18 ms·

Japan's IC cards are weird and wonderful

• PaulHoule 1y ago
  If I had to ask “why is it so fast?” I’d turn it around and ask “Why are western systems so slow?” and posit that Western capital has an ideology that throughout matters by latency doesn’t. (As Fred Brooks puts it, “Nine women can have a baby in one month”). As an individual or a customer you perceive latency directly though, and throughout secondarily. So it comes down to empathy or lack thereof.
  • aecsocket 1y ago
    The magnitude to which FeliCa was faster shocked me as well when I found out. But it's not like the latency is insignificant: it's obvious how much faster people can get through a Tokyo metro gate than a London one. So clearly it must have some kind of financial impact as well, if an entire city's public transport system works slower because of it. Even ignoring empathy for a second, isn't this the kind of thing that a Western capital ideology is supposed to improve? Some food for thought.
    • PaulHoule 1y ago
      It is not just capital but the interpersonal and bureaucratic factors. Technically the way to think about latency is that a process has N serial steps and you can (a) reduce N, (b) run some of those serial steps in parallel, and (c) speed up the steps. For one thing, different aspects of the organization own the N steps. You might have one step that is difficult to improve because of organizational issues and then the excuses come in... Step 3 takes 2.0 sec, so why bother reducing Step 5 from 0.5 sec to 0.1 sec? On top of that we valorize "slow food" [1] have sayings like "all good things come to those who wait" and tend to think people are morally superior for waiting as opposed to "get you ass out of the line so we can serve other customers quickly" (e.g. truly empathetic, compassionate, etc.) Maybe the ultimate expression of the American bad attitude is how you have to wait 20 minutes to board a plane because they have a complicated procedure with 9 priority levels and they have to pay somebody to explain that if you are a veteran you are in zone 3 and if you have this credit card from an another airline that this airline acquired you are in zone 5, etc... meanwhile they are paying the flight crew to wait, paying the ground crew to wait, etc. Southwest Airlines used to have a reasonable and optimized boarding scheme but they gave up on it, I guess the revenue from those credit cards is worth too much. [1] it's a running gag when I go to a McDonalds in a distant city that it takes forever compared to, I dunno, Sweetgreens, even "fast" food isn't fast anymore. When I worked at a BK circa 1988, we cooked burgers ahead of time and stored them in a steam tray for up to ten minutes and then put condiments on them and put them in a box on a heat chute for up to another ten minutes. Whether you ordered a standard or customized burger you'd usually get it quickly, whereas burger restaurants today all cook the beef to order which just plain takes a while, longer than it takes to assemble a burrito at Chipotle.
      • brigandish 1y ago
        > On top of that we valorize "slow food" [1] have sayings like "all good things come to those who wait" Japan has its own versions of these things so I doubt it's this. The whole culture is, in general, not built for efficiency either.
      • SideburnsOfDoom 1y ago
        > American bad attitude is how you have to wait 20 minutes to board a plane because they have a complicated procedure with 9 priority levels The purpose of the many boarding groups is IMHO, to make those in groups > 1 feel as though they're missing out on some perk that they could get if they paid more. It's an intentional class system where some are encouraged to look down on those who paid less, and vice versa. It's good for revenue, bad for people.
        • hiatus 1y ago
          I doubt airlines complicate boarding groups to reinforce classes. It is likely all about the bottom line, and nickel and dime-ing you at every opportunity.
          • appreciatorBus 1y ago
            I think the point is that creating a class system is one way to maximize revenue. The social aspects of that system - looking down on people in economy, or aspiring to be the people in first class – aren’t necessarily the first order effects, but I suspect they contribute.
            • SideburnsOfDoom 1y ago
              Exactly, that's the point. Creating an envy structure in order to increase revenue.
      • appreciatorBus 1y ago
        US govt transportation agency central planners will happily spend billions to bulldoze a neighbourhood for a freeway lane, all to shave a few hypothetical seconds off a car commute, so I don’t think the issue is that US culture isn’t interested in speed, latency, or throughput. Airline boarding is not the only class system in play. At every level of government, even within transit agencies, transit and its customers are seen as and treated as second class citizens. The idea of investing money, time or energy to shave even scores of minutes off the commute of someone who uses a bus, often seems as if it’s an unthinkable thought in these organizations.
    • toxik 1y ago
      The departure times dominate latency and throughput in metros. The gates are not the bottleneck.
      • chgs 1y ago
        When a full train empties out at a specific station you can get massive delays. Euston platforms 8-11 come to mind. Two arrivals of 600+ people (including standing) trains in a minute or so in say 8 and 11 can cause chaos.
      • aecsocket 1y ago
        It depends. Usually you'd be right, but for some big events, the stations and platforms can be incredibly packed. In those cases the extra delay from gates could really hurt. One example is Comiket, where you have thousands of attendees all coming to the same few stations around the venue. Both times I was there, there was a massive crowd spanning from the platform to the outside. Having to wait the extra few hundred milliseconds on each card tap would have been painful. Here's an example video to show the gates in action: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YffjxN3KsD4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YffjxN3KsD4
      • numpad0 1y ago
        ref: https://twitter.com/sigeyosiinoue/status/891206258488885248 https://twitter.com/sigeyosiinoue/status/891206258488885248
    • avianlyric 1y ago
      > So clearly it must have some kind of financial impact as well, if an entire city's public transport system works slower because of it. Unlikely, most cities transport systems will run into issues with capacity long before they run into issues with ticket gate latency. No point getting people through the gates faster if they’re just gonna pile up on the platform and cause a crush hazard. At peak hours in London, the inbound gates are often closed periodically to prevent crowding issues in major stations. If you look at normal TfL stations you’ll notice there’s normally a 2:1 ratio of infrastructure for people leaving a station vs entering. Because crowding is by far the biggest most dangerous risk in a major metro system, and also the biggest bottleneck.
  • londons_explore 1y ago
    > throughout matters but latency doesn’t Governments who think this set speed limits on roads to 45 mph, since that's the speed where most cars pass per second on a busy road. Those same governments then act all surprised when it turns out their whole population is depressed and overworked when they work a 9 hour workday, commute 1.5 hours each way, and have no free time for life, relationships, hobbies, etc.
  • makeitdouble 1y ago
    Another angle: mass transit is seen at best as a cost center in the west, when it's more expected to be a fully profitable business in Japan [0] Paris adopted an IC system as well and it is pretty usable, but not pushed to the extremes of the JR system because they weren't ready to invest as much, manage the money aspect and really make it a full blown business. [0] some lines and areas are definitely money pits. That's where some companies bail out of the IC system altogether for instance, or go with a different, incompatible but cheaper implementation.
    • lmm 1y ago
      Japan hugely subsidizes public transport both directly and indirectly, e.g. almost all employers will pay for employees to commute by public transport but not by car, because the government heavily incentivises them to do so. The Japanese transport providers are indeed more entrepreneurial about this kind of stuff, but I think that's more a case of Japan having high trust in government and quasi-governmental entities than expecting them to pay their way. (Indeed a lot of the penny-wise pound-foolish decisions we see in western public transport are driven by an insistence on cutting costs at all, well, costs).
      • charlieyu1 1y ago
        Or the Hong Kong model. Railway operators are also property developers whose main profits comes from selling homes next to important stations. (This is not necessarily a good thing)
        • Nasrudith 1y ago
          What exactly is wrong with said approach? My guesses are sprawl promotion and attendantly encouraging elimination of green spaces more than normal for developers?
          • charlieyu1 1y ago
            Cronyism, in general. Government pushing for policies favouring railways and cutting bus routes while being the biggest shareholder of the railway company.
  • lxgr 1y ago
    Indeed. But the primary problem with western transit gates/turnstiles is this: Japanese IC transaction: Less than 100 ms. EMV IC transaction: Hundreds of milliseconds. The person in front of you in the New York subway only realizing that they might have to look for their phone or card in their bag as they're already blocking one of very few turnstiles, and your train is arriving: Timeless.
    • Tijdreiziger 1y ago
      This is perhaps more of a ‘New York’ problem (i.e. high passenger volume + small stations + slow turnstiles). In the Netherlands, there are cases where this can happen too (notably, Amsterdam South station), but generally there are less passengers and/or bigger stations (= more fare gates). https://i.ytimg.com/vi/35qeaOD7haw/maxresdefault.jpg https://i.ytimg.com/vi/35qeaOD7haw/maxresdefault.jpg
      • lxgr 1y ago
        The problem is definitely exacerbated by human behavior. There are almost always multiple turnstiles, but I've seen groups of people managing to block all of them simultaneously, figuring out how to use them...
        • Tijdreiziger 1y ago
          The last time I was in NYC was 10+ years ago, but from what I recall, operating the turnstiles correctly required some experience: you need to know that they require manual operation (not obvious to first-time users), and then you also have to operate them at the correct speed (going too fast doesn’t let you through). Systems with fare gates (i.e. most systems worldwide) don’t have these problems, because it’s obvious when you can pass through. Then factor in lots of tourists/visitors (who aren’t used to this system) + aforementioned small stations.
          • lxgr 1y ago
            That’s true for Metrocards and paper single ride tickets, but no longer an issue for OMNY. Most delays with OMNY seem to be due to the fact that people need to unlock their phone or pick a card because they don’t have express transit enabled.
  • avianlyric 1y ago
    When it comes to ticket gate line in a public transport system, latency and throughput are basically the same thing. There is no practical way to increase the throughput of ticket line, without reducing latency. It’s not like you can install more gates in most stations, the station isn’t big enough, and you can’t make the gates smaller because the people aren’t small enough. Every transit system measures and has throughput requirements that their gates need to meet. That inherently means latency requirements, because one gate can’t process multiple people in parallel! Also western systems aren’t that slow. The videos in the article are a decade out of date and show people in London using paper tickets! And almost nobody using a contactless card or Oyster card. In London the Oyster cards are very fast. Fast enough that a brisk walking pace the gates will be completely open by the time you reach them, assuming you put your card on the reader the moment it’s within comfortable reach. Contactless payments on the other hand are slower. But there’s not much TfL can do there. The slower speed is entirely the result of the contactless cards taking longer to process the transaction. TfL track contactless cards latencies by bank and card manufacture. There’s a non-trivial difference in latency between different card manufactures and bank configurations. But that’s not something TfL can control themselves.
  • timewizard 1y ago
    The article suggests a reason: > Places like Hong Kong and Tokyo have a lot of commuters, leading to a lot of congestion around station gates. However I think it's actually _population density_ that's the critical factor. The investment in new payment technologies is much more likely to pay off in these environments than in the US.
• pwim 1y ago
  Unfortunately transit operators are looking to discontinue the use of these IC cards in favour of QR codes as part of a cost saving strategy: https://mainichi.jp/english/articles/20241015/p2a/00m/0bu/011000c https://mainichi.jp/english/articles/20241015/p2a/00m/0bu/01...
  • charcircuit 1y ago
    That article doesn't say they are. >It will continue to accept national IC cards such as Suica and Icoca
    • cmcaleer 1y ago
      I hope it lasts, but I'm seeing gates which have QR code readers, IC card readers,and contactless payment readers, which is obviously unsustainable. One or more of these will have to give eventually, and given Japan's tolerance for QR code payments (PayPay is massive) and foreigners' familiarity with contactless it seems like IC is the most likely one to go. I'd be sad if they do go or get relegated to some app, I love the little mascots.
      • lozenge 1y ago
        I thought contactless is considered too slow? The exit gates are often open and only close when somebody attempts to pass without their IC card/insufficient balance on the IC card, how does this work with contactless? I feel like they could combine the IC and contactless reader into one bit of hardware with some engineering.
        • Tijdreiziger 1y ago
          > I feel like they could combine the IC and contactless reader into one bit of hardware with some engineering. This is the case in the Netherlands. The same readers accept the old OV-chipkaart (stored-value) system and the new OVpay (EMV) system. Actually, I feel like when the OVpay system was rolled out, the existing OV-chipkaart readers simply got a firmware update, giving them the ability to read EMV cards and phones. Both of these systems work across all tranit modes and operators in the entire country (and even at a few stations across the German border), and there are various models of reader that are used. (note: OV = openbaar vervoer = public transport)
• toxik 1y ago
  I could use my European smartphone (well, smartwatch) as an IC card in Japan. I don't think it was slower.
  • makeitdouble 1y ago
    If you're alluding to an Apple watch, it has Felica support wherever you buy it. PS: For anyone in doubt https://atadistance.net/2017/09/12/iphone-x-keynote-global-felica/ https://atadistance.net/2017/09/12/iphone-x-keynote-global-f...
    • richardwhiuk 1y ago
      It also works on iPhone, with built in wallet support for Suica.
  • lhl 1y ago
    It depends on the vendor and whether they are willing to pay for global licensing. For Garmin devices for example, only the APAC version have NFC-F support.
• chgs 1y ago
  I haven’t noticed any delay in london with a card, phone might be 200ms slower than credit catd. I Haven’t been to japan for a decade, are they really that much faster - and does it make a difference? What happens if a card is wrong/doesn’t scan/is invalid/etc at the higher speed?
  • lmm 1y ago
    > are they really that much faster - and does it make a difference? Yes and yes > What happens if a card is wrong/doesn’t scan/is invalid/etc at the higher speed? Then the fare gates close in time to stop that person and the next 3 or so people behind them get annoyed and go around.
  • zparky 1y ago
    I'm currently on a japan train - using a suica card is essentially instantaneous. if the cards are declined for any reason the gates swing shut immediately, if that's what you're asking.
    • chgs 1y ago
      I don’t see how that’s any different to the underground
      • walthamstow 1y ago
        It's the complete opposite. Tokyo stations have open gates that swing shut on fail. London stations have closed gates that swing open on success.
        • astrange 1y ago
          Also, Tokyo trains have air conditioning, whereas the Underground is so hot and stuffy I'm pretty sure I got brain damage from it. Also^2, Japanese train stations have ads for B2B services, whereas almost every ad in London stations is for a musical. I'm not sure what this means. (Also fondly remember the surprisingly numerous signs at Kings Cross about how you shouldn't assault any train employees, and how teenagers weren't allowed to buy matcha drinks because they have too much caffeine.)
• TheChaplain 1y ago
  I love IC cards. They had them on all transport where I live, but a few years ago they changed to QR codes.. Now it's a fiddle with an app, then try to get the right angle on a smudgy reader. Getting onboard takes much longer and it feels like technology sent us 2 steps back instead of forward. IC cards are better, and if they could be integrated in the phone then it would be even better and faster for everyone.
  • mschild 1y ago
    Would printing out the QR code and putting it into your wallet work or is it a changing one?
    • lmz 1y ago
      I think the most annoying part is the external QR reader (on faregates?). I've rarely had a good experience with those whether using a QR on paper or from a phone screen.
    • xorcist 1y ago
      Printing out the QR code and giving out to all your friends? I think most QR systems include some sort of rolling timestamp to combat that.
  • 0xCMP 1y ago
    iOS supports ICs fine. It has supported Suica since 2017 when I used it instead of the physical card. Forcing use of an app and QR codes does seem like a significant step back, although I guess it makes paper tickets much easier to implement with the same scanner.
    • lxgr 1y ago
      Android, however, does not support them at all unfortunately (at least on phones not targeted to the Japanese market).
      • notpushkin 1y ago
• eloisius 1y ago
  I think they are even more useful in Taiwan. Every single transit system across the entire island that I’ve ever encountered accepts EasyCard (悠遊卡). Even ferries. So does every convenience store, and even a lot of proper restaurants and stores. They are also fast, like you don’t even have to break your strike while passing the turnstiles to enter the metro.
  • lhl 1y ago
    I think it's about equal for utility - Japanese Suica/Pasmo cards are also usable in every single konbini, at all the stations stores, across most regional transportation and taxis, and at maybe half of Tokyo shops/restaurants (it's a default option in AirPay and other PoS systems). A lot of vending machines accept Suica, and I use it at grocery or drug stores. You can even use it at some other types of shops like Bic Camera, although for high ticket items you're going to hit the Suica balance limits... https://www.jreast.co.jp/multi/en/suicamoney/shop.html https://www.jreast.co.jp/multi/en/suicamoney/shop.html
    • bemmu 1y ago
      I seem to have managed to live in the only place in Japan where you can’t use suica/pasmo for transport: Tokushima. Still works in convini though.
      • lmm 1y ago
        Tokushima Bus is apparently introducing IC card support next year.
    • decimalenough 1y ago
      Most, but not all. Wikipedia has a hideously convoluted diagram showing the complex web of interoperability or lack thereof: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nationwide_Mutual_Usage_Service#/media/File:ICCard_Connection_en.svg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nationwide_Mutual_Usage_Servic...
      • 1y ago
• lhl 1y ago
  This is a great writeup and reminded me of some others I've seen in the past. For those interested on the topic, I used Deep Research to generated a report on turnstile/ticketing systems compared to others like Hong Kong, Taiwan, Singapore, London, NYC). Also asked it to do research on a few of the other related things like device licensing and the recent NFC-F chip shortages: https://chatgpt.com/share/6828429c-b618-8012-82a3-b8b992ac832a https://chatgpt.com/share/6828429c-b618-8012-82a3-b8b992ac83...
  • aspenmayer 1y ago
    > This is a great writeup and reminded me of some others I've seen in the past. Did you mean it reminded you of others you'd seen on HN or just generally? I don't know enough about these technologies to speak to the authoritativeness or veracity of gpt output, but I appreciate the gesture.
    • lhl 1y ago
      Well I've seen some other writeups like https://atadistance.net/2020/06/13/transit-gate-evolution-why-gate-speed-matters/ https://atadistance.net/2020/06/13/transit-gate-evolution-wh... that have also been referenced on HN. Discussions like https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38694411 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38694411 and others that are probably easy to search for. While some people have a reflexive dislike for AI output, I've done maybe a hundred o3 Deep Research queries now and found the reports to be generally high quality as well sourced as most human generated ones. I shared this one since I think it was a particularly interesting review the various systems around the world (I've personally used all those transit turnstiles personally and am generally familiar w/ RFID/NFC/EMV systems and didn't spot anything egregious). (I find Deep Research reports to on average be high signal to noise than most of the human tokens being output on sites like HN for example.)
• tkgally 1y ago
  Long-time Japan resident here. The IC cards do work quickly and smoothly, but the retail payment system overall is a mess because different stores accept different combinations of dozens of electronic payment brands. When shopping, I prefer to use the Suica app in my iPhone as it’s just a quick touch, but some stores won’t accept it so I have to use the Nanaco app—which requires a face recognition step—or pay in cash. I haven’t bothered to set up a QR code app yet. Twice, when I tried to install PayPay, the most common one, I got stuck on an authentication step and gave up. Even shops within the same department store accept different combinations of payment systems. In my local Takashimaya, I can use Suica to buy food in the basement but not in the restaurants on the upper floors. Shops in the nearby Sogo Department Store do not accept Suica, only Nanaco, except for the Starbucks on the third floor, which does accept Suica. Convenience stores seem to accept nearly everything, as you can guess from the number of logos on this sign: https://news.mynavi.jp/article/osusumecredit-107/images/003l.jpg https://news.mynavi.jp/article/osusumecredit-107/images/003l... Some relatives are arriving in Japan next Tuesday for a three-week visit, and they asked me what they should do about credit cards, digital money, cash, etc. I realized that, despite living here, I barely understood the situation myself, so I had Gemini Deep Research prepare a report for them: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1WY4AM0mJS94uwPMK8XjIQMLfpIu3nHerzr8YPD1J22w/edit?tab=t.0#heading=h.zc1k7a6fxyij https://docs.google.com/document/d/1WY4AM0mJS94uwPMK8XjIQMLf... Another point to add is that in the 1980s and 1990s big security problems emerged with the magnetic cards that were used widely then for transportation and telephone calls. Here is what Perplexity has to say about that: https://www.perplexity.ai/search/i-want-some-information-in-det-Gy6M4gBMRSCSxRgJutXkjg https://www.perplexity.ai/search/i-want-some-information-in-... I well remember the “open street markets in urban areas like Shibuya ... known for selling counterfeit cards.”
  • astrange 1y ago
    > but the retail payment system overall is a mess because different stores accept different combinations of dozens of electronic payment brands. This is a fun thing to keep in mind when people tell you Japan is a "homogenous society". (It's not high-trust either.)
    • 1y ago
• hotpepperishot 1y ago
  [dead]
• NanoYohaneTSU 1y ago
  No they aren't weird. It is a very simple system that doesn't try to destroy the customer.
  • frakkingcylons 1y ago
    weird (positive)
• AshamedCaptain 1y ago
  I don't understand -- we are talking about 100ms or so of latency? which is almost completely dwarfed by any mechanical action such as the gates actually opening?? This is about as ridiculous as it gets. The videos that compare the UK system with the JP system practically show the same throughput, even when in the UK video most people are using magnetic/paper tickets (which by necessity are going to be much slower than NFC). In addition, the annoyance of these gates comes from having to fiddle with the wallet, etc. in order to find the card or the phone, or the fact that multiples tries may be required for the reader to actually read it; not the 200ms it takes for the reader to do so. I'm going to bet that faster NFC bandwidth makes the entire thing even more finicky, not less. If you really want to speed how people go through the gates, then _remove the damn gates_. It's not rocket science, and there are some European cities that have _no_ gates in their underground systems. München comes to mind, but even in London less central stations have no gates. Beat that. In addition , the article bashes NXP for using obscurity as a defense, then goes to praise Felica, whose apparently main barrier of defense is: > the crypto is proprietary, and probably buried underneath a mountain of NDAs, so the public can't audit it independently. This is literally the definition of security by obscurity. When I read the two examples set by the author, my only possible conclusion is that security by obscurity actually works, but only when you can keep it actually obscure. The only problem is that NXP failed to keep their algorithms obscure while apparently FeliCa did. It is basically the opposite conclusion to what the author is trying to convince me to believe. I find it totally unjustified to blame NXP for trying to keep the algorithm obscure by the courts when apparently FeliCa also does it -- just much more successfully. Note: I personally consider MIFARE classic being _almost_ trivially clonable a requirement.
  • Aeolun 1y ago
    The absense of a negative is not a positive. It could be secure, or it could not. On the whole I’m inclined to believe that if it could be broken, it would have been in my lifetime.
  • Washuu 1y ago
    > In addition, the annoyance of these gates comes from having to fiddle with the wallet, etc. in order to find the card or the phone, or the fact that multiples tries may be required for the reader to actually read it; The NFC readers on the gates in Japan will read cards from several centimeters away. My phone, which has Osaifu-Keitai setup, can be left in my bag and I just wave my bag over the reader as I walk by. It is incredibly rare for a misread to occur. They just work.
• ranma42 1y ago
  > Since there's no point in generating keys for a device which will not be used in Japan, non-Japan SKUs don't have Osaifu-Keitai functionality. So even if you rooted your phone and had full access to the secure element, if your phone's secure element doesn't have the key, you can't use it as an IC card. At least in some cases it is sufficient to change the phone SKU id (which requires temporary rooting) to the Japan SKU id to unlock the Osaifu-Keitai functionality on a non-Japan phone. I'm not sure if this means that the secure element had the necessary keys provisioned all along, or just that the Osaifu-Keitai app then provisions it on first use.
  • dadadad100 1y ago
    I believe it is the case that US (at least) iPhones work as IC cards in Japan Source - I’m sitting in Kyoto right now having travelled all over Tokyo and then on to Kyoto using only my phone to interact with Japan Rail. Verified with two 16Es and a 12. In fact we were able to add the Suica cards to our phones and charge them fromApplePay while still stateside. That let us skip the Welcome Suica line at Haneda and go straight to the monorail. Highly recommended
    • cosmic_cheese 1y ago
      Yes, all iPhones and Apple Watches carry the functionality regardless of where you buy them, which has been wonderful for me. The fact that the iOS Wallet app can generate these cards as needed and reload them without a third party app is a cherry on top — so nice to for once get a standardized UI instead of having to deal with some half baked transit service app.
      • notpushkin 1y ago
        I believe Google is trying to do that with their Wallet/Pay/Wallet app, but I guess it doesn’t support FeliCa yet? They do support some weird card formats, so I guess they have at least some flexibility there – no idea why they can’t add it, too.
    • lxgr 1y ago
• coolcase 1y ago
  They are OK. I find Sydney ones more reliably tap, plus you can use just a credit card to tap, as well as use a credit card to buy the Opal card. You can buy the opal card at 100s of places not just train stations. The actual transport itself is better in Tokyo tho.
  • bamboozled 1y ago
    I like how in Sydney you can just tap on and tap off (in a lot of situation) without a gate. Like the light rail, you don't have to have all the pressure of getting through a gate with 100 people behind you like in Tokyo. When your card fails in Tokyo, it's such a stressful event, and you have to do that "huff, turn around & stomp off" thing everyone does...
• Reason077 1y ago
  > “The London Underground gates don't work nearly as quick with Google Pay or any of my other contactless cards - what gives?” They used to (and still do?) work faster with the Oyster fare card. Virtually instant. But paying with EMV cards/devices does add a noticable transaction latency before the gate opens. A few hundred milliseconds, I’d say.
  • lxgr 1y ago
    That's because for EMV, they need to run asymmetric card authentication algorithms, which unfortunately exclusively use RSA. That's just not very fast to do on the type of microcontroller common in these cards. EMV also uses faster symmetric cryptography between the card and the issuer, but the latter is not in the picture in a transit gate transaction – too much latency – so asymmetric cryptography it is. That's also the reason some (mostly older, mostly international) cards don't work with TfL: Some don't even have the coprocessor (or just additional processing power these days, I suspect) required for RSA to cut cost, and only work for online payment transactions.
    • jddj 1y ago
      Is nfc via google/apple wallet faster then?
      • lxgr 1y ago
        Apple Pay uses hardware secure elements, so the same limitations largely apply. Google Pay emulates the card on the application processor, so theoretically it could be faster, but I wouldn't be surprised if anything won in terms of more performant RSA cryptography is lost to higher command processing latency between the NFC interface and application processor. It would be interesting for somebody to do a latency comparison between Apple Pay, Google Pay, and a physical card!
        • ValentineC 1y ago
          Doesn't Google Pay offload some of the processing to their cloud? Google Pay only allows a certain number of offline transactions (around three or so, I think) before I'm required to turn off airplane mode and authenticate with their servers. I believe this also allows it to work with more phones, and get around security and possibly also regulatory requirements, since there's less need for a really secure secure enclave on NFC devices.
• socalgal2 1y ago
  I think I must be mis-understanding something > Since there's no point in generating keys for a device which will not be used in Japan, non-Japan SKUs don't have Osaifu-Keitai functionality. AFAIK, all iPhones from all regions since like iPhone 10 (internet says iPhone 7) support Osaifu-Kaitai unless I don't understand what that means. My USA iPhones works everywhere Suika, Pasmo, Icoca, etc work. Every station, bus, vending machine, convenience store, super market, restaurant, and retail store that accept these forms of payment, they all just work. Given that all of this works, what is it I'm missing?
  • artdigital 1y ago
    iPhones yes, Android no. Most Android devices sold outside of Japan can’t use FeliCa so you have to get the Japan model for osaifu-keitai stuff
  • dal 1y ago
    Also my western Google pixel pro 9XL does not support it..while the Japanese version does. I guess google might be saving on the licensing or something.
    • delfinom 1y ago
      If you want to root your Pixel to enable it: https://github.com/kormax/osaifu-keitai-google-pixel https://github.com/kormax/osaifu-keitai-google-pixel
  • lxgr 1y ago
    Apple is the exception here. What's missing for all other phones not targeted to the Japanese market are the agreements between any non-Apple device manufacturer and the Japanese IC card issuers (JR East for Suica etc.) Since these cards actually "store money offline", the symmetric keys involved are really not something the issuers ever want to see leaked, so I assume it's not only a question of money (i.e. licensing fees), but also trust in the security posture of the secure element of the phone (if it even has one; many Android phones don't).
  • aecsocket 1y ago
• RajT88 1y ago
  Not mentioned is the cards currently in use in Japan, "icoca". A pun on "ikouka" - "shall we go?"
  • amelius 1y ago
    As in, "will this train run?"?
    • RajT88 1y ago
      Do not think so. That would be a different verb form -rareru
• thrance 1y ago
  The public transport cards here in Paris also use NFC. This means you can use your phone to recharge them, or use your phone directly to access the subway network. As far as speed goes, your card/phone is detected pretty much instantly when you tap it on the sensor, at least when the gate isn't broken. The only time I ever had to wait in line to get into the station was after a stadium event, which is understandable. Rest of the time, you can pass the gates almost without stopping.
• lxgr 1y ago
  > [...] conflict avoidance - a reader can detect when it's reading more than 1 FeliCa card at a time, and prevent any reading if so [...] That must be one of the things that ISO 14443 has improved on then, compared to FeliCa: At least 14443-A (and I believe also B) allows addressing each card in the field individually by its serial number, and then selectively "halt" or resume it. Practically, this means that the reader can talk to cards one by one until it finds the one it's interested in (if any). Unfortunately I don't know any practical system making use of that (it could get pretty confusing with payment cards, for example – charging a random card of several possible ones sounds like an anti-feature), but I still find it very neat.
• raluk 1y ago
  One problem with fast writing is that it requres more energy to transmit from reader to a card in order for a card that has no internal source of power, to toggle bits. It is harder compared to just reading a bit from a card. Additonaly it is tricky to implement trasaction with single write, given that data transfer can be interrupted (for example user removes card from RF field). I am not sure if single write is enough for making this robust/transactional. It also helps a lot if RFID antenna is well tuned. Proximity of metal and way it is mounted has a big impact, so it is important that RF antenna for reader is tuned for exact environment it is mounted in.
  • lxgr 1y ago
    > One problem with fast writing is that it requres more energy to transmit from reader to a card in order for a card that has no internal source of power, to toggle bits. Contactless cards manage to boot up a JVM and run bytecode with the energy provided by the field, and many also run RSA with fairly large keys. I doubt that toggling some bits in an EEPROM factors in too much. > I am not sure if single write is enough for making this robust/transactional. Transactions are usually implemented via some form of two-phase commit, I believe, to support what's called "tear resistance". If the transaction is incomplete, the reader tells you and you just tap the same card at the same gate again. Not sure about the implementation, but the feature is supported by all contactless stored-value cards I'm aware of.
• aikinai 1y ago
  The iOS and Android part was hard to follow, so I'm not sure if the article is wrong or just unclear. All iPhones since iPhone 7 support FeliCa regardless of the phone region. This is incredibly convenient for visitors to Japan. On the other hand, Android phones only support it if they are Japan-region phones.
  • delfinom 1y ago
    Yes that is correct. Patents hold it back on Android. Apple just got themselves a licensing deal that apparently lets them just have it on all phones.
    • hocuspocus 1y ago
      Note that on global Pixels it isn't hard to enable, either via root or flashing Japanese variants of the factory images.
      • xuki 1y ago
        This is such a Hacker News comment.
        • hocuspocus 1y ago
          Yes I'm not claiming it's ideal, it'd be nice not to worry about such things as a tourist, it can't be that hard or expensive for Google to just let everyone use the feature. But at least if you move to Japan, you can essentially get a Japanese flavored Pixel at the small cost of a factory unlock/relock.
    • pauldino 1y ago
      The iPhone is really big in Japan (it's one of the few countries where it has a higher market share than in the US) which probably makes it more worthwhile for Apple
      • aidenn0 1y ago
• mrb 1y ago
  "what makes Japan's transit card system (IC cards) so unique compared to the West" Actually other western transit system cards are similar to Japan's. For example in Paris the transit passes (Navigo cards) are stored-value systems and hold a record of the last few scans (three I think). You can also read them with any NFC smartphone and see what's stored inside. The tap at the entrance of a transit vehicle is near instant as the reader doesn't need to interact with a backend since everything is stored on the card itself.
  • delfinom 1y ago
    Yea but the Japanese IC card system has complete interop between all transit systems run by completely different private companies. So you can hop on a train from one city to another and then hop on a bus in that new city on the other side of the country all using the same card. And a good chunk of vending machines in Japan accept the IC card. Sometimes even food shops a step above vending machines.
    • deleted 1y ago
      [deleted]
    • soruly 1y ago
      Japan has lots of IC cards in various regions, and they have spent a lot of effort integrating their system. Unfortunately some IC cards like Kumamon decided to opt-out due to high maintenance fees. AFAIK, you can go through up to 4 different company networks once you enter paid-area. Beyond that, you'll need to do the override settlement (乗り越し精算) with the help of station staff. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nationwide_Mutual_Usage_Service https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nationwide_Mutual_Usage_Servic...
• mifydev 1y ago
  Just visiting Japan, just realised that IC cards are super fast compared to London, crazy relevant article!
  • barnabee 1y ago
    They’re definitely faster, which is nice and surely preferable… But the London Underground gates are fast enough, with enough space from the reader to the gate, that if you’re ready (and the gate isn’t congested) there’s no need to slow down even from a very brisk walk to pass through.
• emursebrian 1y ago
  I just got back from Japan. I did not notice a difference in performance between tapping with a Blink credit card and tapping with an IC card. I only used the ICOCA card. There were never lines at the gates. There were only ever brief lines at the ticket counters and terminals. I was there during golden week, which is one of the busiest travel times of the year. My travel partner and I used almost exclusively public transportation to get around, usually riding a few trains per-day. We only experienced one two-minute delay in Tokyo on a Friday evening during rush hour. Japan's transportation infrastructure is great!
  • ksec 1y ago
    >I just got back from Japan. I did not notice a difference in performance between tapping with a Blink credit card and tapping with an IC card. I only used the ICOCA card. Unless things have changed, the ICOCA uses Felica as well. And old Offline Credit Card transactions used to be 200-300ms. Compared to Felica that is sub 100ms. May be offline transactions for credit card have gotten faster? Or may be not latency sensitive enough to notice the lag.
• ksec 1y ago
  I still remember when Apple announced their FeliCa support. And FeliCa became NFC-F standard there is a potential of Apple Wallet and Apple Cash ( Before both were announced ) for world wide usage to fight against the march of QR Code. They could have a store value card that works worldwide. Effectively bringing Octopus or Suica card to the world. I even remember there were proposal for future version of Felica that works under 10ms. Although I cant seem to find any reference of it. There is also a new NFC proposal ( again my google fu is not helping ) that allows multiple NFC card / tags to be read at the same time. So we can do Membership card, discount card and payment card all in one. And hopefully someday we could have electronics receipt right on our phone alongside the payment record as well. Something I wished Apple have done for the past 10 years but they still haven't gotten Apple Card or Apple Cash to work outside of US.
  • f_devd 1y ago
    > There is also a new NFC proposal ( again my google fu is not helping ) that allows multiple NFC card / tags to be read at the same time This is already in standard NFC-A/B, usually just called the 'collision avoidance' or 'select' protocol, effectively doing a binary search over the uid space (iirc) asking particular bitmasks of uids to respond. The main thing is that it used on the reader side, not the (emulated) card side so I'm not sure what the support for multiple emulated cards is like (and if there is a different proposal for that).
• ishanjain28 1y ago
  In India, The NCMC cards for transit use the same technology. They considered allowing people to use their normal bank issued cards like the public transit in Singapore and decided against it because of potential fraud issues. Right now, some ncmc card issuers allow validating the card using your phone so you don't have to go to the kiosk after topping up and they are working on letting people use their phones.
• kirici 1y ago
  I've recently returned from a trip across the country and liked everything about my (physical) ICOCA card, except that the machines used to charge it, at least the ones I've found, only accepted cash. After charging it once with a decent balance though, I got away (almost) entirely without cash using it in combination with a virtual credit card via NFC, save for street food carts and Gachapon machines.
  • soruly 1y ago
    There are charging machines that accept cash cards / debit cards, but only those issued by Japanese banks. So cash is the only option for touristists. You can go completely cash-less if you can use mobile Suica / ICOCA, which let's you charge your phone with Apple Pay / Google Pay (with osaifu-keitai).
  • Marsymars 1y ago
    I did think it was kind of funny when I’d use a single machine to withdraw cash from my bank account and then deposit the cash right back in to load it onto my IC card.
• lorenzotenti 1y ago
  What really stands out is the difference in design philosophy. In London, the gates are normally closed and only open if your Oyster card is valid. In Tokyo, the gates are open by default and only close if your card fails. You don’t have to wait for doors to open and close every time—it just keeps the flow moving and feels way faster.
  • mitthrowaway2 1y ago
    It's a subtle but very impactful difference. Japanese faregates also typically have two sets of doors, allowing them to close in front of you whichever direction you are moving. So people can go through at a fast pace and very tightly spaced, and the door still closes in front of the correct person. They also have the display screens located farther ahead so you don't have to stop walking to see how much fare you were charged.
  • suddenexample 1y ago
    That's only enabled by the difference in culture though, right? Japanese culture has a much higher emphasis on order and following the rules - I don't know that this "open-by-default" system would work in, for instance, the US.
    • astrange 1y ago
      Japanese transit-using society is old and middle-class; those are the kind of people who follow rules. Americans are often more rule bound than Japanese people (we have HOAs and Nextdoor), but we just don't respect transit systems as much because we think of them as gifts we give to the poor/mentally ill/homeless. And then a lot of Americans have an anti-gentrification ideology ("rent-lowering gunshots" or "neighborhood character") which says that anything made for poor people must be kept old and dirty or else rich people will show up and take it away from them.
      • isatty 1y ago
        Japanese transit using society is not all old and middle class: it’s pretty much everyone who is not filthy rich isn’t it?
• AStonesThrow 1y ago
  It is so strange to think that there are places where the trains have gates that close if you can't pay your fare somehow. I've never lived in such a place. The light rail here in Phoenix was established in 2008. Since then it's been on an "honor system" fare payment regime. There are bright orange lines painted on the ground and you must not cross the line until you've paid your fare! Then, in the station or on the train, you may be approached by a Fare Inspector (these are specialized jobs) who wears blue and wields an electronic scanner box. If you haven't paid your fare then you may receive a warning, and you're usually expelled at the next station. Personally, I've never seen anyone receive more than a verbal warning, such as a citation or a police visit. Recently the entire transit system underwent "fare modernization" and now most riders are on the mobile app or an NFC card. The app uses QR codes only, much to my chagrin. The little kiosks that are supposed to scan QRs are very, very reluctant to accept mine, for some reason. Therefore it may take me 30 seconds up to 4-5 minutes before the kiosk beeps green and takes my fare. (The fare is prepaid in an account, but scanning/tapping will deduct it from that account and acknowledge your presence in the station/bus.) It is 100% operator discretion whether you can board a bus. So every time I try with my mobile app, there is a rigmarole where the operator shares their favorite troubleshooting steps for scanning (which never work because it's not my fault) and then they wave me aboard, whether paid or not. Because the other passengers hate waiting behind a dude who's fiddling with his phone. I often see passengers just walk into a train station without tapping/scanning. I have no idea how they do that. I think they're just not bothering to pay their fare. But again, we don't have gates or turnstiles, only some menacing orange lines on the ground, and we're all still on the "honor system", so anything goes. Honestly it does not seem to me like the stations could be redesigned to have any sort of barrier gates. People would just jaywalk and cross the tracks anyway. I suppose the taxpayer subsidies are so significant that they don't really care about collecting all the fares they could.
• soruly 1y ago
  Suica has a pretty large sensing distance (85mm). So it can "power up" the card at a distance before getting close to the reader. To avoid large touch area causing accidental touches, places like vending machine requires you to keep your card within sensing area for up to 1 second before completing the transaction. reference: https://www.watch.impress.co.jp/docs/series/suzukij/1316685.html https://www.watch.impress.co.jp/docs/series/suzukij/1316685.... Speed test between magnetic ticket / IC Card / Credit Card https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gAQM5NNnCi4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gAQM5NNnCi4
• tiffanyh 1y ago
  > When I first read about the fact that the card stores its value on itself Buried the lede in case anyone missed it. When you cut out the network and are working with essentially exact amount cash, things can be processed fast.
• seanmcdirmid 1y ago
  I really wish China would go the IC approach rather than the QR code approach. Just tapping my phone in Tokyo was much easier than getting into Alipay and bringing up the QR code for metro use. Well, still better than the Seattle which still doesn’t support iPhone transit pay.
• miki123211 1y ago
  I wonder whether it is possible to make a fake card that generates a new key / ID / whatever on each use. If so, this would completely break the offline part of the system. You couldn't rely on hotlists of known-hacked cards any more, you'd need to check each (new) card with a central system to see if its key was ever actually issued to anybody. This is assuming there's an actual list of currently issued keys anywhere, if such a list doesn't exist, the whole system would be done for. The fact that some smartphones can emulate NFC-F doesn't help either. If a hacking technique is ever discovered, we can get from the system being fully secure, to anybody being able to issue themselves undetectable cards for any amount, in the matter of days. With counterfeit physical cards, you can at least try to shut down manufacturers and issue long prison sentences to the dealers selling them on the black market. The criminal activity has to happen in the country where the cards are used by definition, so that country can bring its law enforcement to bear. If all you have is an Android apk and some source code released by three guys in Russia, there's very little you can do. If such a system were designed in the 2020s, you could establish a CA-like system, where each card's key must be signed by a chain of certificates. This way, thoroughly hacking just one card wouldn't help, as its key could easily be revoked, and you couldn't issue new ones without hacking the (presumably airgapped) card manufacturing systems that contain the signing keys. I don't think a system from the late '80s does this, though.
• dmitrysergeyev 1y ago
  NYC subway tap-to-pay via Apple Pay is also instant. Like, actually, instant (<500ms)
• asimops 1y ago
  Since all Pixel phones have the FeliCa build in, I would have loved for GrapheneOS to just enable that in their builds for all phones. It would have been one patch to a library call, so that it always returns true. But I found an issue where the team sadly dicided against it :( I still loved the system when visiting Japan and would wish that Germany had something alike.
• vardai 1y ago
  Have you ever considered eliminating gates from public transport entirely, as is done in Vienna?
• commandersaki 1y ago
  Can't they protect the stored value in the card against manipulation by way of digital signature? Or does this not make sense because then readers controlled by 3rd parties would have the private key.
• grishka 1y ago
  I'm not sure about the speed argument. My city uses stored-value cards based on Mifare Classic and Mifare Plus (depending on the type of the ticket). If you live here and use the public transit with any regularity, you don't stop when you're going through the turnstile. The card validation isn't instant by any means, but it takes just enough time that you can plop your card on the reader as soon as you can reach it and keep walking, and it'll be done by the time you need to rotate the thingy that's in your way. On most stations, the bottleneck isn't the turnstiles, it's the escalators. On the security side, yeah, someone did exploit those Mifare key extraction vulnerabilities and make an app to clone cards and restore dumps. The system collates all data every night so if you mess with your ticket, it'll get banned. So you're getting one day of free rides at most, and forfeit the remaining balance and the cost of the card itself.
• abdullahkhalids 1y ago
  Late to the party. These cards are stored-value ones. And they seem to be very secure. Does this mean that the offline digital cash problem has been solved, as far as in-person customer to merchant payment system goes? You can trust an arbitrary person giving you money through the card just as well as if they gave you cash. Could you turn this into a pay-anyone-money using cards and card readers?
  • lyall 1y ago
    The whole system is quite tightly controlled by the transit companies (e.g. JR East). For example, your average payment terminal can take money off of a card but not load money onto it (refunds have to be done out of band). Loading money onto cards is more privileged, as it’s equivalent to printing money. One other limitation in place is that these transit cards have a limit of ¥20,000 (~140 USD) max that can be loaded on to them. So any transaction larger than that is out of the question. So to answer your question, no this isn’t really a person-to-person cash replacement. It’s a transit card that happens to be able to be used as an offline payment method, but it’s got various limitations and weirdness that prevent it from being something more.
    • abdullahkhalids 1y ago
      I am not saying this particular system is good enough for person-to-person cash. But.. The primary problems that digital cash has to solve is double-spending. Debit/credit cards solve this problem by confirming the transaction with the central server over the internet. Credits cards used to solve this problem by trusting that someone's signature could not be replicated, but this was obviously insecure. Some cryptocurrencies solve this problem by confirming transactions with a public distributed ledger. This system is solving the double-spend problem preventing the holder of the card from, as per OP, > cloning (can't read the keys) > a successful attack on another card (each card has its own keys) > replay attacks (per-session unique keys are generated in the challenge/response) So the secure enclave on these cards prevent double-spend. However, it seems like the card reading machine has to be trusted in the current implementation, because it can extract an arbitrary amount of cash from your card. This prevents arbitrary peer-to-peer transactions. But this seems like a much easier problem to solve.
• mmooss 1y ago
  Referring to the Osaifu-Keitai part of the article: > A lot of this is thanks to FelicaDude (Reddit, Twitter), an anonymous internet stranger who disappeared a few years ago but seems to have a lot of knowledge about how FeliCa works. I can't verify any of this information, but it makes sense to me; and anyway, there's no way someone would lie on the internet, right?
• Symbiote 1y ago
  > Compare the speed of passing through a ticket gate on the Underground to a Tokyo ticket gate The video in London is showing tourists/visitors, since they all have paper tickets and half of them are fumbling around. The Japanese video shows people familiar with the system. The Japanese gates are certainly faster, but not as much as shown.
• kccqzy 1y ago
  From the user experience perspective, the Bay Area Clipper card might be the closest to these IC cards in Asia. It's also a stored value card. The official Clipper app allows you to transfer the card to be an NFC card on the phone and inspect the value on it, entirely offline. (Of course to support the use case of automatically adding value to the card when it's below the threshold necessarily requires the fare reader to be internet connected, but such an internet connection is not on the critical path.) From my Apple Watch there is even no need to press any button to activate (unlike Apple Pay EMV transactions): just hold the watch next to the reader and it works. They are weirder than other public transport payment systems like Chicago CTA or NYC MTA, and are also more wonderful.
  • pkage 1y ago
    The DC Metro system operates similarly.
• hoppp 1y ago
  How is it compared to the Danish rejsekort? That works kind of similar, its very fast too
  • Symbiote 1y ago
    Japan's cards are faster and are accepted in convenience shops. However, in Denmark many passengers (commuters with weekly or longer tickets, people with smartphone tickets, people with paper tickets) don't need to do anything at all when they leave a train as there aren't any barriers, and that can't be beaten for speed.
• ZeroNietzsche 1y ago
  Japan's IC cards ARE weird and wonderful, a reason I have missed Japan (after only living there three months whilst working for my US-based employer) ever since the day I returned to this cesspit over two years ago.