Applications for Java Card: the good ideas, but also the more peculiar, and the not that successful.
It seems that the American plastic cards are getting them in trouble, at least when they travel in Europe. Of course, cards without chips still work perfeectly in restaurants, hotels, and stores. However, things are very different at automated machines. If you are in France and you want to pay for underground parking, for renting [...]
RATP has been working for a while on the future deployment of their Navigo transport cards over NFC phones. Such a move perfectly makes sense for a utility company, since card issuance is a pure cost for them, so dematerialization sounds good.
One of the promises of such a deployment is over-the-air renewal of monthly passes. [...]
The PlaySIM project is about using a SunSPOT device as a Java Card 3.0-enabled SIM card. It is a collaboration between Sun and Telenor, and as far as I know, it is the first experiment based on Java Card 3.0 performed by a mobile operator.
The interest of this project is to combine the expressive power [...]
Visa seems to be investigating a new way to use magnetic stripe cards. The article does not give much details, but the basic idea seems to be that the magnetic stripe is scanned with a high definition, which provides a “unique” pattern, which Visa compares to the DNA or fingerprint of the card. Of course, [...]
One year ago, I blogged on Android security. I recently received a comment asking if my impression had changed now that Android actually exists, even on devices.
Well, no. Not at all.
Reports about cloning debit cards have been all around, for instance here. The combination of cloning cards and making millions with a fraud scheme instantly makes smart card people happy: we told you that your magstripe cards would lead to big problems!
OK. But let’s try to analyze this a bit deeper.
Juniper Research has just published a study on Mobile Payments, 2008-2013, which is announced in a press release. The report promises wonderful things, like $75 billion in yearly mobile payments by 2013. The author of the report, Howard Wilcox, is however quite cautious, and he is cited in the press release as saying:
Whilst trial results [...]
Mobile application platforms are interesting for smart card developers, because most mobile phones host some kind of a SIM card, which stands good chances to be a Java Card. Of course, if we are thinking in terms of Java Card 3.0, since the card is a Web server, there is very little to do in [...]
There is a big ongoing debate about the future of the SIM, as illustrated by e-Smart’s debate about “SIM, no SIM , super SIM?”. I don’t have the answer, and as a Java Card expert, I am not sure to really care. It seems that most people agree that it is nice to have at [...]
Over a week after the launch, it is a duty as a blogger to mention the iPhone. I am not going to explain how great it looks and feels, and I am not going to talk about the latest iPhone hacks. In fact, I will react on an old Steve Jobs quote that I saw [...]
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