I'm actually quite impressed with the contactless smart cards that are emerging in the marketplace.
There are a couple full featured ones that do everything a normal card would do and are quite fast.
I like the idea of contactless cards used with passports. Although passports generally have a physical
picture printed, a contactless card would provide a high speed, convenient mechanism to pass a
trusted, digitally signed digital picture of the user as well.
One of my big concerns on the emergence of contactless is that we are sort of starting over from a protocol perspective.
Contact card readers are just now finally getting to the point where interfaces are standardized and a
reader will work with lots of different cards without problems. As contactless emerges, I'm almost positive there
will be similar issues with certain readers not working well with certain cards like we had with the contact cards
a few years ago. Hopefully it won't take long before vendor A-Z's contactless cards will work with vendor B's contactless
reader. Contactless works well now because the contactless provider provides the card and reader in most cases or has
strategic relationships with another vendor that provides the reader. As this technology broadens, we may open ourselves up
to problems we had with contact based cards a few years ago.
Best Regards, Dave
On Mar 5, 2004, at 1:14 AM, Anders Rundgren wrote:
http://www1.chinadaily.com.cn/en/doc/2003-10/15/content_272271.htm
But I believe a "Wireless Citizen Card" is much more interesting long-term because if you are "identified" you can "be" all the other things you need to be like paying using 3D Secure which do not require a local credit card (as it resides on secure servers).
So far it looks like the EU will lose the initiative as we have no dominant software vendors and other important parties seem unable to go outside of their own core business.
I say it one more time: The smart ID card is dead and gone. It is beyond repair.
It is like X.500 versus the Web. Or OSI versus TCP/IP. Or BetaMax versus VHS.
I saw it happen in "slow-motion"...
regards Anders Rundgren
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