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Apple Hints At Near-Field Payments System In Next-Gen iPhone, iPad
An anonymous reader writes "The smartphone seems to be well on its way to becoming the next wallet; and Apple could be pushing that movement along. Reports from several outlets suggest the Cupertino, Calif.-based electronics giant has plans to put a near-field communications chip in the next versions of the iPhone and iPad for contactless payments technology. The latest report, from blog Apple Insider, says Apple has put up two job postings for two global payment platforms managers."
The site is incredibly obnoxious. Ads pop up over the content from time to time. Avoid if possible. Hope someone can find an article on this on another site.
Not just a lot of ads, but my Mozilla Seamonkey addon shows they have 16(!) tracking cookies. Wow.
- For me the best feature of these kinds of technologies is "cash back". For example Discover Card lets me just wave my card to pay for stuff and then gives me 1% off my purchase. 5% for hotels (I just got back $40 on my last statement). Amazon has a card that gives 3% off books, games, et cetera, and AAA has a gas card that is also 3% off.
For Apple to make me want to use their Credit "near field" technology, I'd like some kind of discount, like maybe 3% off my apple.com purchases.
Information wants to be expensive AND wants to be free. So you have Value vs. Cheap distribution fighting each other.
Several people commented on the ads and tracking cookies and whatnot on that site. Here's an alternate article on the same topic.
This is why apple is so amazing, they keep inventing new stuff like this near field communication.
Why do I want this? I'm more than willing to get a piece of plastic out of my wallet or on my keychain to pay for something. I can't wait for the hack that lets people walk by you and get you to pay for things. It's bad enough credit cards have RFID tags in them now. I don't need my phone doing it too.
MidnightBSD: The BSD for Everyone
It would be nice if you could receive a smartphone from your bank or credit union that was free except for the phone calls or data usage. I have a tracfone that deducts my data and phone usage per use. I spend about $15-20 per month on it. For a light user like me getting a smart phone and paying $60-70 per month would be a waste of money, but the banks could earn money on the debits & credit charges I make on the smart phone like they do now with my plastic debit and credit cards.
Why do new specialized chips have to be used for it, can't bluetooth be used for the same purpose? You can detect the signal strength and specify a high range so that the devices have to be close.
I've seen a lot of stories pop up around this, but I'm not quite sure why - for one thing, doesn't the most recent Google Android phone already include an NFC chip and support in the OS? So it's not like Apple is the first here, they haven't even confirmed they are doing it!
Also, in more general terms, I don't know why people get freaked out about this. It's just another way to pay for things.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
You can get an Android powered Nexus S, which already has an NFC chip...
I do NOT want anything like this capability on my phone that I carry everywhere....
I'm trying to go more cash as it is...keep CC spending down...and really, one good hack on this thing, or a stolen phone...how much money could you potentially lose if this thing acts like a debit card and takes it straight out of your checking??? I don't have a debit card for reasons like that....that your funds are gone, and don't come back until your prove it wasn't you as opposed to CC's where at least you don't have the money taken out immediately.
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
Uhm, a RUMORS site implies something about a job posting at Apple and this becomes 'Apple hints'? Does anybody question what they read anymore? Also, the kind of payment system they are imagining being worked on isn't even mentioned! "What is the air speed of an unladen swallow?" Got whisked away- thought so.
Isn't this sort of payment system widely used in more advanced countries like Japan (a.k.a Grorios Nippon)???
...to take your money. That is all.
Most Japanese cell phones have included e-money features for several years now. (I first saw someone use it at a convenience store in October 2006 in Kyoto.) Is this a similar technology, or something completely new?
Is there a way to remove the comments from the Slashdot RSS feed? Takes up a lot of time scrolling past all of them to get to the next news item in Reader. The ads are fine just the comments are annoying!
"Service" charges on electronic cash transactions to me are little more than taxation without representation. The only choice one can make is who skims your money. If these services are to be a replacement for legal tender, what charter protects them as legal tender transactions? At what point does this bypass democracy? (Thinking of Wikileaks donation issue, among others).
First Steve Jobs invents the computer. Then he invents the GUI. Then he invents the MP3 player. Then he invent the cell phone. Then he invents the tablet computer. Now he invents NFC. The man is single-handedly inventing everything!
My carrier recently rolled out a phone based payment system, I was asked to be part of the trial. I declined.
They want me to spend $1.50 per transaction to use it. I can use my debit card for free, I can use cash for free, and my visa card actually pays me to use it, why on earth would I want to give my carrier $1.50 for each transaction? I don't pay bank fees, they already get the privilege of using my money while it's in their care, I refuse to pay money to get access to it.
I enjoy my iPad as a useful tool for a variety of things, hauling it around to use a payment method, I don't think so. Subjectively I can't think of a time I would be using my iPad while shopping (I tried using it for a shopping list medium and it just does not work for that). My iPhone, maybe, but thats just one more issue to contend with for it being lost or stolen. It could work of others that live a more metro life then me.
I do not play in the middle of the road
"Near-field" isn't the issue. It's that Apple wants to be a payment processor, handling payments through iTunes and skimming off part of the transaction.
We need a crackdown on payment systems run by non-banks. PayPal is generally agreed to be terrible at handling problems and acts irresponsibly with the money of others. Most of PayPal's competitors are worse. Payment systems need to be run only by companies subject to regulation as banks.
The Japanese have been using NFC for many years now, yes... but I can't imagine how a technology that you simply hold near something to be read, becomes more usable.
I think it just means the U.S. will finally catch up to Europe in ease of payment, I always feel sorry for cashiers overseas when I have to present my ancient mag-stripe tech for payment instead of even chip & PIN.....
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
You know what's going to happen. Attackers don't even need to hack the OS. They just need to convince hapless users that their phone has x number of viruses and click here to fix the problem. IOS5 + near field payment + attackers = profit
"We are just a war away from Amerikastan. When god vs god the undoing of man." Dave Mustaine
Apple stores your CC details on your iTunes account, not your phone. Your phone will ask for the account password to authenticate media & app purchased though it, but the CC transaction details happen between apple and your CC company (not your phone).
Why this is "news" when it's associated with a rumored Apple product? There are phones that have been shipping for a good while with NFC chips now, and that hasn't generated buzz of even remotely comparable scale. Is it once again so that a feature becomes newsworthy only when Apple adds or *might* add it to their products?
Who in their right mind pays to pay someone? You've gotta be a little derp.
Maybe Apple is looking into ways to use the iPad to receive payments.
I can't wait. Any engineer can probably buy the development kit for the retail side of this, hack it, and walk around creating fake transactions off any phone that has this. Wonderful! Never have to do honest work again! Of course, you'd have to have mules etc to cover the backtrail. One thing about digital money -- someone has to "collect" the value some way, and that's just about always easy to trace. So you need some fall guys, because some will be caught.
Why guess when you can know? Measure!
Umm, iphone I could see, but ipad? I'd laugh harder at the guy at the dinner table who pulls out a 10" tablet device to pay than I would at a guy who rides a segway.
OK, this is going to a bit of a rant. As an electrical engineer, I object to the use of "near-field" to describe this nascent technology. To an antenna engineer, near-field means something very specific, relating to the size of the antenna and the wavelength of the waves with which it operates, and generally describing other aspects of the situation as amount of wavefront curvature and the phase relationships between certain fields.
But I will concede the argument because I have lost every other attempt to avoid the subversion of technical terms by non-technical people.
Any communication engineer knows the difference between bandwidth, channel capacity, and data rate and their relationship to signal-to-noise ratio. Yet the "technical" press has conflated these concepts into one, or rather, use "bandwidth" to mean usually either channel capacity or instantaneous data rate. I once attempted to repair the Wikipedia page on Bandwidth by allowing that there are two definitions, one of which is the "new-age" version and one of which recognizes the work of Claude Shannon; my edits were quickly reversed to include only the "new-age" definition, or, as the other editors called it, the "computer science" version.
In the early 1980s, I wrote a letter to each of the three popular audio magazines of the day begging them to stop using "software" to refer to the information stored on Compact Discs which is properly called "data" or "information" or the like. I included dictionary definitions to bolster my argument. I received a polite reply from two of the three editors saying that they agreed with me but that it was too late--that train had already sailed. Oddly, nowadays that particular misuse has partially been corrected as people have come to realize that software is the stuff that makes their computers operate, while the stuff on CDs (and other media) is frequently referred to as "content."
Does ANYONE else find the mental image of someone swiping their iPad or waving it over a contact to buy a bag of doritos ludicrous?
Iphone and Android have no effective security source code analyzer.
No Fortify
No Ounce Labs
No IBM AppScan Source edition(which ate Ounce).
So your stuck with clang and faultfinder which work on . 2 of the OWASP top ten.
Mobile platforms are where windows was in the the pre Windows 3.1 days. Just a mountian of code rife with platform exposures to delight hackers for the next 15 years.
Now why or rather how much illegal drugs does it take to market this with a straight face.
Apple and Google should be eppicly ashamed of this systemic security phail.
Until one of the few professional automated source coder eviews can be added to the Android and Iphone SDLC's no company should touch it with a 30 foot pole. Adding a Chip to the iphone at this point is the grossest of negligence to best practice security reviews.
For shame.
Actually this is a bigger issue than it seems to most people.
One likely implementation is a FeLiCa style NFC chip running the JavaCard OS, with various specific applets from partner payment services. This card is fully independent, in that can run in full contacless mode, receiving energy from a reader to power itself, even when the iPhone has no power. When the iPhone has power, it communicates directly with the chip via serial interfaces, similar to contact mode. This allows querying the applets on the chip and updating information as needed. This seems like the more likely implementation as it enables zero confirmation touch payment as well as commuter ticket operation.
Another option is fully connected mode, where it will not operate with the iPhone in a battery dead state. This may be subdivided into zero confirmation and moderate confirmation modes, such as touch contact for specific applets such as commuter ticket transactions, and a confirmation UI for applets such as payment services.
The third option is a hybrid mode, where confirmationless applets are directly loaded into the chip which will work with a dead iPhone, and ones requiring confirmation will require the iPhone to have power and show a confirmation dialog. This would require the JavaCard OS to be intelligent enough that in offboard fixed power mode, the available applet storage space includes iOS itself and transfer certain requests to iOS. Unfortunately, this would break some applet security models, so you would end up having to load applets into the chip that are unusable when the iPhone is off, which ends up being the first implementation mentioned.
/.ers:
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Seriously, though. I see many of you railing at this new development, but I don't see how it could possibly be worse than plastic. You know those numbers printed on your card? Yeah, people (read: cashiers) can see that; those numbers are all you need to use someone else's card online. Now after thinking about that, someone please tell me how this new technology can possibly be less secure than a plain old card.