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Plastc will cease operations and will not fulfill any pre-orders

plastc.com

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Re: Plastc will cease operations and will not fulfill any pre-orders

#101

Post by Theodores »

egeozcan wrote: post #38
tacostakohashi wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was always bemused about this idea that putting multiple credit cards on a single physical card is some great feature that a lot of people want and would pay money for. In my experience, having many credit cards is a complete pain to manage, because for each card you need to monitor the statement, set up the automatic payment (or do it manually), change the address when you move, etc, etc, and no sane person is goi…

What I don't understand is the need for multiple credit cards. I have a bank card (an EC-card) and I haven't used my credit-card since a month (other than automatic transactions).

Yes you are sensible. But most people are not, they live in debt and shuffle it between the various cards. There are also people that just like collecting these things so they have a wallet full. Five cards should cover the personal, marital and work requirements in debit/credit flavours.

Re: Plastc will cease operations and will not fulfill any pre-orders

#102

Post by anona »

hkdobrev wrote: post #2

Does anyone have any information whether they'd refund people who have pre-ordered?

If you paid via a credit card you could try doing a chargeback with the bank that issued your card. If plastic is unable to refund you, their payment processor will likely be on the hook instead.

Re: Plastc will cease operations and will not fulfill any pre-orders

#103

Post by bigiain »

slededit wrote: post #97
bitexploder wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So, not $10 if you needed a borrowed, expensive piece of equipment. It is not possible for most of us to jaunt out and borrow a fancy microscope. That only underscores the "expensive equipment required argument". The contactless payment hack is much more practical, though. (Oh you also need far beyond average hardware hacking knowledge and skill, which itself is generally more difficult to acquire and learn ).

They go for about $10k-$30k on EBay. But people have also DIY'd their own: http://makezine.com/2011/03/24/diy-scanning-electron-microsc...

Or free - if you're in the right place at the right time (and have the right reputation and friends...):

https://tinkerings.org/2015/11/15/in-which-i-acquire-a-scann...

Re: Plastc will cease operations and will not fulfill any pre-orders

#104

Post by uiri »

coffeemug wrote: post #66
vkou wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In their non-defense, they also promised accountability and transparency. If you are one signature away from bankruptcy, you may want to be transparent about that, before taking un-refundable preorders. Or you could do the responsible thing and keep preorder money in escrow. Madoff was also only a few signatures from having his Ponzi scheme staying afloat.

Don't judge them until you walk a mile in their shoes. When you worked on something for years, you still maintain hope, and you're wrestling with doubt every day being "transparent" isn't so easy. You literally can't say "hey, we might go out of business" and then walk into a VC office and make a pitch. Having to wrestle with this was the hardest part of my job at RethinkDB, and any time I hear of someone who had to…

This reminds me of Paul Graham's talk/essay about how (as a startup) not to die. Relevant portion:

When we were visiting Yahoo to talk about being acquired, we had to interrupt everything and borrow one of their conference rooms to talk down an investor who was about to back out of a new funding round we needed to stay alive. So even in the middle of getting rich we were fighting off the grim reaper.

http://www.paulgraham.com/die.html

Re: Plastc will cease operations and will not fulfill any pre-orders

#105

Post by blackguardx »

bigiain wrote: post #96
bitexploder wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So, not $10 if you needed a borrowed, expensive piece of equipment. It is not possible for most of us to jaunt out and borrow a fancy microscope. That only underscores the "expensive equipment required argument". The contactless payment hack is much more practical, though. (Oh you also need far beyond average hardware hacking knowledge and skill, which itself is generally more difficult to acquire and learn ).

Sure - but people _are_ doing this at home with stuff they buy off eBay right now: http://zacsblog.aperturelabs.com/2013/02/decapping-integrate... And as for "far beyond average hardware hacking skill", I suspect if you got Bunny Huang, Michael Ossmann, and Travis Goodspeed together and curious - this might well be broken in a single weekend! ;-)

Your link just describes decapping and reading the state of mask programmable PROM. Reverse engineering a secure IC and coming up with an exploit is several orders (like 10) of magnitude more involved.

Re: Plastc will cease operations and will not fulfill any pre-orders

#107

Post by dboreham »

xKingfisher wrote: post #32
tacostakohashi wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was always bemused about this idea that putting multiple credit cards on a single physical card is some great feature that a lot of people want and would pay money for. In my experience, having many credit cards is a complete pain to manage, because for each card you need to monitor the statement, set up the automatic payment (or do it manually), change the address when you move, etc, etc, and no sane person is goi…

My dream for something like this is having everything on one card would let you manage the complexity a lot better. Having one single interface to pay all bills and see spending breakdowns aggregated across all your cards, recommending the optimal order to pay down cards (if you are going to carry a balance). Then on top of this, automatic fallback in case one card is declined, new numbers for every online transactio…

Or you could have zero cards given that everyone trots around with a supercomputer in their pants these days..

Re: Plastc will cease operations and will not fulfill any pre-orders

#108

Post by dboreham »

moeadham wrote: post #60
Mister_Snuggles wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Chip & Pin is an interesting beast. Canada went straight to Chip & Pin, skipping over Chip & Sign. Since credit cards generally didn't have PINs at the time, there was a little work on the part of the issuing banks to assign PINs. One of my cards came with a letter that said "Use the same PIN as you use with your regular bank card", another came with one that said "Here's your new PIN, you can change it at any of our…

Chip + Sign reduces 80% of classic fraud. Chip + PIN reduces ~98% (last I heard in 2016). Someone I spoke to at capital one said that Visa/MS decided to do Chip+Sign in the US due to the increased support costs of forgotten PINs.

Also people in US are in the habit of handing their card over to family members to use, which works with signature because the POS operator never checks the signature, but won't work with PIN because PINs are supposed to be super-secret. Hence requiring PIN would reduce the spend on credit cards (no lending and spending), hence fewer smaller boats for credit card executives.

Re: Plastc will cease operations and will not fulfill any pre-orders

#109

Post by robjan »

thaumasiotes wrote: post #73
srssays wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do you pay for tickets in Vienna then? I kind of like the barriers, if you are on the station platform, then you have definitely paid. For me, the stations that don't have barriers are more stressful, as you run the risk of forgetting to tap your card (or the tap not registering) and incurring a maximum fare.

Maximum fare?? The fine for fare evasion should be well above the maximum fare.

In London, the barriers automatically charge the maximum fare if you forget to touch in or out of the system. It helps because you can jump the barrier to get into the system but you never know if ticket inspectors/security will be present at the station where you plan on alighting. The penalty for being caught jumping the barrier is significantly higher.

Re: Plastc will cease operations and will not fulfill any pre-orders

#110

Post by Mister_Snuggles »

moeadham wrote: post #60
Mister_Snuggles wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Chip & Pin is an interesting beast. Canada went straight to Chip & Pin, skipping over Chip & Sign. Since credit cards generally didn't have PINs at the time, there was a little work on the part of the issuing banks to assign PINs. One of my cards came with a letter that said "Use the same PIN as you use with your regular bank card", another came with one that said "Here's your new PIN, you can change it at any of our…

Chip + Sign reduces 80% of classic fraud. Chip + PIN reduces ~98% (last I heard in 2016). Someone I spoke to at capital one said that Visa/MS decided to do Chip+Sign in the US due to the increased support costs of forgotten PINs.

I'd be interested to know how much of a problem this is in Canada.

Maybe it's different here because debit cards are so common that we've been trained to remember our PINs. My bank even uses Chip & PIN as the first step for an in-person transaction at a teller.

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