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It's a matter of cost vs. benefit. Designing an iPhone peripheral that has built-in crypto is extremely expensive (or any embedded system with strong crypto for
by mustpax 16y ago
It's a matter of cost vs. benefit. Designing an iPhone peripheral that has built-in crypto is extremely expensive (or any embedded system with strong crypto for that matter), especially if the information you're trying to protect is printed on the other side of the friggin card. The fact is, as a consumer, you can't know if the device that's going to read your card is legit. This is true even if you're looking at a state of the art IBM POS system or a tiny plastic widget with a coil of wire attached to a headphone jack.
- wmf 16y agoI think this is the most important point in this thread. Verifone (and the other big players) makes expensive card readers. Square is disrupting that with a card reader so cheap that they can give it away for free. Verifone is using a standard anti-disruption argument: we're not over-engineered because everyone needs this level of complexity (crypto in this case). This would potentially break Square's business model.