Yeah security in the USA has always been pretty bad. Iirc it often had to do with monopoly like structures keeping the advances at bay because it costs money to upgrade. Did the bank cards move away from magnetic strips already?
Did the bank cards move away from magnetic strips already?
Mostly. Half the time the chip will work. Half the time it fails because you inserted it too fast or two slow or because it was Tuesday so it falls back to the magnetic strip.
NFC: yes. Most new credit and debit cards have NFC. Can tap to pay at pretty much any retail store and some smaller businesses. There are still weirdly many phone models without NFC (especially lower end), but the situation is slowly improving.
Value-capped transactions: not really a thing if I understand right.
it’s embarrassing as fuck though when NFC’s either broken at the terminal or really finicky, so you have to get the cashier to slowly, painfully re-request the payment twice before giving up and seeing if your chip still works
or you’re at Walmart or CVS and they intentionally disabled it in all their stores for asshole reasons
even more embarrassing: I accidentally call it NFT and the cashier knows what that is and thinks I’m a fucking idiot
Yeah security in the USA has always been pretty bad. Iirc it often had to do with monopoly like structures keeping the advances at bay because it costs money to upgrade. Did the bank cards move away from magnetic strips already?
Mostly. Half the time the chip will work. Half the time it fails because you inserted it too fast or two slow or because it was Tuesday so it falls back to the magnetic strip.
Surely this is more secure right? … right?
lol god that’s even worse :/
so have nfc and value-capped transactions even made inroads there yet?
NFC: yes. Most new credit and debit cards have NFC. Can tap to pay at pretty much any retail store and some smaller businesses. There are still weirdly many phone models without NFC (especially lower end), but the situation is slowly improving.
Value-capped transactions: not really a thing if I understand right.
it’s embarrassing as fuck though when NFC’s either broken at the terminal or really finicky, so you have to get the cashier to slowly, painfully re-request the payment twice before giving up and seeing if your chip still works
or you’re at Walmart or CVS and they intentionally disabled it in all their stores for asshole reasons
even more embarrassing: I accidentally call it NFT and the cashier knows what that is and thinks I’m a fucking idiot
“have you got tap?” / “can i tap?” is a common local verbiage here
(also “got snapscan?” but that’s more popular in some cities than others, depending how much inroads snapscan has made)
(we also still have a fairly healthy cash market)
see I’m slowly shifting my vocabulary to tap unless I’m DIYing an NFC sticker into a project, but sometimes my cursed engineering brain takes over
maybe both should be tap. maybe it’s all tap. REST calls are now taps.
“tapping the api”
checks out
okay wait there’s one possible failure mode in this reference which we might have to consider
they ever so very slowly started doing chip (not necessarily with PIN) from 4~6y ago, state depending
probably need to give them another decade.