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My difficulty with all of the "use your mobile on the internet" models is the speed of transaction at point of sale. A large UK supermarket chain has a simple formula - for every additional second on the transaction at the point of sale it costs them £1 million. This is why they were originally wary of chip and PIN but won over when they realised it was actually tquicker than a magstripe transaction where a signature was required.

Added to this is the fact that network signal can be very patchy inside some retailers because the building is a big metal box also known as a Faraday cage. This may require retailers to provide 'micro cells' in the store to guarantee coverage!

I didn't think MagnePrint was still going. Whilst it may add security to the transaction it is essentially a dead end technology as it is passive in the actual transaction. Only when you put an active component in the transaction process either a chip on the card or NFC communications with an active component (Mobile phone) can you add value to the transaction. Because the chip can play an active part in the transaction the cardholder not only benefits from increased security but also in the functions and facilities offered to the cardholder at the point of sale.

I suppose you could say I'm from the north as well - well north of Watford anyway. I totally agree all these crackberries & iplods wandering around and would add why does everyone look so bloody miserable on the tube? A bunch of associates meet in London each quarter for a Grumpy Old Man day that involves Food and Beer. You should see the looks we get on the tube because we are having fun!

There is so much emphasis from the US on end to end encryption and I don't disagree that it is something that should be done. But is it me? Aren't they securing a token (the mag stripe) that is insecure. Yes fraudsters won't be able to steal millions of card details from one place but the magnetic stripe can still be compromised at point of sale. Bolting the stable door come to mind.

I note the article says that "it fits in a spare microSD slot" - I only have one microSD slot on my phone and I'm using that. So that's me out of the equation.

I think this comes under the heading of "Just because you can doesn't mean you should" - brings back memories of RF powered send lights on CB Radio Arials.

Here, Here!

Why does the industry continue to expend effort on trying to secure the magstripe when it is just money down the drain (watermark magnetic et al.)? I agree that the magstripe may stay but purely as a means for unattended devices to ensure you have the card the right way round. The answer is to use IC Cards where you have a secure environment to store the data. EMV expands throughout the world and in every country it is introduced fraud goes down; the issue is that as everyone closes the front door the back door is left wide open in the US.

I'm not saying that chip cards are the answer to everything (I'll leave that to some of the purveyors of solutions who have 'the answer') there is no single solution to combating fraud it always has been a layered approach. But putting an active component in the cardholders' hands gives you the ability to develop solution for Card Not Present that would further limit the opportunity for fraud.
To plagiarise 'The Borg' "EMV - you will comply - resistance is futile".

I think the poor people with BlackBerries are quite rightly called CrackBerries - they are addicted to them. The expectation has become that if you get an email at 11:30 at night or on Sunday afternoon while the footy is on or while your on holiday YOU MUST RESPOND. The simple point is you don't have to. Everyone is entitled to some time of your own. In most cases, if not all, the world or the company won't come to an end if you don't answer an email - if it's that urgent they'll ring.

The solution lies in the hands of the users; don't look at it until you start work, don't look at it when you've left work in the evenings and don't look at it when you are on holiday. Yes - I check my email when I'm on holiday, I'm self employed and if I don't I might miss a work opportunity, but I do it as a 'pull' not a 'push' and at a time of my choosing.

Sitting on the train you see the electronic leash snap and the reply dashed off. Do not be a Crackberry, ignor it, read the paper, have a coffee it won't be the end of the world.

I'll show you mine if you show me yours.

We seem to have numbers of agreements for the US to have access to data and people that are not reciprocal, for example the UK hacker that is to be [possibly] extradited to the US. A US hacker would be under no such threat to be extradited to the UK.

So I vote for letting the US have access to payment data provided everything they are granted is true in the other direction so that EU members can have the same data from the US - perhaps that would temper their demands.

This, on the face of it, sounds like a good idea but wait. I got a Barclaycard One Pulse card for two reasons one being in the industry I felt I should have a contactless card and two it meant I could retire my Oyster card. Everything fine and dandy I could pay for the tube by placing my wallet on the turnstyle and theoretically the same process could be used for paying for goods. The only time I tried this, however, the 'machine was broken' but never mind early days.

Last week the Mem Saahib lost her purse, well left it in the supermarket, and this resulted in a card re-issue all round. My new Barclaycard Platinum arrived and was contactless and that's where the trouble starts because if I place my wallet on a reader now it sees two cards. So now I have to take the card I want to pay with out of my wallet. It shouldn't cause a problem because of different technologies but the tube turnstyle gets upset as well.

Roll on the day I can have the applications in my NFC handset, choose the one I want from the menu, unlock it with a PIN, wave my phone and go. Leaving my wallet in my pocket where the moths are a lot happier.