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Apple Said To Team With Visa, MasterCard On iPhone Wallet
An anonymous reader writes with news about a possible partnership between Apple and major credit card companies. Apple plans to turn its next iPhone into a mobile wallet through a partnership with major payment networks, banks and retailers, according a person familiar with the situation. The agreement includes Visa, MasterCard, and American Express and will be unveiled on Sept. 9 along with the next iPhone, said the person, who asked not to be identified because the talks are private. The new iPhone will make mobile payment easier by including a near-field communication chip for the first time, the person said. That advancement along with Touch ID, a fingerprint recognition reader that debuted on the most recent iPhone, will allow consumers to securely pay for items in a store with the touch of a finger.
This will be good because it might finally get businesses serious about exception NFC transactions. As long as it's not some proprietary bullshit on Apple's end, of course.
Any idea whether it'll work internationally? Android 4.4 has NFC transaction support but it's only actually supported in the U.S.
Rampant carbon sequestration destroyed the Dinosaurs' tropical paradise. I'm here to help repair the damage.
NFC payment chips have been in Japanese phones since they got 100Mbps fibre to the premises available.
Sure, they didn't hook into visa or mastercard, but added more to your phone bill.
If Apple is going to be taking a cut of the transactions, then perhaps this is why they bought their stock back?
Considering iCloud was hacked and massive amounts of nude celebrity photos were taken from it, people probably aren't too trusting of your security at this point.
What's the big deal? Mobile payment exists since the late 1990s.
Circumcision is child abuse.
Ah nevermind, I got it. It's not terribly obvious though...
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
Let's hope Apple's new fingerprint reader is better than their previous one: http://www.theguardian.com/tec...
A few years ago, those Google NFC payment terminals were all over Silicon Valley. Nobody used them. Newer credit card terminals show no sign of supporting them, although some apparently have the hardware inside for it.
Another problem is that if the technology just requires the phone's presence, not interaction on the phone, it's insecure. "Near field communication" is only supposed to be up to 20cm, but a 2013 paper at Black Hat demonstrated connectivity at 100cm, which is good enough for crime. If it does require interaction on the phone, the user has to activate the phone, navigate to some app, and deal with the app. This is slower than swiping a credit card.
It's easier to do than card-reader skimmers.
Citation on the NFC chip broadcasting your info 24/7?
You have to enable it in an app/widget/whatever.
Way to spread the FUD though, astroturf much?
Please disregard previous comment, reading multiple forums at once ain't such a good idea after all.
I've got better things to do tonight than die.
NFC exists since several years but there is not exactly general, widespread take-up. Whether you like Apple or not, they are in a good position to enable wide adoption. Their products tend to offer accessible funtionality, and they are big enough to leverage their relationship with the credit card companies, hence I can see them having success.
Even so this is part of normal technical evolution. If Apple doesn't crack the nut, eventually someone else will. I am more interested in the expected wearable health-oriented device (probably an iwatch) that will likely be announced as well next week. Smartwatches in general are terribly nerdy and unattractive, yet a succesful health-oriented product could be a quality of life improver. It could be a big thing.
Coin is going to be dead in the water as soon as US requires chip cards. The whole point of chip cards is that the key never leaves the chip and it can't be copied. They talk about supporting it in the future but can't elaborate on a plan, as they don't have one. They also have blatant misinformation about "chip and sign" on their site. "Chip and sign" uses the ICC chip to verify card presence, but you sign the receipt rather than entering a PIN. The Coin people claim you still use the magnetic strip, but that just plain isn't true.
The cost of handling transactions is steadily diminishing. There was a time it would cost you something between 49$ and 149$ to place a single trade. It dropped to well below 10$ when I was still trading. Would not be surprised if they give you money to place a trade or something now. Compare it to the debit card transaction.
When it comes to creditcard I would not begrudge the 2% to 5% fee charged to the merchants. The credit card companies are essentially advancing an unsecured loan, and it would cost the individual merchants much more to check and advance credit to their customers. (Of course it there is some real competition the percentage might come down). But it is the debit card transaction that is atrocious. Money comes from the bank, there is no risk involved. There was a very nice system, including PIN numbers to manage the POS terminals. Way back when stock trade was 49$, it was 25 cent per transaction irrespective of the size of transaction. This should have become zero. But that is not what happened.
The Visa and Mastecard combined to discourage ATM cards and the POS terminals and undermined the system. They made debit and credit card to go through the same system. And the merchants were forced to pay 2% transaction fees on risk free money transfer from one bank to another.
The time is ripe, with prepaid cards and stored value cards for really cheap and free micro transactions. It took the clout of Apple to hit the music executives on their head and make them wake up, smell the coffee and realize the days of selling single track with 10 more useless tracks for 19$ per CD are gone. It might take such a juggernaut like Apple to make the bankers come around the bend and give up their 2% commission on risk free transactions.
But I wish we are not going from the duopoly of MC + Visa to a monopoly of AppStore. Well one thing at a time. Once the bankers get used to lower fees commensurate with the cost of transactions, may be alternatives to AppStore might emerge, and the system might become more open.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
easily lost stolen hacked phone equipped with a radio broadcasting your CC info 24/7
Easily hacked? How would you go about hacking an iPhone?
The negativity is because this is Slashdot. The second reason is that it is about Apple.
"Nothing new" - yeah, and cell phones existed years before iPhone - how did that work out.
Haters will hate.
The recent Cartoon Channel show, 'Chippy', conceived and sponsored by a joint effort between Apple, the Department of Homeland Security and the Internal Revenue Service, has reached a critical mass in terms of viewership according to a recent media rating survey by the National Government Network. The show, which promotes the implantation and use of the Apple iChip and shows DHS agents busting unregistered gun owners, smugglers, drug dealers, black market medical personnel, Constitutionalist terrorists, and non-'Chippers' has become a significant PR success and increased the demand for chip implementation in the core demographic of 8-12 and, surprisingly, adults as old as 70. The show's tagline 'Chippy is your friend!' has spawned t-shirts, window stickers, screen savers, and a host of DRM-free online episodes as well as a counter-culture of subversive anti-Chippie paraphernalia. From the Pacific White House in Hawaii, the President declared the show a clear success and commented that the revised chip requirement under his Affordable Care Act was 'a keystone in the future of healthcare and commerce in the United States'. In a related story, Apple CEO Tim Cook announced that the next revision of the iChip will include wireless and cell phone connectivity and a new basic neural interface along with further enhancements to it's current healthcare, credit, commerce, and GPS abilities. The iChip has boosted Apple stock to well over the $1100 mark as of the close of yesterday's announcement at Mac World San Francisco.
The corporation famous for its slave labor and environmentally damaging manufacturing policies?
The corporation that works with the NSA to cripple your phone and provides whatever is asked of it to the security forces.
Apple who can't even secure their own cloud and thus keep nude celeb photos safe.
In other words..... Crapple, we shit on your security and privacy.
"If any question why we died, Tell them because our fathers lied."
You guys crack me up. One day Slashdot is in a furor over revelations that the overstepping government is voraciously cataloguing and sifting through your personal data, the next you happily buzz about *paying money* for technologies that make government big data collection of your purchases, travel info, communications, lifestyle, reading, etc... more and more convenient and irresistible. It's hard to feel sorry for people that so willingly hand their freedom over, for novelty, time after time, and learn nothing. America will be the first panopticon, and you will all deserve it.
Anyone else thinking of Thumb payments in that?
Conversion Rate Optimisation French / English consultant
The same corporation that is complicit with the NSA spying, obvious code errors to allow said spying, a variety of other "bugs" and then the recent "nude celeb photos" scandal show you how incompetent Apple is at security, why anyone in their right mind would use anything they make in a security required situation.
"If any question why we died, Tell them because our fathers lied."