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Swiping left on magnetic stripes

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Re: Swiping left on magnetic stripes

#271

Post by bjowen »

SilverRed wrote: post #204
jjk166 wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The reader may be cheap, but the things its integrated with aren't. If it costs $20k to replace a gas pump and you have a half dozen pumps, the cost of replacing them might be comparable to the value of the gas station. A grocery store point of sale system is even more expensive, around $40k a pop. Maybe you're lucky and the manufacturer of your current setup has made it in such a way that the card reader can be swap…

>the manufacturer of your current setup has made it in such a way that the card reader can be swapped out without replacing the entire thing, but that's a big if. This seems to be universal in Australia. Even the mega store self serve integrated systems have a separate machine mounted on for processing card payments.

Visa and MC put Australia in the Asia-Pacific region, and the regional rules and fees have been gradually changed (2004ish onwards) to favour chip payments. There still had to be an extravagant amount of re-work for ATMs and compromises to suit some of the major players in Oz, whose quirks dictate the norms for the rest of the market.

Re: Swiping left on magnetic stripes

#272

Post by AnIdiotOnTheNet »

ehnto wrote: post #217
Animats wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Where’s the bottleneck? Gas stations. The gas station industry has been avoiding upgrading pumps. It's expensive. Retail checkouts usually just need a replacement of the desktop unit, but gas pumps require actual modification. They got a 3-year delay, until October 2020. Then April 17, 2021. Then they got hit by the coronavirus epidemic. The upgrade has to be done by a qualified installer; you don't want someone who…

Gas stations also have a disincentive to have you pay at the pump. They want you to walk in and buy from the mini-market, at least here in Australia the petrol was a loss-leader for a long time. They made all their money from the in store mini-market. All petrol stations here are essentially convenience stores with a gas station attached to get you in the door. We have had pay at the pump before, but they got rid of…

A lot of gas stations now have a screen on the pump that plays ads at you to make up for the fact that you're not coming in. Fortunately there's a mute button and it usually works.

Re: Swiping left on magnetic stripes

#273

Post by bjowen »

ohazi wrote: post #119
drclau wrote: post #12

Why does it take so long? Where’s the bottleneck? Where I lived over the last years (two countries in Europe), I don’t even have to use the physical card. I just use contactless payments with the phone. Prior to that, it was contactless with card. Even ATMs work with contactless (not all, yet). Prior to that, it was chip. I honestly don’t even recall the time when the magnetic stripe was needed. (edit) Think of this:…

From the card companies' perspective, the alternative to magstripe isn't contactless, it's contact (the smart card IC embedded in the physical card). In the US, the card companies convinced merchants to adopt the EMV contact standard by implementing a liability shift that would make the merchants liable for card-present magstripe fraud after a certain date. For merchants using POS terminals, the liability shift happe…

Eh? No, it’s part of the EMV standard and uses the same triple-DES crypto. There have been contactless implementations with poor security, including some truly weird contactless-mag stripe devices, but they are not the current standard or widespread in most markets.

Re: Swiping left on magnetic stripes

#274

Post by Wildgoose »

fortylove wrote: post #210

Does this mean that we can finally have smaller credit cards, if they only need to be big enough to hold the chip? (Assuming payment slots can somehow handle multiple card sizes, eventually...)

I have a McLear Ring which embeds the contactless chip in a ceramic ring I wear on my little finger. No need to mess about fishing a card out of your pocket or wallet, it's just there.

It comes with its own bank account which you simply top up.

Works really well.

https://mclear.com

Re: Swiping left on magnetic stripes

#275

Post by watermelon0 »

LeonidasXIV wrote: post #234
watermelon0 wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's more convenient if you need to pay more than 25 EUR (or whatever the limit is where you live), where you need to use your PIN with contactless card.

Or you use contactless payment with your phone which then does not have a 25 EUR limit (actually I think these days it is more like 50 EUR) since the phone supplies some form of authentication, which a plain contactless card can't.

Maybe I wrongly worded it, but I meant the same thing.

Re: Swiping left on magnetic stripes

#276

Post by kalleboo »

One thing I've been curious about is how long have ATMs been using chip readers? Do they use NFC readers now? The ATMs I've used all still pull they card in and dispense it, so you can't really see what technology they're using internally.

Re: Swiping left on magnetic stripes

#277

Post by Kye »

jacobr wrote: post #251
kook_throwaway wrote: post #244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Installing gas station spyware sounds to fill up sounds like hell.

It only knows your location when you open the app, why is that a problem?

It's probably not a problem in a place like that with some kind of privacy regulation. Import the concept to the US and it'll be outsourced to some company with sketchy security that'll find all its user data leaked in a year because they'll face no social, economic, or legal consequences for not preventing it. If they're not selling the data themselves.

Re: Swiping left on magnetic stripes

#278

Post by jjk166 »

SilverRed wrote: post #204
jjk166 wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The reader may be cheap, but the things its integrated with aren't. If it costs $20k to replace a gas pump and you have a half dozen pumps, the cost of replacing them might be comparable to the value of the gas station. A grocery store point of sale system is even more expensive, around $40k a pop. Maybe you're lucky and the manufacturer of your current setup has made it in such a way that the card reader can be swap…

>the manufacturer of your current setup has made it in such a way that the card reader can be swapped out without replacing the entire thing, but that's a big if. This seems to be universal in Australia. Even the mega store self serve integrated systems have a separate machine mounted on for processing card payments.

Even if the machine is physically separated, it still needs to be integrated. At the very least, you need a way of telling the machine what is owed and a method for the machine to communicate back that the amount has been payed, and it can't be easily spoofed. Nowadays there is a lot more customer specific integration as well (deals, rebates, signing people up for mailing lists, etc). There are about a dozen different communication standards for POS systems, and some POS systems support more than one, but there are also boatloads of proprietary communications protocols floating around. Presumably you're replacing the POS system with one from the same manufacturer, so the communication protocol is likely to be supported, but that doesn't mean any custom software you have on your system will run as is.

And even if you can hotswap a POS system, they're still expensive. A machine plus software is about $4000 per lane, and that's when you're not a captive market. Even small retailers typically have enough lanes that this is a significant expense. People in this thread are giving prices for Square readers which 1) are not at all sufficient for most businesses and 2) are sold at a loss while Square makes its money on transaction fees and subscription services (the same is true for the rest of the Square clones). It's like comparing a home projector to a movie theater projector.

Re: Swiping left on magnetic stripes

#279

Post by chrisdhal »

jwineinger wrote: post #76
xahrepap wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Gas stations around me (Utah) have all replaced their magstripe with a dual magstripe/chip reader. It drives me nuts though, because you still have to insert your card ALL THE WAY IN as if you're using the mag stripe, and then it decides which one to use. Are gas stations not a big target for skimmers? Why didn't they design it to avoid the magstripe-skimmers? have two inserts or something, I don't care. But now we'r…

In my area (Minneapolis), Costco is the only fuel station I've seen with actual tap to pay (and it handles the Costco membership check as well).

Speedway should have them now (the ones by me in New Brighton do) as do most KwikTrips.

Re: Swiping left on magnetic stripes

#280

Post by GordonS »

onion2k wrote: post #211
dazc wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Anecdotally, the machines fail quite often in cabs.

I've always suspected they don't, but the cab driver says it's not working so you pay cash that they don't to declare as income in order to minimize their tax liability. I have no real basis for this suspicion though, besides knowing that taxi drivers were notorious for tax dodging before card readers were common (like most cash-based businesses really).

When I ask to pay by card in the UK or Norway, it's 50/50 whether the driver claims the card machine is broken. If you say you don't have cash, they're like "oh, well, let's try just in case", and lo and behold, it works every time.
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