David Alexander Molnar <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: > On Sat, 9 Jul 2005, [UNKNOWN] Jörn Schmidt wrote: > >> less attractive to commit credit card fraud. You are, however, not >> making it harder. That's why I believe the credit cards companies will >> indeed have a good, long look at smartcards. Probably not tomorrow or >> next week but in the near future. > > Actually, smart cards are here today. My local movie theatre in > Berkeley, California is participating in a trial for "MasterCard > PayPass." There is a little antenna at the window; apparently you can > just wave your card at the antena to pay for tickets. I haven't > observed anyone using it in person, but the infrastructure is there > right now.
The contactless systems provide almost zero added user convenience. They're a nice marketing hack by the RFID crowd, but nearly nothing more. Users do not mind withdrawing a token from their wallet and inserting it momentarily into a reader. However, the contactless systems also provide a nice new mechanism for fraud, and with the increasing feasibility of phased array systems, that fraud may soon be possible at considerable distances. So, we've gained very little, other than a nice new app for RFID (RFID being a large scale solution waiting for problems), but at the same time we've lost quite a bit. -- Perry E. Metzger [EMAIL PROTECTED] --------------------------------------------------------------------- The Cryptography Mailing List Unsubscribe by sending "unsubscribe cryptography" to [EMAIL PROTECTED]