Title: Smart Card Transaction support
I have been doing a little research into Smart Card based transaction systems. Quite an interesting technology. In the near future, it should be possible to make secure transactions (purchases, deposits, withdrawals, person to person/store payments) with these systems via a web browser or mail client. Thus my question, what modifications will be needed to Internet Explorer and Entourage to support Smart Card transactions? Assuming that the Mac has a Smart Card reader attached via USB or PCMCIA interface, then either application should be able to access the card for Authentication, Authorization, and for access to stored cash balances (presumably via PC-SC). For Internet Explorer, I expect the additional capability could be supported via plugin; however, Entourage may require more direct modifications. Has either development team looked into this yet?
Since there is already a development effort for Smart Card support on Linux <http://linuxnet.com/index.html>, I imagine that adding the basic PC-SC support to Darwin/MacOS X will be small.
I can see that an internet merchant would have an extremely strong interest in this type of payment system as it would substantially reduce costs and risk.
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Eric Hildum
