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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.
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.
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?
NFC payment cards in Australia/Europe cryptographically sign a challenge from the terminal, using basically standard crypto. It's EMV all the way. In-person magstripe payments are carefully controlled and risk analysed to ensure they only occur if, for example, the card is broken - or outright banned.
NFC payments in the USA involve the phone sending regular magstripe data to the terminal, with only the CVC code being some kind of cryptographic derivative - a three digit number (less than 1000). The reason for this crazy setup is so merchants don't have to update their backend/PoS systems that still expect magstripe data. There is no plan to perform a complete upgrade thus old style transactions cannot be phased out. It's a dramatically less secure system.
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.