Tag: Fraud

Playstation 5: At Last

I finally got a Playstation 5, thanks to Best Buy and Twitter. The new hardware can apparently do 4K at 120Hz over HDMI 2.1. I have a monitor that I use at 4K@60Hz over DisplayPort for my Mac, but it can only do 4K@30Hz over HDMI. So I went looking for a new monitor. The problem is that what I want doesn’t seem to exist. I can’t find a single model in the 30-inch range that can do 4K@120Hz. There are a lot that do 1080, and many that can do 1440, but if there are any that can do the full 2160, I can’t find them. What I don’t understand is that there seem to be a lot of big screen TV’s that can do 4K at 120Hz. Why aren’t they making them in desktop monitor sizes? I guess I’ll have to wait and hope that the new-gen gaming consoles push the market to make them.

UPDATE: I’ve been able to find a few select models that will do 4K@60Hz in a 32″ size, but, so far, none of the them support HDMI 2.1. Only 2.0. I’m not buying until I can find a unit that satisfies all the display features of the PS5.

UPDATE: Aha! My prediction about the next-gen consoles pushing the market was spot on. Asus — from whom I’ve bought all of my monitors for years, now — has just announced a new model, the ROG Swift PG32UQ, and it was covered just 3 days ago. It supports HDMI 2.1 and HDR and 4K@120Hz.

At the time of this writing, Amazon has listings for the 25″, the 43″, and a 34″ models. The 43″ is listed at $1,100, but I don’t want to go bigger than about 34″, and that one is being listed by some 3rd-party scalper at $1,600. (Good job, buddy.)

B&H lists them as a new item, “coming soon,” for $800, and that seems correct, but then I notice that it’s a ROG Swift PG32Q (not “UQ”), and the specs say it only supports HDMI 2.0, and I’m right back where I started. Why is this so hard? Researching further, this article says that the UQ version will be available starting at the end of the first quarter. Sigh.

Note bene: This means that all three listings on Amazon for the “UQ” model are fraudulent. They can’t possibly be that model yet. Nice, Amazon. Really keeping up your reputation here.

Anyway, I guess that will give me time to recoup from the PS5 itself, and get my tax return…

Breach at Dickey’s BBQ Smokes 3M Cards

One of the digital underground’s most popular stores for peddling stolen credit card information began selling a batch of more than three million new card records this week. KrebsOnSecurity has learned the payment card data was stolen in a two-year-long data breach at more than 100 Dickey’s Barbeque Restaurant locations around the country.

Source: Breach at Dickey’s BBQ Smokes 3M Cards

The article says the card data only came from Dickey’s, but I don’t know. I can’t recall ever having eaten at one of these joints, but this happened too coincidently, and I’ve been watching for an announcement exactly like this since. I expect there’s more than just the one source in the dump.

Visa and MasterCard instituted new rules in October 2015 that put retailers on the hook for all of the losses associated with counterfeit card fraud tied to breaches if they haven’t implemented chip-based card readers and enforced the dipping of the chip when a customer presents a chip-based card.

Also, pretty interesting stuff about mag stripes still being so prevalent. I appreciate the card companies making it the retailer’s problem. However, fraud related to security breaches at retailers should always be their problem, regardless of technology used.