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Paying With the Wave of a Cellphone
holy_calamity writes "Tech Review discusses how it will soon be possible to pay in stores by waving your cellphone over a contactless reader, thanks to new handsets due next year, and RFID stickers and cases offered today by firms including Visa. It's convenient for shoppers, but a major driver of the technology is the opportunity for retailers to gain access to their customers' cellphones and social networks for marketing purposes."
Welcome to the party, round-eyes.
Edy prepaid or iD credit, the Japanese have had this for years.
Like losing your cellphone wasn't bad enough so far?
How many transactions will I be doing from my pocket on a crowded subway?
And the blackhat standing by the exit door with a 50$ RFID-reader gets my account as well.
They're gonna need some very hefty security measures to get me on that bandwagon, thankyouverymuch!
"but a major driver of the technology is the opportunity for retailers to gain access to their customers' cellphones and social networks for marketing purposes."
Is NOT helping in convincing me.
I don't want a facebook/twitter update of what I bought and where, every time I shop.
~men are from earth. women are from earth. deal with it.~
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/3697940.stm
The night club offers its VIP clients the opportunity to have a syringe-injected microchip implanted in their upper arms that not only gives them special access to VIP lounges, but also acts as a debit account from which they can pay for drinks.
This sort of thing is handy for a beach club where bikinis and board shorts are the uniform and carrying a wallet or purse is really not practical.
My bank already issued me an RFID-fitted credit card... which I don't use.
Set your phasers on "funky"!
I actually do want RFID capability in my phone. But only if that means I can have a built-in RFID Guardian.
But giving retailers access to all my contacts? Why the hell would I want to do that?
Personally I don't see the point of just having a dumb RFID chip in me, I'd rather have some smarter tech with some kind of user interface (preferably something a bit more "Ghost in the shell" and not just a keyboard implanted in one wrist and a monitor in the other).
As for religious objections, you're free not to get cyberized (to use a word from GitS) and although I may find your reason for it silly I would probably also refuse simply getting a "dumb" implant that does little more than act as a glorified ID card.
Greylisting is to SMTP as NAT is to IPv4
The "no way you can have it done from your pocket" only applies for zero gain antennas. The black hat standing at the exit point, or better yet, in the van some meters away with a high gain parabolic antenna would tend to disagree.
It sounds to me that you're implying that the bible quote is somehow an accurate prediction of the future. I'm having a bit of trouble believing in that. Even if it becomes extremely common (which I doubt).
Also, it's a quote from a collection of fairy tales several thousand years old, hardly an accurate prediction of technological progress or world events.
Greylisting is to SMTP as NAT is to IPv4
And desperate enough to void the warranty.
And gullible enough to risk having the vendor brick his device on purpose.
Let's assume Bible to be inerrant. Let's also assume that this particular quote was meant as a prediction of future events thousands of years away; there's a pretty strong argument that the whole Book of Revelation was written as a thinly-disguised "fuck you" to the Roman Empire, who had a habit of putting their rulers portraits on their money (so you'd have to take the "image of the beast" into your hand to conduct transactions) and requiring worship of said rulers, and had a ruler (Nero) who had just died but was rumored to be alive and about to return, was commonly considered a beast, and who's name can be read as "666" by a common numerological method of the time, but let's ignore all that.
Even with these assumptions, your argument is illogical. There is no reason to assume that RFID tags really are the fulfilment of a particular prophecy, just because they could be. You certainly can't assume that they are, then use that to "disprove" any counterarguments, for that is begging the question. The GP pointed out that RFID tags seem unlikely to go the way the Mark of the Beast is supposed to; that's evidence that RFID tags are not, in fact, Mark of the Beast, not that they are MotB and a miracle will enforce all the conditionals.
This is why religious arguments usually get modded down: even if you assume that said religion is correct, the arguments themselves tend to be one logical fallacy on top of another, and often completely incoherent.
Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.
Don't be ridiculous. I will wait until the apple store offers to duct tape it on for me for $50. They will use special apple duct tape that is SO much better than ordinary plebeian duct tape.
They whose government reduces their essential liberties for temporary security, receive neither liberty nor security.
Exactly. The "mark" fear is based on the idea that a lot of Romans of non-proper birth were locked out of markets and opportunity. It was John's way of saying "Hey, they'll do this to all of us! Down with the Emperor! Christ will come in our lifetime, shut down the Emperor and save us."
Didn't exactly come to pass, but like Nostradamous or whomever, the emotionally unbalanced and credulous hold up these writings as accurate and simply reinterpret everything to fit modern history. When I was a kid Revelation fit in "perfect" with the Iranian revolution and with the lineage of European royal families. Now we're projecting onto RFIDs and IT. In 2050 we'll be projecting onto jetpacks and the founding of Saudi-Israel. Humans are just dumb irrational animals. Religion is proof of this.