 So, a while ago I did some videos on a, or at least one video, on a magnetic card swipe reader that I had that plugged into USB and it acted as a hidden device, a keyboard. So basically you would swipe, you know, a gift card, a credit card, a driver's license, anything with the magnetic strip, three tracks or less, and swipe it and it would type into any device like it was a keyboard. So you didn't need any special software installed to get the information off the card. I showed you how to do a little bash script to break apart the information so then you can send it to wherever you need to send it. And I want to talk about some of the comments. First of all, most of the comments on that video were spam. I guess if you just do a video that has the word credit card in the title, you're going to get a lot of spam, a lot of, oh, come here, get credit card numbers, that sort of stuff that I had to, you know, delete. But a lot of the other comments were interesting. I have one guy asking me in regards to it how to get the, was it CVV number, the three-digit number, usually it's a three-digit number on the back of your credit card, on most credit cards. And I tried to explain to him that, you know, you can't get that from the magnetic strip. That is the whole point of having that number is that it's something that's not on the magnetic strip. And we went back and forth a number of times and he just wasn't getting it. It's like, that's kind of like a, in a way, a two-factor authentication. It's like, you have to swipe and have that number or type in the information and have that number. And you have to read that, that number should be nowhere else other than on the back of your card. It shouldn't be in the magnetic strip or stored someplace else. Another person was asking me in regards of how to use the credit card for transactions, how to submit it. And the thing is, well, it depends on who you're using for your credit card transactions, PayPal or whoever, you can, I showed you how to swipe that and grab the information. Now you need to send those people however they want it sent, whether it's a form on a website or some other transactional way. Then I also have a handful of people telling me how I shouldn't be making this video because you're teaching people how to do bad things, which is not true. Again, the magnetic strip, there's no private information on there that isn't on the front of the card already. It's your name, expiration date, credit card number, that is about it. And so if you can swipe the card, you have the card and you can get that information off the front. I'm not teaching anybody how to do anything illegal. In fact, you would get more out of it by taking a picture of the front and the back of the card because then you also have the person's signature if they signed their card and that little security number on the back. So there's actually more information printed on the card than there is on the magnetic strip. The magnetic strip is for entering that information through a database depending on what card it is, entering it in a database or submitting it for transactions or whatever you're going to do. But there's nothing on a credit card that isn't already printed on the card that's on the magnetic strip. Plus, what I was saying wasn't private information. There's Wikipedia pages on it. It's a standard that has been around since the 70s on how these magnetic strip works. As far as the data on them, I mean it can store any data. I don't know what the limit is, but it's just plain text. And all I showed, the only thing I showed was how to take that long string and find the limiters using just the cut command. So no, I wasn't showing you how to do anything illegal. In fact, I've seen that exact magnetic strip reader being used in places, for example, where I get my oil changed. You pull up and they wheel over a little computer. They scan your serial number off the door of your car. And when they swipe it, I can even see, they bring up the credit card screen and they go to a field and they swipe it. And you can actually see it typing, because again, this type of card reader, types like a keyboard, just types really fast. So you swipe and you can see it typing into a field and when it got to the end of that field, it jumped to another field for name and another field for expiration date. It's just how it works. So I wasn't showing how to do anything illegal, not even in the least. And I haven't shown you how to do something that would help you, because again, you're better off just taking a picture of the card than you are swiping information, because you're going to get more information off that. Now, one of the reasons I'm bringing this up now, because that video is kind of decently old, year or two old, but I still get comments on it like that. But it's going to be a little loud, because I have lots of projects, a lot of videos I'm working on. But in the near future, I'm going to do a video on this little device, because I just got this for Christmas from one of my in-laws, because I put it on my Amazon wish list. And one of those things is like, I don't really need, but I want people to be able to buy me gifts that are cheap. And this little card reader, square reader here, which is designed for cell phones, I know it's a little blurry. Anyway, it was only five bucks. So I thought it was something neat that I could put on my wish list, someone who wanted to spend five bucks was able to spend. And the difference between this and the other one is, again, the other one works as a hidden device, as a keyboard. So you plug in anything that accepts a keyboard, and you can swipe it, and it will type out that information. You can open up Vim or Nano, or if you're on Windows, you can open up Notepad. There you go. You don't need to write any special software to get that information. You need to write your own code to do something with that information, but just to get it, you don't have to. This is a little different, and I'm not 100% sure that this works like a traditional card swipe reader, but I've mentioned other videos, and I'll go more into this in detail in the actual videos when I get to them. And hopefully I'll be able to do something with this. As you can see, it plugs into the audio slot, the headphone jack on your phone, unless you have a new iPhone and this won't work for you, I guess. But I'm assuming it works just like a traditional magnet strip reader. The magnet strips on a card are basically the same as a cassette tape. In fact, years and years ago, I started an article in 2600 magazine where someone took apart an old cassette tape deck, took the head out, connected the leads to a headphone jack and plugged into the computer, and then mounted that on a ruler to keep it straight, and then he could swipe cards. And that's all he needed, and it would record the data to a computer, and then you needed software to process it. So that's kind of what I'm hoping to be able to do with this. I'm assuming that's how this works. So I should be able to swipe a card with this and record audio. And I can record it to an audio file, and it's probably going to sound, I'm assuming, kind of like a old dial-up modem. And I feel like this camera keeps going out of focus. Sorry. There we go. OK, so you swipe it. And what happens then, the audio goes through. So you just plug it into the headphone or the microphone jack on your computer or the audio inline. And it should be able to record the audio, and then you just need software to decode it, which I've seen open source software out there on GitHub. I haven't tried any of it yet, but it should just be able to take all the tones and code them into ones and zeros and then translate that into plain text. So I'm looking forward to playing with this. It'll be a little while till I do those videos, but it should be a lot of fun, a lot of fun. And yeah, so I'm just doing this video to comment on the comments on my last video on this topic, and to let you know that I'm going to be doing videos similar to it in the future with this. Yeah, so the other card reader, as I said, it types out a keyboard, so basically there's a decoder. It's recording the audio inside the device on the microcontroller in there. It's decoding it and typing it out, where this one is just, it's basically just the head from a tape deck connected to an eighth inch jack that you can plug into your microphone and record the tones. So yeah, so this is just a I'm going to do this in the future type video and replying to some of those comments or commenting on those comments. Nothing illegal going on. And again, I'll say it one more time. There's nothing on this strip that isn't on the card that you can't tell just by looking at the card. And that is it. So look forward to those tutorials as long as well as many others in the near future. I thank you for watching as always. I hope that you have a great day.