• ExtremeDullard@piefed.social
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    4 months ago

    I’ll do one better:

    Reshaped payment card's NFC antenna

    My payment card was just a bit too wide to fit in my cellphone’s cover. The phone’s own NFC antenna is at the top - and I use it all the time - so the card had to be at the bottom of the cover to avoid triggering the phone all the time, in portrait orientation so-to-speak.

    So I dissolved the card in acetone to extract the NFC chip and its antenna, then carefully reshaped one end of the antenna so it’s a bit less wide (and since I couldn’t modify the length of the wire or the number of turns in any way to avoid de-tuning the antenna too much, I sort of accordioned one side of the rectangle to accommodate the extra length of wire).

    Then I set the new shape of the antenna permanently by carefully applying a piece of packing tape over it, flipped it over, taped over the other side to seal everything, then carefully cut around the new, ultra-thin, stubbier contactless payment “card”.

    Now it fits really smartly in my cellphone cover!

    • OwOarchist@pawb.social
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      4 months ago

      I dissolved the card in acetone to extract the NFC chip and its antenna,

      Wouldn’t the acetone also dissolve the insulation around the antenna wire? So when it touches itself, it shorts itself out, and – electrically speaking – you only have one turn of thicker wire?

      • Darkassassin07@lemmy.ca
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        4 months ago

        Wire that thin is usually insulated with an enamel coating. I’d guess it’s either unaffected by acetone, or just tougher to breakdown. Allow the card to dissolve, but remove and dry asap, don’t let it linger longer than necessary.

        Veritasium demoed this a few weeks ago while discussing tap-to-pay security and a vulnerability with apple pay+visa.

    • definitemaybe@lemmy.ca
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      4 months ago

      Have you ever run into difficulty with needing to authenticate with chip+PIN? Like while traveling?

      That would be my big concern with this; it would make it very difficult to pass a PIN check, to say the least!

      Super cool idea. I might just try it myself and see if I run into issues.

      • ExtremeDullard@piefed.social
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        4 months ago

        What I modified was in fact a contactless payment token. It had the form factor of a payment card, but it only does NFC.

        I have another card for chip+pin.But I almost never use it where I live, because all limits were lifted on contactless payments a few years ago. If I try to pay something really expensive contactless, it will ask me for the pin - which is specific to the payment token.

        • Darkassassin07@lemmy.ca
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          4 months ago

          Do you mind if I ask what bank issued those? Why? Does the chip+pin also tap or are they features on totally separate cards?

          I’ve never heard of a separate tap to pay token (outside of perhaps transit passes or like, arcade cards), and never a card based tap transaction that asks for a pin.

          • ExtremeDullard@piefed.social
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            4 months ago

            Payment tokens are very common. Usually they’re sold as keychains, wristbands or rings, and they’re provisioned to work with the myriad of payment processors out there - which aren’t banks.

            in my case, it’s a token from iCard. The way it works is, it’s connected to a regular bank account number with an IBAN number (supplied by iCard when you activate the token), and you transfer money to it that you can then spend with the contactless token. The nice thing is, if you lose it, you can’t lose anymore money than you put on it.

      • InFerNo@lemmy.ml
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        4 months ago

        I looked high and low for one where I could place my creditcard size tracker that isn’t also a flip cover, just a simple cover with a creditcard slot seems almost trivial.

    • kamen@lemmy.world
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      4 months ago

      Kudos for the effort. With that said, this would definitely raise some eyebrows if you have to return the card when getting a new one.

        • kamen@lemmy.world
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          4 months ago

          Knowing the reliability of our postal services, I would very much prefer to receive it in person. Of course there are security measures (activating it only when you get it and so on), but still.

          • lemmyvore@feddit.nl
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            4 months ago

            Our bank will just print a new one on the spot for you if you go to their office. As long as you’re ok with your name and card number not being embossed. They have to order away the embossed ones – but you can still pick them up in person.

    • JamesBoeing737MAX@sopuli.xyz
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      4 months ago

      Well, what if you need an actual card for identification in the bank or something similar? Do you just show them the dissolved one?

      • Ricky Rigatoni@piefed.zip
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        4 months ago

        Don’t know about OP but gov ID works for that purpose. I’m more worried about when they go to a store that doesn’t accept tap.

        • definitemaybe@lemmy.ca
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          4 months ago

          I was thinking about this, and there are two easy workarounds, I think:

          1. If possible, get a second active card in the same name. Ideally, a full-identical cloned card. Not sure if this would be allowed, but if not…
          2. Add another authorized user to your account and never give them the card, then just dissolve that card for tap payments.

          But, in either case, I do think you might run into a different issue: automated fraud detection sometimes requires me to chip+PIN, even for transcribed below the tap limit. This has happened to me when traveling. I don’t think there would be any way around that, and if you then fail to authenticate with chip+PIN, it’s reasonable to think that the bank would lock your card for contactless payments until you successfully authenticate the card again with chip+PIN. (To be clear: this is only speculation; not sure if that would be an issue in practice.)

          So, I suspect that whether this would work or not might depend on your institution (or maybe jurisdiction?)

  • stoy@lemmy.zip
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    4 months ago

    Or you can just keep your card in your wallet, like you have done for decades

  • diaphragmwp@discuss.tchncs.de
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    4 months ago

    Ironic it’s a monobank card, it’s mobile only and you have to use a locked unrooted googled phone (or an iPhone) because big brother said so.

      • Obi@sopuli.xyz
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        4 months ago

        I’m European, I technically have a MC credit card which I’ll use on the rare occasions I need a credit card, but the vast majority of the time it’s debit card or direct transfers (what they’re now calling wero).

        • SkunkWorkz@lemmy.world
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          4 months ago

          Unfortunately Visa and Mastercard also own the payment network for debit cards in many countries in Europe.

        • Vittelius@feddit.org
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          4 months ago

          A lot of European countries have their own debit card networks. Germany has GiroCard, Italy has PagoBancomat and so on. The problem is that those are national systems that stop working once you cross a border. Most cards are therefore cobadged with Visa or MC as a fallback system.

          What’s needed to get rid of the cobadging (at least within the EU) is some kind of translation layer to bring the existing European systems together.

  • Dr. Moose@lemmy.world
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    4 months ago

    We can go even further and create some sort of physical tokens that we can give to each other. These token would be secure, completely private, waterproof and even work offline. Maybe we could even put some pictures on them and make them vision-impaired accessible - the possibilities are endless!

    People forget that cash is a technology - a pretty good one too.

      • Dr. Moose@lemmy.world
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        4 months ago

        It’s nothing compared to digital transfers. Sure you can trace via serial number but that’s mostly safe for us normal people. With digital transfer the privacy leaks can affect us normal people as the data can easily leak or be sold, stolen.

    • GutterRat42@lemmy.world
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      4 months ago

      Contactless payment works without connection. Now, the technical marvel is that it works even if the phone is dead.

  • mEEGal@lemmy.world
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    4 months ago

    Nice meme, but for us out there with at least a fully virtual card (some companies provide such benefits), we need a real MyAss-Pay alternative

    I recently found Walt, but it’s a work in progress for now. The app is avalaible though

  • ChaoticNeutralCzech@feddit.org
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    4 months ago

    Some banks issue stickers for phones without NFC. It’s another physical card but contactless only and very thin (probably with an aluminum strip antenna).

  • bryndos@fedia.io
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    4 months ago

    I’ve got this papery stuff, and circley metal discs that works in most places. Unfortunately it does have pictures glorifying some family of depraved paedos on it , but not easy to avoid that.

    • iknewitwhenisawit@fedinsfw.app
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      4 months ago

      If you live in a country with 19th century banking where people still pay each other by IOU on little pieces of paper, then sure. In modern countries a lot of places only take electronic payments.

    • boonhet@sopuli.xyz
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      4 months ago

      Carrying an actual wallet all the time is pretty inconvenient, but honestly, I’ve been considering getting back into cash for 2 reasons: 1) If more people use cash, it’s harder to legislate it away altogether and 2) so small-time vendors don’t have to pay taxes. I don’t mean the local grocery store (the big chains get audited anyway), I mean the person with a stall selling homemade smoked sausages in front of a store, or the guy by the road who sells smoked fish from the nearby lake.

      Also euro banknotes don’t have people on it to avoid the whole paedo glorification thing, so that’s cool

      • yetAnotherUser@discuss.tchncs.de
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        4 months ago

        Yup.

        And while the monarchist EU countries do stamp their monarchs on their coins, there’s more than enough decent and interestin people on other country’s variants.

        Like Austria stamping Mozart and Bertha von Suttner (first female recipient of the Nobel Peace Price).

        Or Croatia putting up Nikola Tesla, a Serb from Croatia, on some of their coins, likely to provoke Serbia. Or perhaps to symbolize unity between Croatians and Serbians but I frankly doubt that.

        Or France recently creating coins with three important French women on the 10, 20 and 50 cent coins: Simone Veil, Josephine Baker, and Marie Curie.

        Greece put up a couple people who were instrumental in Greek’s fight for independence and, more notably to Europe as a whole, the mythical Princess Europa riding on Zeus - the literal symbol of pan-Europeanism is on Greek’s 2€ coin.

        And that’s just a sample, there’s even more. Largely (ignoring the monarchies) people who genuinely deserve to be looked up to - or at least respected - are on the coins that have a person on them.

  • phx@lemmy.world
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    4 months ago

    Man, this really makes me wish we had a more modern or powerful successor to the PinephonePro (that I could actually order from outside the EU)

  • boredsquirrel (he)@slrpnk.net
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    4 months ago

    Nobody here mention security?

    Like with passkeys (getting better though) and encrypted RCS messages, this is a proprietary standard that still sadly offers way more security.

    It is token based afaik and the secret is never shared or even readable by an attacker. This card can be stolen with a single swipe, all that is protecting you is the banking system being overly cautious and expecting their systems to fail, so you need to enter a pin code on higher transactions or your card is simply locked.

    Paying with VISA card online is insane from a security perspective, made slightly less bad by requiring authentication with a proprietary TAN app.

  • FoolHen@lemmy.world
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    4 months ago

    I got a case with magsafe and a magsafe card wallet, that also works and you can have more cards too