Harald Koch <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: > Crawford Nathan-HMGT87 wrote: >> Why require contactless in the first place? >> >> Is swiping one's card, credit-card style too difficult for the average >> user? > > As compared to slapping your wallet on the reader? yes. > > I swipe my Visa / debit / Tim Horton's cards regularly. With the > plethora of bad reader technology out there, no matter how practiced I > am it sometimes takes 2-3 tries to get a good read. Heck, sales clerks > who swipe hundreds of times per day sometimes have trouble. And that's > with a relatively easy to read magnetic stripe...
Here in New York City, we use a swipe based system called Metrocard. New Yorkers are not known for passive, accepting behavior, and yet no one seems to complain about the swipe system -- it seems to work more than well enough, and I have to double swipe at most once every few dozen times. The system has held up quite well to quite determined attacks, and the cards themselves are insanely cheap to produce. I therefore expect no one else will ever use the technology -- anything cheap, secure and well tested in the field can't possibly see wide adoption. -- Perry E. Metzger [EMAIL PROTECTED] --------------------------------------------------------------------- The Cryptography Mailing List Unsubscribe by sending "unsubscribe cryptography" to [EMAIL PROTECTED]