Funktionslust reports that if you put a CharlieCard in acetone for about 20 minutes, all of the plastic dissolves and what you're left with is some strands of copper (which act as an antenna) and the RFID chip that does all the magic. Photo.

Tomorrow, she plans to try it out to see if it still works.

UPDATE: It does.

Bess Lomax Hawes, who wrote "Charlie on the MTA," has died at age 88, the Globe reports.

More versions:

CharlieCard Discount Book.

Via BostonTweet.

The T reports CharlieCard users can now renew or replenish their cards online, by setting up a MyCharlie account.

The new system lets monthly pass holders have their cards get renewed automatically and lets users get replacement CharlieCards for lost or stolen cards. T General Manager Dan Grabauskas said:

With this new technology, customers who register their CharlieCard receive a replacement free of charge. That was a legitimate customer concern that today is an issue of the past.

This morning, NONE of the faregates at North Station subway were accepting monthly passes. Instead, they had a single CSA manning the 'Reduced Fare' faregate, and you flashed your pass at them as you went through.

Also, the ticket machines were apparently not accepting debit cards today, as the single CSA at the gate was yelling to people who were having problems with the machines. And yes, there were no other CSAs in sight near the machines to actually help those people who had trouble.

ArsTechnica reports Dutch researchers claim to have broken the encryption used to protect information on CharlieCards and similar systems:

... The group at Radboud carried out its investigation with the help of Ghost, a tag emulator, reader, and eavesdrop device that they built for around 40 euros. ...

Seems the software behind CharlieCard readers was built in Microsoft Visual C++. And guess what? It's not immune from crashing. Zeroday posts the photographic proof from the Central Square station.

Janice Loux distributes a report by those MIT students, calls for an external audit, the Globe reports.

UPDATE: The MBTA won a temporary restraining order that will keep the students from discussing their findings. Read the judge's order (in PDF). Read the MBTA complaint (in PDF).

Wired reports the T wants to stop three MIT students from giving a talk at a hacker convention this weekend on their efforts to crack the CharlieCard system.

The transit authority, known as the MBTA, is also seeking to prevent the students from "publicly stating or indicating" that electronic passenger tickets used on the transit system have been compromised until the MBTA can fix security flaws in the system. It further seeks to bar the students from releasing any tools or providing any information that would allow someone to hack the transit system and obtain free rides.

A hearing is scheduled for 11 a.m. in U.S. District Court in Boston on the T's request for a temporary restraining order to keep Zack Anderson, RJ Ryan and Alessandro Chiesa from giving a talk at the DefCon conference in Las Vegas on Sunday on The Anatomy of a Subway Hack: Breaking Crypto RFID's and Magstripes of Ticketing Systems:

In this talk we go over weaknesses in common subway fare collection systems. We focus on the Boston T subway, and show how we reverse engineered the data on magstripe card, we present several attacks to completely break the CharlieCard, a MIFARE Classic smartcard used in many subways around the world, and we discuss physical security problems. We will discuss practical brute force attacks using FPGAs and how to use software-radio to read RFID cards. We survey 'human factors' that lead to weaknesses in the system, and we present a novel new method of hacking WiFi: WARCARTING. We will release several open source tools we wrote in the process of researching these attacks. With live demos, we will demonstrate how we broke these systems.

Human factors? So they managed to sweet-talk some T employees to inadvertently help them out.

Anderson told the Register the trio initially contacted the T to offer their help in fixing the vulnerabilities and that they weren't planning to release specific enough details to let somebody else replicate their feats.

Dee Cee reports she and other people who use WageWorks cards (sort of debit cards handed out by their employees) to add value to their CharlieCards haven't been able to do so this month:

... I have been calling every other day to WageWorks and MBTA. WageWorks is apologetic, and tell me there was a system issue with the T kiosks. Hundreds of people have been calling, asking for their money back. The MBTA is denying any fault, saying this is WageWorks' problem. One "customer service" (I use that term loosely, due to the rudeness I got) rep told me it was my own fault for a)using a WageWorks card, and b)waiting for the 1st of the month to update my Charlie Card. ...