Re: 'Bout time (Score 1)

Back in the 1980's the European phone network was a lot less reliable than the North American one so Europe needed various systems for off line validation of card charges, hence the wide spread use of smart cards. In North America vendors could all use online terminals to verify the validity of the mag stripe cards so there ws no need for costly smart cards. Current Chip and PIN systems are not as secure as people think as there was a major problem a few years ago in the UK where people were being charged with fraud for contesting various charges made on their chip and PIN cards which were assumed to be secure. Turns out a compromised point of sale terminal could get all the information necessary to make additional transactions without the card or re-input of the users' PIN. So yeah, if you own the point of sale system you own the cards. Chip and PIN would not have helped Target.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/tec...

BTW the E carrier is faster than T carrier because the AT&T engineers didn't want the phone company to sell the housekeeping bandwidth so they reduced the number of bits available for housekeeping so that it could not support an additional voice channel. Turns out their fears were justified as in Europe the extra housekeeping channel was quickly just turned into an extra data channel and the their engineers were left with nothing.