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Japan's IC cards are weird and wonderful

aruarian.dance

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Re: Japan's IC cards are weird and wonderful

#231

Post by overfeed »

whoisyc wrote: post #225
isatty wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Japanese transit using society is not all old and middle class: it’s pretty much everyone who is not filthy rich isn’t it?

[dead]

while it's not an apples:apples comparison, in contrast, only 5% of American workers commute by public transportation[1], which means >90% commute by car. From this, one can make educated guesses on the socioeconomic status slices that make use of public transit for each respective group - 5% vs 50%

1. https://www.census.gov/content/dam/Census/library/publicatio...

Re: Japan's IC cards are weird and wonderful

#232

Post by notpushkin »

lmm wrote: post #114
0xCMP wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

iOS supports ICs fine. It has supported Suica since 2017 when I used it instead of the physical card. Forcing use of an app and QR codes does seem like a significant step back, although I guess it makes paper tickets much easier to implement with the same scanner.

The IC card companies got too greedy unfortunately - along with phones not supporting NFC-F if they're not designed for the Japanese market, the readers are also expensive. With various subways starting to introduce credit card contactless payment I suspect it's only a matter of time before IC cards go away.

I thought transport companies are the ones doing IC cards? (True for Japanese IC cards, except Pasmo)

Re: Japan's IC cards are weird and wonderful

#233

Post by notpushkin »

lxgr wrote: post #104
0xCMP wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

iOS supports ICs fine. It has supported Suica since 2017 when I used it instead of the physical card. Forcing use of an app and QR codes does seem like a significant step back, although I guess it makes paper tickets much easier to implement with the same scanner.

Android, however, does not support them at all unfortunately (at least on phones not targeted to the Japanese market).

I’ve read elsewhere in this thread that for Pixel you can flash a Japanese version of the system image and it will enable IC support. Definitely trying it out later.

Re: Japan's IC cards are weird and wonderful

#234

Post by notpushkin »

anArbitraryOne wrote: post #51
oivey wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At least in Japan, they all work from your phone already.

They even work when the phone is off

Is the card stored on the NFC chip? Or are you talking about these NFC-enabled SIM cards?

Re: Japan's IC cards are weird and wonderful

#235

Post by abdullahkhalids »

lyall wrote: post #230
abdullahkhalids wrote: post #226

Late to the party. These cards are stored-value ones. And they seem to be very secure. Does this mean that the offline digital cash problem has been solved, as far as in-person customer to merchant payment system goes? You can trust an arbitrary person giving you money through the card just as well as if they gave you cash. Could you turn this into a pay-anyone-money using cards and card readers?

The whole system is quite tightly controlled by the transit companies (e.g. JR East). For example, your average payment terminal can take money off of a card but not load money onto it (refunds have to be done out of band). Loading money onto cards is more privileged, as it’s equivalent to printing money. One other limitation in place is that these transit cards have a limit of ¥20,000 (~140 USD) max that can be load…

I am not saying this particular system is good enough for person-to-person cash. But..

The primary problems that digital cash has to solve is double-spending. Debit/credit cards solve this problem by confirming the transaction with the central server over the internet. Credits cards used to solve this problem by trusting that someone's signature could not be replicated, but this was obviously insecure. Some cryptocurrencies solve this problem by confirming transactions with a public distributed ledger.

This system is solving the double-spend problem preventing the holder of the card from, as per OP,

> cloning (can't read the keys)

> a successful attack on another card (each card has its own keys)

> replay attacks (per-session unique keys are generated in the challenge/response)

So the secure enclave on these cards prevent double-spend.

However, it seems like the card reading machine has to be trusted in the current implementation, because it can extract an arbitrary amount of cash from your card. This prevents arbitrary peer-to-peer transactions. But this seems like a much easier problem to solve.

Re: Japan's IC cards are weird and wonderful

#236

Post by notpushkin »

cosmic_cheese wrote: post #79
dadadad100 wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I believe it is the case that US (at least) iPhones work as IC cards in Japan Source - I’m sitting in Kyoto right now having travelled all over Tokyo and then on to Kyoto using only my phone to interact with Japan Rail. Verified with two 16Es and a 12. In fact we were able to add the Suica cards to our phones and charge them fromApplePay while still stateside. That let us skip the Welcome Suica line at Haneda and go…

Yes, all iPhones and Apple Watches carry the functionality regardless of where you buy them, which has been wonderful for me. The fact that the iOS Wallet app can generate these cards as needed and reload them without a third party app is a cherry on top — so nice to for once get a standardized UI instead of having to deal with some half baked transit service app.

I believe Google is trying to do that with their Wallet/Pay/Wallet app, but I guess it doesn’t support FeliCa yet? They do support some weird card formats, so I guess they have at least some flexibility there – no idea why they can’t add it, too.

Re: Japan's IC cards are weird and wonderful

#237

Post by notpushkin »

lxgr wrote: post #90
pwim wrote: post #5

Unfortunately transit operators are looking to discontinue the use of these IC cards in favour of QR codes as part of a cost saving strategy: https://mainichi.jp/english/articles/20241015/p2a/00m/0bu/01...

I believe QR codes are mostly intended to replace paper/magnetic single-ride tickets, not IC cards, in most transit systems. Magnetic tickets are already slower than IC cards, and are both more expensive to produce and harder to recycle than QR codes printed on regular paper.

I’ve only used them twice (on Sinkansen, and on a regular train in Hokkaido), and it was nearly instantaneous – about as fast as an IC card. The whole experience felt like magic: you put the tichets into a slot, whoosh! – and you pick them up on the other side.

It is true that they are expensive to produce and hard to recycle, though, so it’s a good idea overall. But I’ll miss this iconic experience (or hopefully they retain it on some lines at least). (Edit: or just make the whoosh! readers work with QR codes! :)

Re: Japan's IC cards are weird and wonderful

#238

Post by notpushkin »

nayuki wrote: post #174
umbra07 wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh really? The two dmeo videos I just saw of the Japanese system seemed to give back your ticket as soon as you walked through the gate.

The normal ticket gate behavior in Japan is that when you enter, the gate gives you the ticket back so that you can carry it all the way to the exit in order to prove that you traveled that journey. When you go through a ticket gate to exit the station, all Japanese ticket gates to my knowledge will dispose of your ticket.

I’ve retained at least some tickets, somehow. No idea!

Re: Japan's IC cards are weird and wonderful

#239

Post by Panzer04 »

no_wizard wrote: post #221
AnthonyMouse wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The rewards programs are the anti-competitive lock-in. Visa and Mastercard charge high fees because their dominant market position forces merchants to accept them. Then they use part of the fees to bribe customers with rewards programs. A new payment network doesn't have leverage against merchants so can't charge the same high fees and therefore can't offer the same rewards programs, but then they can't get consumers…

This is a great argument for forcing network interop. Akin to net neutrality, allow card companies to transit over the network for reasonable rates. This removes any networks ability to squeeze things like this

It depends where the division is, I guess. It always feels a bit heavy-handed to force private companies to interoperate within their infrastructure. That being said, I don't really know a better way to do it.

Having terminals be more universal would be good, but good luck replacing old ones and convincing entrenched market participants to offer them..

The newer generation of products like BNPL are even worse; they often contractually prevent merchants from charging a surcharge commensurate with the cost of accepting that payment method.

Re: Japan's IC cards are weird and wonderful

#240

Post by tonyhart7 »

em500 wrote: post #127
lxgr wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A perfectly aligned QR code, displayed on a bright mobile phone display, can work acceptably fast. Practically, many people however only start thinking about possibly needing to open some app to display it while they’re already blocking everybody else’s way at the transit gate… The biggest practical benefit of IC cards is that they are by nature always “armed”, unlike QR codes in apps, and are readable from both side…

> Practically, many people however only start thinking about possibly needing to open some app to display it while they’re already blocking everybody else’s way at the transit gate… This really comes down to adoption. In China, where QR is ubiquitous, almost everyone has the QR ready to scan well before they reach the scanner.

if its work on country that has billions of passenger, it would works on everywhere else
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