4 ms·

Sorry, but I'm not impressed. It's a credit card reader and an iPhone app. Yeah, nice and tiny and all, but there's absolutely nothing new or revolutionary here

by teilo 17y ago

Sorry, but I'm not impressed. It's a credit card reader and an iPhone app. Yeah, nice and tiny and all, but there's absolutely nothing new or revolutionary here. The buying experience is not going to change for the better until we can do this stuff with a quick swipe (for lack of a better word, since magstrips are definitly NOT the way to do this) and a thumbprint for a signature, with cryptographically signed receipts automatically emailed to your pre-registered address, or posted to an account on a website where you can retrieve them later, or auto-import them into your accounting software. Blip. Press. Done. THAT will be impressive.

johns 17y ago
This is PayPal for 'real life'. Eventually they could remove the need for the scanner and just let people bump to pay (with the appropriate security caveats). That's huge.
TheSOB88 17y ago
Thumbprints on the seller's machine would be useless; they could just save the data. What we really need is the buyer authenticating and somehow notifying the middleman that they want to buy stuff.
- teilo 17y ago
  Just about as useless as, say, a signature? You are making an incorrect assumption about signatures: They are there to verify or dispute that you authorized a purchase, if necessary, after the fact. The whole point is that the vendor saves the data, because it is his proof that you were there. Signatures are about managing by exception, because it is impractical to do anything else. Biometric signing, properly implemented, is far more secure than a signature. Consider: * POS system grabs biometric data and encodes it. * POS system transmits the biometric data to the bank, who returns a cryptographically signed timestamp. * Biometric signature, authorization, and timestamp are then bundled together and cryptographically signed by the vendor. This becomes the receipt. * Vendor stores the result locally as proof of sale. Customer receive the same as proof of sale. Thus, the bank, for the first time, has actual proof of the presence of a customer. This makes the signature stronger. Also, vendor and customer both have much stronger proof of transaction to dispute / verify same. No system is impossible to subvert. Low-level man-in-the-middle hardware/firmware hacks are always possible. But with some variant of the above, the buying process can be both swift, and much more secure than it is now.

by teilo 17y ago

johns 17y ago

This is PayPal for 'real life'. Eventually they could remove the need for the scanner and just let people bump to pay (with the appropriate security caveats). That's huge.

TheSOB88 17y ago

Thumbprints on the seller's machine would be useless; they could just save the data. What we really need is the buyer authenticating and somehow notifying the middleman that they want to buy stuff.

teilo 17y ago
Just about as useless as, say, a signature? You are making an incorrect assumption about signatures: They are there to verify or dispute that you authorized a purchase, if necessary, after the fact. The whole point is that the vendor saves the data, because it is his proof that you were there. Signatures are about managing by exception, because it is impractical to do anything else. Biometric signing, properly implemented, is far more secure than a signature. Consider: * POS system grabs biometric data and encodes it. * POS system transmits the biometric data to the bank, who returns a cryptographically signed timestamp. * Biometric signature, authorization, and timestamp are then bundled together and cryptographically signed by the vendor. This becomes the receipt. * Vendor stores the result locally as proof of sale. Customer receive the same as proof of sale. Thus, the bank, for the first time, has actual proof of the presence of a customer. This makes the signature stronger. Also, vendor and customer both have much stronger proof of transaction to dispute / verify same. No system is impossible to subvert. Low-level man-in-the-middle hardware/firmware hacks are always possible. But with some variant of the above, the buying process can be both swift, and much more secure than it is now.