Offtopic? How I mitigate online credit card

[Jago Pearce]

Firstly I hope this isn't too offtopic. It is about money and it is
about linux. When I found this out I wanted to share it and seeing as
this is the only linux related accounting discussion area I decided to
post. If there is a more appropriate place to discuss financial
software on Unix please let me know. If so I'm sorry to disturb you
all.

Anyway,

I had an idea the other day. Why not generate a new credit card number
for every transaction?
- that way the risk of liability would be limited to one transaction.

Well, it turns out that someone has already thought of this and is
offering it on the high street.

I've managed to get this working under linux, albeit very imperfectly.

This is what I did:

Cahoot, the online UK bank are offering what they call a webcard. You
can generate a visa debit card number for every transaction with a
limit of your choice.
Unfortunately and very regretably, they have chosen to do this using
their own Windows based .exe. How secure this actually is, I really
don't know. However, I think we're in the right place to discuss it.
Using Codeweavers Wine I was able to run the application but for some
reason it exited after a couple of seconds before I could use it. This
meant I had to screenshot it.

cd /mnt/2003/Program\ Files/cahoot\ webcard/
/opt/cxoffice/bin/wine CahootWebcard.exe

--> enter details
--> & then screenshot using gimp

I then used this to make a purchase online. I believe this way the
merchant doesn't have cart-blanche with my account like the AOL have
done with friends accounts, emptying them into unauthorised overdraft.

Next stage:

- Talk to the Wine people and see if we can figure out why the program
doesn't run but does with codeweavers wine.
- Complain to cahoot. The webcard should be accessed through an online
website interface
- Consider storing a set of webcards, possibly as jpeg's ready for future use
- Start to worry about the security of my setup and try to find a
convienient solution