Did you ever wonder what information was on the magnetic strip on the back of your credit card? Well you’re not alone, many folks would love to find that out. Now a Sourceforge project has begun that gives you the tools to capture, modify, validate, analyses, and shares data from your magnetic stripes. “The data is captured through different hardware interfaces (or stdin), the contents decoded into the correct character set, and then a CDDB-like database attempts to figure out what the contents mean”
I think we all need to know what others discover when we give up our credit cards to them for payment. Online transactions have been taking a real beating of late, but at least they do not swipe our cards and have access to all that additional information.