| New Credit Cards May Leak Personal Information
|
http://news.yahoo.com/s/pcworld/20070216/tc_pcworld/129096;_ylt=A0WTUeOD9tVFrwkA7SwjtBAF
|
| from above:
|
| You may be carrying a new type of credit card that can transmit your personal
| information to anyone who gets close to you with a scanner.
|
| The new cards--millions of which have been issued over the past year--use
| RFID, or Radio Frequency Identification, technology. RFID allows scanners to
| use radio signals at varying distances to read information stored on a
| computer chip.
| ... snip ...
This was reported a couple of months back. (In fact, if you follow
the links, they get you to a draft version of the report from October
of last year.)
What struck me in this whole story was:
- The gross stupidity of fielding, in this day and age and
after all that has happened, a system that leaks
valuable information so readily and pointlessly.
- The classic response from the vendors: "Oh, yes, that
was in old versions of the stuff that no one
actually uses, we fixed all that *long* ago" -
conveniently ignoring the fact that the study
targeted a number of cards found "in the wild",
from multiple sources.
-- Jerry
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