LabSlice

Lab environments are places were you can play with machines -- eg. customer POC, product evaluation, training environments etc. The objective is to move those lab environments to the cloud, for certain customer use cases.

We use regular AMIs. What we do is add management around it to make it into the 'lab' type environment. For example, we offer policies to help control costs, we can allow you to share an AMI simply by sending an email and we offer a multi-user environment for all employees within a company. These are all features that aren't readily available in the off-the-shelf EC2 environment.

I am quite certain that the EMV chip, which is the chip on your card, must authenticate the POS machines it talks to. The authentication is done using public key cryptography.

So it's not sufficient just to host a fake machine and expect it to be accepted within the EMV infrastructure (cards, POC machines and backend processors).

> my email address, is shared with a famous (in a bad way) world leader

Kim Jong Il?

Brute forcing gmail is not really feasible, especially not if you have a decent password in place. I suspect that they would just put up a captcha and maybe slow down the login process if you fail too many times.

If your computer is compromised and you keep using the system to either login or change your password then that password will continue to get compromised.

In many ways you are also best off to reimage your PC and create a completely new gmail account. If the account was sending too many nasty things then it may be on various blacklists already, which will just affect your ongoing usage of it.

I may be opening myself up to attack, but I find that the best programmers around are the ones who started at the lowest levels and then progressed up the abstraction levels. It's quite easy to move up in levels of abstraction, but not the other way around.