Fake Credit Card Numbers

Today I registered for a local engineering conference. Although my registration was free, for some reason their eCommerce site wanted a credit card number. Well, I don't particularly care to give my credit card out to just anyone on the internet, so what do I do, and why does their site want my credit card number if they aren't planning to charge it for anything?

Of course, I did the only reasonable thing a security concious engineer could do, I did a quick search for "fake visa number generators" on the internet and found this gem of a site:

http://www.darkcoding.net/index.php/credit-card-numbers/

Then, I took the first number off of the list, made up an expiration date and CVV number, and tried it out. Two pages later I got a lovely confirmation stating that my registration had been accepted.

Docufarm without the extension

Today I found a groovy new website Docufarm that lets you preview .pdf, .doc, and .ppt files without downloading them. This is a real benefit when I want to quickly view a document without loading up a different program (especially a really slow memory hog like Acrobat).

However, at least for now the website doesn't provide an easy way to preview a document that I want to view without using their Firefox extension. I'm not always using a computer that I can install extensions on, but a blog post on their site gave me a pointer that I can use to DocuFarm any document that I want without using the extension. Simply prepending the url with

http://www.docufarm.com/view.jsp?url=

will do the trick. Nifty!

Update: Docufarm now lets you copy and paste a URL directly into their search box at http://www.docufarm.com. So this hack is no longer necessary, but it might be useful if you wanted to add it to document links on your own site.