[ExI] openness again

[Anders Sandberg]

On 2016-04-04 10:54, William Flynn Wallace wrote:
> Anders - ​The problem with credit card numbers is that currently we 
> use security by obscurity: much of your protection comes from me not 
> knowing your number, rather than restrictions on how I can use it. A 
> good authentification system would make knowing your card number 
> useless to me, just as me knowing your email address doesn't allow me 
> to hack your mail server (some extra authentification needed to ensure 
> that I don't forge emails from you).​
>
> OK, I'll bite - why don't they do that?  bill w

I think part of it is the extra cost of chip-and-pin machines and their 
certification, but also that people are strongly used to certain ways of 
using the cards (like signatures) that make them or issuing banks resist 
the new system. Plus that there is an issue of whether merchants, banks 
or card companies should bear the cost:

http://www.usatoday.com/story/money/2016/02/17/survey-adoption-chip-enabled-credit-cards-falls-behind/80453906/
http://www.bankrate.com/finance/credit-cards/why-youre-still-swiping-credit-card.aspx
http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-1221-credit-card-technology-20131221-story.html
http://www.csoonline.com/article/3047178/security/chip-and-pin-adoption-still-slow.html

Upgrading any existing tech infrastructure is always painful. When 
people have differing incentives it is even tougher.

-- 
Anders Sandberg
Future of Humanity Institute
Oxford Martin School
Oxford University

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.extropy.org/pipermail/extropy-chat/attachments/20160405/2f02589c/attachment.html>