to him, but the closure of Brisbane’s trams was (apparently) largely the work of Clem Jones, then Lord Mayor of Brisbane, who strongly believed working families should be able to all own and drive their cars, unimpeded by trams, and dismantled the network, replacing them with buses. To this day there are no trams in Brisbane apart from in the museum, though the Gold Coast is building a light rail line.
I assume he was behind the Riverside Expressway alongside one side of the Brisbane River — a stark contrast to the pedestrianised and much more friendly Southbank. The Clem Jones tunnel aka the Clem7 is named after him, and it’s with some glee that tram lovers point out that the tunnel is in dire financial straits.
After the museum we headed back to the station, via a servo to buy some icecreams. My sister once again struggled with the station ticket machines, with me convincing her at that point that she should obtain Go Cards for the rest of their holiday (which would involve some bus rides around Brisbane and heading to Surfers Paradise the next day, as well as a further buses around the Gold Coast), given paper ticket costs of $5.40 each way versus Go Card fares of $3.68 meant the $5 (refundable) cost of the card would have almost paid for itself on the trip to Ferny Grove alone.
Back at their serviced apartment (which was a block from hours ours — they’d tried to book in the same building, but couldn’t) and we ordered pizza from the very fine Pizza Capers for dinner.
Then we headed back to our own apartment, with a quick detour up to the nearby Fortitude Valley to have a look around and check out possible restaurants for another night. Naturally the spotting of a restaurant called Bow Thai resulted in cries of “Bow Thais are cool!”
Tags: Brisbane, holidays, Timezone, trams
3 comments
