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The tiny chip that powers Montreal subway tickets

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Re: The tiny chip that powers Montreal subway tickets

#161

Post by tomoyoirl »

ForHackernews wrote: post #122

> a per-chip price of nine cents That still seems expensive for a $3.75 metro fare. 2.4% of the cost of your ride is the chip in the ticket itself? Maybe it's worth it because it lets them eliminate mechanical ticket-reading and unify paper tickets with other NFC payment methods.

I assume all regular customers will be paying a fare of $3.25 or less per ride on the reusable Opus card (fare purchased in a 10-ride pack). Essentially you’re paying for the chip with the very-occasional-commuter one-ride convenience fee.

Re: The tiny chip that powers Montreal subway tickets

#162

Post by kevincox »

mschuster91 wrote: post #42

> The Ultralight chip has a few features beyond a printed ticket, though. The chips are manufactured with a unique 7-byte identification code (UID). Moreover, the UID is signed, ensuring that fake UIDs cannot be generated. The problem is, they can be just as easily cloned . Your average Flipper Zero can do that. If you want actual security, you have to go for a challenge-response scheme - i.e. every card is provision…

> The problem is, they can be just as easily cloned

But you can only clone a ticket who's ID you use. So you can buy a ticket and clone it, but what have you achieved? It is still validated "on the backend" once you use either the first time.

So the only real risk is that you clone a random person's ticket between them buying it and using it which is a security flaw, but probably a very minor issue in real-world use.

Maybe there could be slight issue with day passes? You could buy a single day pass then issue clones at a lower price. However it is likely not an issue worth paying for more expensive chips to avoid.

Re: The tiny chip that powers Montreal subway tickets

#163

Post by lxgr »

chgs wrote: post #123

Mifare is what’s been used in London’s Oyster cards for 20 years (not the ultralight ones mind), and Hong Kong for even longer. However oyster really is in its way out for most uses. contactless and especially a phone is far more convenient for non season use, and far less wasteful.

Hong Kong's Octopus card uses Felica, as far as I know.

It's conceptually very similar to MIFARE – a fixed function IC implementing a fully offline stored value purse – but uses a stack that differs from ISO 14443 A on pretty much all layers. (It was planned to possibly become ISO 14443 C, but that never happened.)

Re: The tiny chip that powers Montreal subway tickets

#164

Post by TeMPOraL »

markus_zhang wrote: post #98
justusthane wrote: post #21

This is fascinating. We were just in Europe where we experienced these tickets for the first time. I had trouble with them; I was trying to figure out how to scan them because it never occurred to me that they might contain an NFC chip. My wife, on the other hand, who is not at all technical, took it for granted that you would tap them and immediately figured it out intuitively.

I have found the same thing with my wife. I'm a technical person, but I'm extremely bad with tools and such, including the ticket thing. If no one shows me how to use it I'll probably figure out a way to insert it somewhere. My wife won't have any problem with this and other small tools. The same thing with IKEA: I always rely on the manual and just blindly follow the instructions, and gets very frustrated if the ins…

> The same thing with IKEA: I always rely on the manual and just blindly follow the instructions, and gets very frustrated if the instructions miss one step.

Thing I figured out assembling IKEA stuff in the past few years: if it seems like they skipped a step, look carefully at the details in pictures. Perhaps use a magnifying glass. There's going to be only one way to get from step N to step N+1, and all the information to figure it out is there. The drawings of all the pieces, from major parts to tiniest of screws, have accurate details, and there's enough of them to disambiguate the situation.

Re: The tiny chip that powers Montreal subway tickets

#165

Post by TeMPOraL »

Tijdreiziger wrote: post #110
ck45 wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This reminds me a bit of Nabaztags, or maybe the reverse. They would also read something that resembles NFC and could perform an action.

Around that time, I recall there being a lot of hype around RFID tags. E.g. the Touchatag was just a bunch of RFID tags and a USB RFID reader, but marketed as a consumer product. This never really seems to have caught on, though. Nowadays, I suppose most consumers do have RFID tags (debit cards, transport cards, building keys, e-Passports), they just might not be aware of the underlying technology.

All the patents and "sekhurity" isn't helping. A decade ago, I ended up with a bunch of programmable NFC stickers that my Galaxy S7 suddenly wasn't able to read, because some MIFARE intellectual property issue retroactively bricked this class of NFC stickers. Good luck figuring out where on the compatibility matrix the Amazon listing you're looking at is.

Re: The tiny chip that powers Montreal subway tickets

#166

Post by lukan »

markus_zhang wrote: post #98
justusthane wrote: post #21

This is fascinating. We were just in Europe where we experienced these tickets for the first time. I had trouble with them; I was trying to figure out how to scan them because it never occurred to me that they might contain an NFC chip. My wife, on the other hand, who is not at all technical, took it for granted that you would tap them and immediately figured it out intuitively.

I have found the same thing with my wife. I'm a technical person, but I'm extremely bad with tools and such, including the ticket thing. If no one shows me how to use it I'll probably figure out a way to insert it somewhere. My wife won't have any problem with this and other small tools. The same thing with IKEA: I always rely on the manual and just blindly follow the instructions, and gets very frustrated if the ins…

"I always rely on the manual and just blindly follow the instructions, and gets very frustrated if the instructions miss one step"

But why do people make incomplete manuals? If I have a step by step guidance and it doesn't work, because some steps were left out, than this is just a wrong manual!

(I share your frustration)

Re: The tiny chip that powers Montreal subway tickets

#167

Post by Reason077 »

randunel wrote: post #138
chgs wrote: post #123

Mifare is what’s been used in London’s Oyster cards for 20 years (not the ultralight ones mind), and Hong Kong for even longer. However oyster really is in its way out for most uses. contactless and especially a phone is far more convenient for non season use, and far less wasteful.

There's a noticeable delay between contactless cards and oysters. Some people I know prefer oyster cards simply because they open the gates faster, in spite of having to top them off all the time. I'm looking forward to not having to choose one trade-off over the other.

It’s noticeable if you’re used to the instant response of Oyster, but we’re talking about a few hundred extra milliseconds. Not something that bothers you once you’re accustomed to it.

It’s still fast enough that it will read my Apple Watch before the gate starts to close from the passenger in front of me.

One saved trip to an Oyster top-up machine will make up for a lifetime of contactless NFC latency!

Re: The tiny chip that powers Montreal subway tickets

#168

Post by ianburrell »

bobthepanda wrote: post #129
kens wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't like the e-waste aspect either, but realistically, the chip is so minuscule that the amount of waste is trivial compared to almost anything else you might discard. The chip is literally the size of a grain of salt. The other factor is that people who use tickets regularly would use the rechargeable plastic cards, rather than the disposable tickets, so the amount of waste is reduced.

I don’t really see why a chip is needed at all for single use tickets. Those have existed forever and there are a plethora of non-chip options ranging from the simple holepunch to the optical printed barcode or QR code.

Because that would require a completely different way to read tickets than are used for stored value cards. Every ticket machine needs way to print which is less reliable than writing NFC chip. It is likely that printing a ticket costs more than NFC. Every fare reader needs two sensors, one NFC and one optical. The optical ones are going to be slower. People are going to get confused about which reader to use.

Re: The tiny chip that powers Montreal subway tickets

#169

Post by ianburrell »

dheera wrote: post #101
b112 wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know how many times I've been in a city for a single day, or part of one, and have zero interest in spending precious minutes finding, buying, and returning a card. Just let me pay with coins, or a credit card in seconds, with no return work.

I believe Singapore's public transit does support tapping a credit card directly at the gates now, but there's an annoying step of having to register your card in advance on an app before it actually works. My guess is this might be because on-the-fly credit card authorizations still take too long. Waiting 3 seconds for an EMV contactless verification would seriously hold up the line at rush hour in a country where m…

That is a flaw of Singapore's system. Other places let people use contactless credit cards without any delay.

London has been using contactless for a while.

Re: The tiny chip that powers Montreal subway tickets

#170

Post by bobthepanda »

ianburrell wrote: post #168
bobthepanda wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t really see why a chip is needed at all for single use tickets. Those have existed forever and there are a plethora of non-chip options ranging from the simple holepunch to the optical printed barcode or QR code.

Because that would require a completely different way to read tickets than are used for stored value cards. Every ticket machine needs way to print which is less reliable than writing NFC chip. It is likely that printing a ticket costs more than NFC. Every fare reader needs two sensors, one NFC and one optical. The optical ones are going to be slower. People are going to get confused about which reader to use.

If people can manage the existence of both an optical scanner and contactless at the self checkout grocery store, this is way overblown.

A ticket needs to be printed anyways, the single use ticket with chip does not come from thin air.

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