I just read a very impressive speech by Eben Moglen. Here is an excerpt that is music to the ears of people supporting personal Web servers: What do we need? We need a really good webserver you can put in your pocket and plug in any place. In other words, it shouldn’t be any larger […]
Android fragmentation
Things are starting to get ugly on the Android fragmentation front. Worse yet, I just got hit by the problem with my good ol’ Touch (about one year old, i.e., an antique by Android standards). A good friend just pointed to stickybits, a promising service (at least if you are not in the NFC industry) […]
Hadopi, Google, and a few illegal things
We European have strange laws. The French Hadopi law is a law that is intended to protect copyright owners against big bad teenage copiers. That law has been voted, and it is in the process of being enacted. Of course, it won’t work; such laws just don’t work. ReadWriteWeb has published an article about Hadopi […]
Here and Now !
Ajit Jaokar has published a post on Mobile Cloud Computing, in which he asks some questions about mobile computing. I found his questions very interesting, so here are my answers (I kept them short, but I will try to develop some things later): a) Is ‘mobile cloud computing’ a distinct domain in itself? Or is […]
Chip And PIN Is Broken (A Little)
By now, there has been sufficient hype around Ross Anderson’s latest attack on EMV banking cards. Once again, the Cambridge guys have scored a good one here, as the simplicity of the attack is outright incredible: Intercept the PIN Presentation command, make the terminal believe that the PIN is correct (i.e., return Status Word 9000), […]
What about iCharge?
Well, it seems that I was wrong on Europe and swiping. A European company is getting ready to launch iCharge, which looks like a clone of Square for many of its features: small card swiper, on-screen signature, location-based, … They don’t mention pictures and loyalty, but I guess that it’s coming next. The questions about […]
Magstripe: 1. Chip: -1
Being from the smart card industry, I usually don’t spend much time looking at things that work better by swiping cards than by using a good old smart card. Then, a few minutes ago, I looked at the promotional video for the Square payment service. Well, it’s definitely worth watching. The basic idea is to […]
A new use for the (micro) SIM?
One of the numerous articles from Wired commenting Apple’s new iPad is about its SIM card. Rather than using traditional SIM cards, they will be using a Micro-SIM form factor, which is slightly smaller than a traditional SIM card. Wired claims that the intention behind the change is to force customers to buy two SIM […]
Greetings from China
The Java Card Forum is meeting in China this week. This is a first for me, so I can’t tell how much Beijing has changed in the past 10 or 15 years, because I don’t know how it used to be. So, here is what I have seen (from a very naive point of view): […]
OMTP TR1 gaining support in the UK
Yesterday, I attended the Mobile Barcamp on Security at ETSI. Even though attendance was rather low, the exchanges were interesting, and the unconference format made them even more interesting. It was my first Barcamp, and I really enjoyed it. Among the news and messages spread during the meeting, one struck me, even though it is […]