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Comment This thread is hilarious (Score 1) 731

by MullerMn (#46219903) Attached to: Death Hovers Politely For Americans' Swipe-and-Sign Credit Cards
Next time there's a Slashdot story where the consensus among the wise, assembled community (who always have mysterious insight above and beyond the people behind the technology in question) is It'll-Never-Work, just remember this article.

We're talking about a technology that is 20 years old, deployed globally and (based on the complete absence of negative comments from current users) a universally accepted improvement upon the system it replaced.

And the running theme from the (let's face it : primarily American) contingent in the comments is It-Can-Never-Work, It's-Hopelessly-Flawed and What-Idiot-Invented-This.

Slashdot is a special place.

Comment Re:Tin foil hats! (Score 2) 731

by MullerMn (#46218425) Attached to: Death Hovers Politely For Americans' Swipe-and-Sign Credit Cards
For this to be a new system you need to travel back to 1992 when France adopted it.

Anyway, it can't ever be purely proximity based (like the contactless payments systems that you are presumably worried about) because it requires your PIN to authorise the transaction. Since its challenge/response there is presumably little benefit to eavesdropping on one transaction - you're not going to capture anything that will allow you to perform additional transactions in future.

Comment Re:One question (Score 2) 731

by MullerMn (#46217187) Attached to: Death Hovers Politely For Americans' Swipe-and-Sign Credit Cards
The first proper credit card in the US was 1958, the first outside the US was 1966 (according to Wikipedia). I'm not sure that an 8 year head start investment of infrastructure from 50 years ago is a plausible explanation.

It's easy to make excuses to save national face, but given the massive fraud reduction that chip and pin brings the likely result is that you have spent the last 10 years or so paying for the increased credit fraud in the US through charges or through increased interest rates on credit card debt.

Someone has dragged the process out for their own gain and they'll do it again next time round if you accept it.

Comment Re:Tin foil hats! (Score 2) 731

by MullerMn (#46217087) Attached to: Death Hovers Politely For Americans' Swipe-and-Sign Credit Cards
Chip and pin is not proximity based. You put your card in a handset and enter your pin to authorise the transaction like at a cashpoint. The handset never gets access to the PIN in the card, only the one you enter on the pad. It's genuinely surprising that there is still somewhere where this is not the standard. I can't remember the last time I had to sign for a card transaction.

Comment Preliminary injunction (Score 1) 211

by NewYorkCountryLawyer (#45924005) Attached to: Supreme Court To Hear Aereo Case
I guess it would take a litigator to notice this, but it's quite unusual that a preliminary injunction denial would be getting this kind of appellate attention.

In the first place, it was unusual for an interlocutory appeal to be granted from the denial of the preliminary injunction motion. In federal court usually you can only appeal from a final judgment.

Similarly, apart from the fact that it's always rare for a certiorari petition to be granted, it's especially tough where the appeal is not from a final judgment, but just from a preliminary injunction denial which does not dispose of the whole case.

Submission + - Google Books case dismissed on Fair Use Grounds

Submitted by NewYorkCountryLawyer
NewYorkCountryLawyer writes: In a case of major importance, the long simmering battle between the Authors Guild and Google has reached its climax, with the court granting Google's motion for summary judgment, dismissing the case, on fair use grounds. In his 30-page decision (PDF), Judge Denny Chin — who has been a District Court Judge throughout most of the life of the case but is now a Circuit Court Judge — reasoned that, although Google's own motive for its "Library Project" (which scans books from libraries without the copyright owners' permission and makes the material publicly available for search), is commercial profit, the project itself serves significant educational purposes, and actually enhances, rather than detracts from, the value of the works, since it helps promote sales of the works. Judge Chin also felt that it was impossible to use Google's scanned material, either for making full copies, or for reading the books, so that it did not compete with the books themselves.

Submission + - Aereo required to testify about non-public patent info

Submitted by NewYorkCountryLawyer
NewYorkCountryLawyer writes: In ABC v Aereo, a copyright infringement action against Aereo, the Magistrate Judge has overruled Aereo's attorney/client privilege objection to being forced to divulge non-public details about its patented technology. In his 15 page decision (PDF) he ordered the continued deposition of the company's CTO and CEO about their patent applications. My gut reaction is that this sets a very dangerous precedent, giving the big copyright plaintiffs yet another 'in terrorem' device to use against technology startups — the power to use the lawsuit as a chance to delve into a defendant's non-public tech secrets.

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