At last, the $4 The Bank Job Pen fulfills that little part of your brain that's always wanted to walk into a bank, cut the pens away with the assistance of jaws of life and a team of 10 or so highly tactical masked vigilantes, peel out in a getaway car and sell the goods on the black (ink) market.

The story will make you the coolest kid in Mrs. Winger's third grade English class. Guaranteed. [Perpetual Kid via The Green Head]

Basically, when you type your PIN into an ATM, the PIN is encrypted by the bank, only to be decrypted by your own bank, who (hopefully) approves the transaction. That leaves two ways for these thieves to get access to swathes of PINs. First, they can install malware to copy the PINs in the brief time they're decrypted, while they're sitting in a bank's memory cache waiting to be authorized. Banks typically rely on anti-virus software to catch this kind of attack, and resourceful hackers have taken advantage of this inattention. The second way involves a piece of software that tricks the bank's security software into providing the decryption key for the PINs.

This kind of thievery isn't a huge problem yet, but experts are concerned that it may become more prevalent, and the solution may require a fairly extensive overhaul of these security systems. That kind of upgrade costs a lot of money, and we all know that banks are sort of not doing that well these days. Check out the full read, it's a little bit scary and pretty interesting. [Wired]

The article, by Brian Ashcraft of Kotaku fame, gives us a walkthrough of three differently themed game banks, with styles that range from RPG (you put in money to level up) to dating sim (as a modern female, you feed your dates coins to hear sweet nothings).

And while the games are useless to most of us as they are written in Japanese, the Ikemen dating sim Bank does offer one universal climax that we all can appreciate:

...you totally forget to insert money into your Ikemen Bank for a whole working week. Your greedy hunk writes you a letter that simply says, "Sayonara." No translation needed.

The moral? Always feed your hunk. [Wired via Kotaku]

USAA, the bank that serves the armed forces, has done this for a while, but it hasn't picked up beyond there. Although the Check Clearing for the 21st Century Act has made this possible, and half of all business checks are deposited this way already, the system still needs to be safeguarded against fraud before it can really reach mainstream adoption rates. Interesting, but I'd guess the majority of Gizmodo readers use PayPal or World of Warcraft gold pieces instead of ye old checkbook. [NYT Bits]

Now if someone will make a trash can that looks like a Delete key, a remote car starter that looks like a start button and place a keyboard-like Home key on a GPS navigator, we could decorate our surroundings for total geekdom. – Charlie White

Product Page [Totally Funky]