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Plastc Card

plastc.com

61–70 of 356 posts

Re: Plastc Card

#61
post #18

Product description describes remotely wiping from your mobile phone ... How do they propose doing that ?

It appears that your data is stored on your phone. So I think that the sentence "Completely wipe your card data from your phone." doesn't mean that you will remotely delete data from your lost card using your phone but delete data from your lost phone using some other device. But yeah, it is very ambiguous.

From reading the front page and only blog post, I gathered it is paired with bluetooth to your phone, and you set a timeout before self-destruct.

So if you set an hour, if your card hasn't been paired with your phone in over an hour it can erase itself. The phone probably rewrites the data as soon as it identifies the card again and the pin is entered.

Re: Plastc Card

#62
The ridiculous number of features on this card makes it really hard to believe that an unknown startup has the resources to pull it off in the form factor as thin as a credit card. Coin still hasn't gotten there yet (they claim it works at 85% of the locations they visited). Adding more features including wireless charging coils and unknown method for duplicating chip and pin makes me really skeptical that this will ever make it to market.

Re: Plastc Card

#63

It claims to support Chip & PIN (EMV) but I don't see how this works. EMV is designed so that you can't clone a card and in practice is it impractical to attempt to clone a card that uses EMV. The only way I could imagine it would work is if you have the support of the bank that issued the card. However, I doubt any bank would agree to a scheme to allow a 3rd party to generate a clone of an EMV card.

Agreed, if they did it would seem that this is a card cloner's wet dream. Maybe I'm missing something but I just don't see how it is possible to support Chip and Pin without proving the system is broken.

Re: Plastc Card

#64
post #35

What need does this address? Are cards taking up too much room in people's lives? This solution doesn't reduce the height or width of the encumbrance at all, and reduces the depth only by n*.76mm, where n is the number of cards that will be replaced. I don't get it. Also, http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?TheZenOfProgramming

In theory, this could enable one time use magnetic stripe data, which would solve many security problems. I could get this instead of waiting until all merchants support chip and pin (which is never going to happen in the US).

Re: Plastc Card

#66
post #16

They say this supports chip-and-PIN, but I don't believe them until they explain how. If I have a chip-and-PIN card from my bank, the chip has an unreadable secret used to generate one-time cryptograms to verify the authenticity of the card. There's no way to get that secret onto my Plastc card. You'd need partnerships with banks to get a new secret the way Apple Pay does. Without those, this sounds like it'll be use…

[deleted]

Re: Plastc Card

#67
post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On the bottom of their wallet tab [1], they list several participating banks, so it sounds like they might have those partnerships you mention. [1] https://www.plastc.com/wallet

Question is what exactly does "participating" means. Banks generally hate anything that takes away their branding. Less sleek of this -- i.e. reprogrammable Visa cards -- have been around for a few years but banks never supported them, again because of branding.

It looks like it displays the logo, so it isn't out of the question for banks (now starting to be scared at being disintermediated) to maybe throw in some "support" (aka tepidly allow access). After all, apple pay also reduces branding (and Apple takes a cut), and threatens a lot of the industry as what you pay with becomes a minor manner (and also massively encourages a single default card).

Re: Plastc Card

#68
post #35

What need does this address? Are cards taking up too much room in people's lives? This solution doesn't reduce the height or width of the encumbrance at all, and reduces the depth only by n*.76mm, where n is the number of cards that will be replaced. I don't get it. Also, http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?TheZenOfProgramming

Say you have 10k stolen cards...now its easy to carry them all.

Re: Plastc Card

#69

1) The process of selecting a card and paying appears to have many more steps compared to merely selecting the appropriate physical card and using that. Is the sell here something to do with security (not displaying the card number all the time)? Does this support temporary/ burner numbers? 2) I would like to know what target demographic, if any, that that ad was not intended to irritate.

This comment made me watch the video; my goodness that was grating.

Re: Plastc Card

#70
post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Plastc also supports NFC

I'm calling shenanigans after reading their specs. Here are my reasons: NFC + EMV secure elements are issued by banks and can't be reprogrammed. You can't switch between them on the fly. You can only house "multiple" EMVs if you can by some grace of god magic convince the different banks, and Amex to take your card to their facility and program it with their secure info and then give it back to you. E-ink displays ar…

There are several variants on the NFC protocol. Some contain secure elements (with a CVV3, which is a cryptographically-signed incrementing number), but I believe they can also just dumbly-send the normal card data over the air.

I've also seen credit cards made from glass. I think they're NFC-only, though, because of the thickness, but I could be mistaken.

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