On Jan 14, 2009, at 5:11 PM, s.ferey wrote:
Michael Bender a écrit :
[...]
The root cause of all this mess is because none of the smartcard
manufacturers were mature enough to want to work *together*
when the technology was being developed decades ago
that's unfair & incorrect.
ISO 7816-3 & 4 were defined decades ago by card
manufacturer working together.
Well, I can believe that a bunch of card manufacturers all sat in the
same room and everyone got to put in *their* own favorite APDUs and then
at the end of the day when the actual silicon hit the streets, we had
a bunch of random sort-of compliant cards out there, but as you say
later
on, no one really cared about interoperability until the mid 90's or so.
the title of this topic is still correct:
"how to recognize _a_ card by its ATR"
the point is that no card manufacturer, nor
any card integrator work with _a_ card,
everybody works with a chosen, known card.
Right, and that's a big problem when you move beyond the captive
vertical market that the smartcard industry has loved for so long.
The one biggest, most important forward-thinking feature of smartcards
that was not standardized was an "ID" command of some sort (in the ATR
or via a well-defined APDU), similar to the USB device descriptors or
the SCSI ID commands. Why the smartcard industry didn't think that this
was a good thing to have, even if they didn't care about working with
their competitor's cards, is beyond me.
everybody but people that plays (not works)
with cards of course - the specs do not cover
this point ... except the huge banking specs
that did care about terminal stuff regarding
card capabilities.
That's not true for products like Sun Ray where we support many
different
cards from many different card vendors right "out of the box" for
session
mobility so tat when you install the Sun Ray product you can instantly
use
hundreds of different cards and card families in the Sun Ray. I and my
colleagues went to great pains and spent many long nights getting this
to
work, and not having a universal ID command for cards was a challenge
for.
I don't characterize our work as "play", given that it's been a core
feature
of our product since 2000.
mike
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