The tiny chip that powers Montreal subway tickets

Yeah I figured but you can't buy a charliecard online to load into your smartphone wallet, and I only needed it the once, and since it took more than an hour to get to Cambridge due to some combination of circus acts I used Blue bikes for the remainder of the day.

Comparing Montreal subway with Vancouver's skytrain:

- Montreals subway stations have this gritty, distinctively french atmosphere i loved it.

- Vancouvers above/below stations have no soul, distinctively anglo but above ground ones i liked.

- Montreal train cars use rubber wheels to my shock! Extremely loud.

- Vancouver train cars use some sort of electric system which im not familiar with ( have a few variants (newer hyundai rotem cars, old ones: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W_BoeXqaV9c)

- Montreal subway does not cover the entire region like Vancouver's skytrain. Getting around is difficult without uber. Road conditions are horrible (pot holes remain unfixed for decades, city went broke hosting olympics long time ago), I just shudder how you can get around during the winter.

But the biggest shock was that in some instances, it was faster for me to walk then walk to the station and wait for the subway.

- Arriving at YVR: Skytrain runs directly from airport to a satellite city where its numerous public buses cover almost the entire MV. I could just tap through the toll gate with my credit card and wait for a bus which arrives on time quite frequently.

- Arrriving at YUL: Have to take a bus from airport for 30 minutes to Montreal but doesn't seem to respect time schedule. Got off somewhere in Montreal I don't remember (there was a large open artsy area) tried to wait for a bus but never came, gave up, got uber.

I am interested in the plastic layer with conductive traces for the antenna. How are these made? Do you know of a source that talks about the production process for them?

It isn’t different from other anti-counterfeiting measures, the printing just happens to be really small and electrically react to certain frequencies.

Part of the “software eating the world” story is the decreased cost of precision that enabled the hardware substrate of software to be inexpensively and ubiquitously included in any mass produced object.

I haven't really looked into the security aspects. I think that you could clone one of the Ultralight chips, but it wouldn't gain you anything because the security is in the backend. It's a lot like a printed concert ticket or boarding pass. You could print as many as you want, but the ticket is still good for just one admission.

The DESFire and other secure chips contain a cryptographic key that you can't access. Without the key, you can't make a clone of the chip. The cryptography provides authentication and encryption that you don't get with the cheap Ultralight chip.

I think this is all market segmentation; they don't put more security into the Ultralight chip because they don't want to cannibalize their higher-end sales.