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Salt Lake City To Launch Mobile Payment System
jitendraharlalka writes "According to The Register: 'Operator consortium Isis has selected Salt Lake City as its flagship deployment to show the rest of the USA what NFC can do for them. The plan will see Salt Lake City's public transport system accepting pay-by-wave from a mobile phone by the middle of next year. Retailers have also been encouraged to adopt Near Field Communications technology at the point of sale, as Salt Lake City strives to become The Place You Can Leave Your Wallet At Home. The Utah Transit Authority already uses proximity payment cards, deployed in 2009, so adding NFC functionality to public transport is a matter of software not hardware.'"
Japan's been doing this for quite some time now. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FeliCa
I get news about changes in the city where I live from a British news source? Something is wrong with this...
Public transit made the dollar coin relevant again - take it away and the dollar coin becomes a novelty, again.
I think if something like this payment by wave thing becomes common then we can expect hacks where people are charged without even knowing it, at some point.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
I for one cannot wait to use your phone to make my purchases.
Tiger Blooded Bi-Winning Machine
So if I write something sufficiently sophisticated, I can bill everyone I walk past for a few cents.... NIIIICE!!!
HDGary secures my bank
In Japan, everybody has a portable phone, all the phones have id-chips in them, and everybody already uses their phone to pay for the subway. They've been doing this for years and years, now. The only way we could possibly do any better is if you could use your phone like a Visa card. That would require all POS card readers to recognize the chips in the phones. A huge upgrade we wouldn't have to make if we had been doing it the way the Japanese have been doing it for years now.
When fairly unsophisticated thieves steal a debit or credit card the first place they usually go is a gas station and fill up all their friends cars... possibly even offering to fill up other cars for cash. I suspect grocery stores are similarly used. Its an easy way to get a small pile of useful goods out of a credit card before the owner knows its gone, and it doesn't set off alarm bells the way buying something larger would.
"In America, first you get the sugar, then you get the power, then you get the women..." -H. Simpson
and for that, I would refuse it.
slippery slope that makes travel less anonymous.
I just don't like this trend. neither do I like it when they *assume* you carry a phone.
(and no, I don't.)
--
"It is now safe to switch off your computer."
Do you mean Mobil and their Speedpass?
If I remember correctly they even had one that you can glue onto your window so it activates the pump when you drive up.
I haven't seen a Shell/Texaco station with that but maybe they just weren't in my area.
$10 says that after they roll this out to the rest of the country we rapidly find out that nobody noticed the system doesn't work for buying alcohol
I used it there in Feb on the buses up to the ski resorts. My son works for a bank and test used a swipe phone two years ago. When people behind him in line saw it, they all asked, "Where can I get one?" Expect it will be the norm in a few years.
And I don't just mean that figuratively.
If one of these goes on the fritz because some drunk pounds it with a rebar he found lying on the road, it's going to strand commuters.
On the other hand, since it doesn't involve any sort of slot to insert or swipe anything, that's one less point of weakness. You can plant the NFC transceiver behind an inch of HDPE (plastic decking, e.g.) and it'll never feel a thing.
The ticket-printer slot is still going to be there. Unless the ticket is also electronic and someone wanting to check it can NFC your phone to know if you're riding privileges are intact.
...but don't forget your expensive smartphone.
Pihk-lee-wah?
Pie-klie-wah?
I prefer the first choice.
Reverse Engineering a real-world RFID payment system: http://events.ccc.de/congress/2010/Fahrplan/events/4036.en.html Video of the presentation (in English)
Note that that the comprised system was "MIFARE Classic", which is an extremely flawed implementation. Other systems are not necessarily such an easy target (and FeliCa is almost certainly better than MIFARE Classic).
Of course, while there are certainly better and more secure ways to implement stored-payment cards, I guess the real lesson is that the entities who choose which system/standard to use are often not very well qualified to do so...
We live, as we dream -- alone....
With every such system I know of, payment-via-phone is an option, and you can just use a stored-charge contactless smartcard instead.
I actually have a phone I can use to pay for the train, but I just use a card instead because it's anonymous (the cards can be recharged easily at a ticket machine, or a new one obtained from a machine for a ¥500 deposit) and it's easier to grab the card from my pocket than fish out my phone...
We live, as we dream -- alone....
I wouldn't trust them with my money. Remember the Mountain Meadows Massacre
The concept sounds cool, but if all you have to do is get close the phone close enough to the scanner it seems easy enough for someone to walk around a crowded street and charge everyone they pass.
Time to get a Faraday cage cell phone bag to prevent random unauthorized charges if I happen to walk in the wrong place. That would kind of defeat the purpose of the phone though if nobody can contact me... FML.