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[Perry E. Metzger]

David Alexander Molnar <dmolnar at EECS.berkeley.EDU> 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		perry at piermont.com

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