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Credit Cards That Think They Are Gadgets
holy_calamity writes "Pittsburgh startup Dynamics Inc has unveiled gadget-like credit cards with buttons, lights and even displays built into the same space as a conventional card. One card has two buttons on the front, which, when pressed, rewrite the data on the card's magnetic stripe, allowing it to act as multiple bank or credit cards in one. Another has several buttons and a display in place of the card's number. Only after entering a PIN is the magnetic stripe populated and the full card number revealed, and after a short time both go blank again for security."
I wonder how long it'll be until somebody builds onboard biometrics into one of these things.
AS TFA points out, there are 16 million credit card readers out there. Instead of making them all RFID readers, just use the existing infrastructure. And this would potentially reduce the size of your wallet, not increase it, by allowing you to carry just one programmable card instead of many.
Tic-Tac-Toe, Global Thermonuclear War, and relationships all have the same winning move.
I know chip&pin isn't perfect, but it'd be a step in the right direction..
I just went on vacation and had no problem with my cards until the end, when someone cloned one of my cards and "swiped" it nearly ten days after I'd last used the card in that particular city.
Curiously the card was never out of my sight. They carried a machine to the table in restaurants and swipe on the spot, as is common in Europe.
Then, when my genius bank thought there might be fraud, they called me on my land line at home. This despite having told them my travel plans and they knew I wouldn't be home for another 24 hours. Since I didn't get back to them soon enough they let the fraudulent charges go through -- one of them for over $2000 -- and I had to deal with it the hard way when I got home.
Yes. Says it in TFA.
Tic-Tac-Toe, Global Thermonuclear War, and relationships all have the same winning move.
SecureID I think. Mine is the size of a care remote. The thin ones broke a lot. Old technology, but effective.
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
It's called Dynamic Magstripe and is available now. One example of it is here.
In Europe, they are solving this problem by moving away from magstripe to chip-and-pin. This is for two reasons, you don't give your PIN out to anyone else and because the card never leaves your sight.
For example, when you pay for food at a restaurant, the server physically brings you the Point Of Sale terminal for you to insert your card, confirm the price and enter your PIN. This means that it's impossible for them to run off and make a copy of the card without you seeing it happen.
(I was in the US recently and did not like the fact that my credit card disappeared from my sight when I went to pay for the bill)
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This is all just a way to make you pay for more and more. Card companies/Banks have to write off fraud, usually, and they hate doing this, so every new card gimmick that comes along will be aimed at making fraud more your problem and less theirs.
But it will also be used to make you pay for everything big companies won't. Let's create an example: Say you walk into Walmart and buy a pair of Calvin Klein jeans. You pay for the Jeans at the checkout. However, Walmart never pays the supplier, Calvin Klein (or the distributor). Thanks to all these shared records, the databases can track everything and one day you get a bill from Calvin Klein for the jeans you purchased at Walmart.
Sounds implausible right? I'm right now fighting with Direct TV for services I purchased through Verizon. Verizon didn't pay Direct TV, so Direct TV is billing me instead, even though I paid Verizon. I never got a Direct TV bill before this one. I was never their customer (directly), I was a Verizon customer. And yet here I am, stuck with the bill.
Trust me, my above example at Walmart may be implausible now, but 5 years from now it'll be commonplace to see the average joes being shafted at both ends by large companies. This card is one more step towards that end.
If telephones are outlawed, then only outlaws will have telephones.
Yet they're going to be used for your boarding pass:
http://www.google.com/search?q=phone+boarding+pass
Agreed, these cards would be invaluable if they had a one-time card number generator. But in practice, that is a lot harder to do then you would think.
Credit cards have 15-16 digits, but the top 6 reserved are for the BIN that identifies the issuer and corresponding VAP/MIP/... processing station in the credit card network that authorizations are sent to. The last digit is reserved for the mod10 checksum. So that means that you have only 7-8 digits available per BIN. Note that each BIN typically is used for 10's of thousands of individual cards.
When you use a one-time card number online, it is generated/provided by a centralize server and database in order to efficiently maximize that 7-8 digit pool for one-time use that is SHARED, coordinated, and distributed among the 10's of thousand of card holders.
But since these new computerized cards do not have any networking capabilities, and since of the 10's of thousand of card holders need to be identified individually, you would only have a 2-3 digital pool for the one-time use, which is not enough for security.
The only option for these new computerized cards would be to either add network capabilities, like a bluetooth connection to a mobile phone, or add a one-time passcode to another field in the magstripe, perhaps appended to the card holders name.