For decades, the magnetic stripe has been ubiquitous on everything from credit cards to tickets to ID badges. But the BBC reports — unsurprisingly — that the mag stripe’s days are numbered. Between smartphones, QR codes, and RFID, there’s just less demand for the venerable technology.
IBM invented the stripe back in the early 1960s. The engineer responsible, [Forrest Parry], was also involved in developing the UPC code. While working on a secure ID for the CIA, his wife suggested using an iron to melt a strip of magnetic tape onto the card. The rest is history.
The new technology rapidly took over, and by 1969, in the United States, there was a standard that has remained largely unchanged. The BBC post notes that a card reader in 1970 could read a credit card out of your pocket today if it still had a magnetic stripe. Infamously, IBM’s CEO at the time was not a fan, reportedly because “Mom doesn’t like credit cards.”
So, while you’ll still find mag stripes on a few cards here and there, in a few years, they’ll probably vanish completely. Don’t worry! You can still make your own. Don’t have a reader? Grab a flatbed scanner.
Hmm… The card readers at my local grocery store (West Coast USA) consistently fail to read the chip on my debit card (they only take debit or cash) 3 times in a row causing it to fall back to the mag stripe. The cashiers behave like this is a frequent problem, so I don’t think I’m the only one having this problem. Neither my card nor the readers support tap to pay. All of my cards have mag stripes and I would be surprised to receive one without a stripe. I also suspect a fair number of gas pumps are still stripe based, because they usually have to replace the entire pump to upgrade to chip and pin. I suspect that rumors of the mag stripes demise are a little premature.
Not sure why we went through all the effort to switch from stripes to chips in the first place, honestly. Stripes are quicker to use (no 3-second delay before you can pull your card out), and seeing as they’re the fallback option when the chip reader fails, it seems like they’re more reliable as well. I suppose they could theoretically get demagnetized, but I’ve never had that happen. Not to mention the security nightmare that is tap-to-pay. Honestly it just seems like tech for tech’s sake.
Chips are much harder to clone than a mag strip.
Duh.
For me it’s very much the other way around.
I started wondering some 15 to 20 years ago why those insecure magnetic things still worked at all for money transfers.
For how long have scammers been adding (magnetic) card readers to ATM machines?
ATM machines is redundant, as ATM stands for Automated Telling Machine
Well, it did help in distinguishing it from the old network protocol. Considering the audience here.
B^)
It’s because the magnetic stripe can be copied. That’s how cards are cloned. Contact chip and tap-to-pay can’t be cloned.
It’s true that the wireless is a security risk. A big antena (possibly masked as a different large object) can read the card in your pocket from a few meters away, but the transaction must be done while the card is still in range. An attacker cannot read the card and use it later, like they do with the magnetic strip. Also, there are metal card holders that prevent reading the card while in your pocket.
Putting a piece of copper of aluminimum sheet material with the same size as your bank card in between the other cards should give a lot of dampening and make it more difficult to read such cards remotely.
If you’re really troubled by this possibility, there are also cards that are especially designed to thwart unintended reading attempts. They send back random data when any reading attempt is made, and thus corrupting the data that could be send from any other card.
Yes it can with flipper zero.
This is why most wallets have faraday cages inside them now. They are all RFID proof
Tap to pay is way more secure than a magstripe ever is. I can clone your magstripe in seconds, but there’s no way I can clone your tap-to-pay transaction. It’s a one off signing exercise.
In the UK at least, contactless and chip & pin are the norm; magstripe requiring places are basically none. I can even use my banking app to disable the magstripe on my card (basically it’ll reject any magstripe-authorised transactions). I’ve had it disabled on my card for 8 years now without issue, only needing to enable it on a trip to NYC.
The pandemic even hastened the decline of cash-only transactions in the UK, so contactless is accepted basically everywhere one wishes to pay, even in taxis, pop-up shops and a coffee kiosk in the middle of a forest walk near me, miles from everything.
Thanks for pointing out you can do that! Time to check all my cards, I don’t think I’ve ever used the magstripe but in fairness I don’t think I’ve used my card in months now phones support tap to pay.
I have seen use of magstripe only in US, before I thought that chip cards cannot use it for payment… What a shock for me.
Why is tap a security nightmare? Sure, bump it, it gets charged. Once. They can’t steal the card number and repeatedly use it. Tap and pin would be an ideal solution in my book. Tap solves the 3 second delay, pin resolves the misc hobo trying to tap your card.
As for grocery stores always having busted chip readers, I can see why. People slam cards into them like there is no tomorrow. Plastic cards, metal cards, cards with stickers/covers. Tap to pay? Next to no wear on the reader.
Two-factor authentication is significantly more secure than single factor authentication, and chip cards have the technology to perform two-factor authentication through chip-and-PIN transactions. In Europe, chip-and-PIN cards were significantly more secure than magstripe-and-signature cards in the US. Debit cards in the US using magstripe-and-PIN transactions had the same advantage, but PINs are inconvenient.
We compromised by switching from magstripe-and-signature to chip-and-signature, which physically looks like the more secure chip-and-PIN cards, without the actual inconvenience of being more secure.
See also: The effects of cell phone calls on accident rates vs the effects of holding on to an object. Holding on to an object has almost no effect, while communicating over a cell phone has significant detrimental effect. Banning cell phone calls while driving is inconvenient, so we just ban holding on to the cell phone.
If you spend any time near magnets, you wouldn’t see this as a theoretical issue. I had to get new cards every couple of months for years, chip-and-pin means my credit cards continue to work long after the stripe is erased.
It’s also not cloneable like magnetic strips are. This is a VERY good thing!
Tap-to-pay is SO much more secure. What are you talking about? I’ll give you a pass if you’re older but like Gen X or younger, your devices make a virtual card number to keep your information secure. Do your research before you try to make yourself seem like an expert.
Odd that America can’t make this well established, well tested, technology work, when the rest of the world has no problem. Pretty sure the only reason cards issued in the UK still have a mag stripe on them is for visiting the US, haven’t seen one used in at least a decade and many readers in shops no longer have the mag reader in them.
Have you never been to the US? Chip and pin is the norm here and outside of Walmart for some reason NFC is always there. I haven’t used a magstripe card in 10 years.
The only reason magstripe is still a thing is because we have more banks and credit unions than some nations have citizens. We’re not like the UK where you only have 3-4 banks to choose from.
They’re backup for power failures and cyberattacks.
Im only 45, but I’ve experienced purchasing items during a network outage, and the store owner had to bust out the carbon copy machine.
A power outage would also knock out the magstripe since it’s on the same terminal though. I think it’s just because there’s so many banks here it takes them a long time to all update to new standards. I mean look how long embroidered cards stuck around (and for some banks still do). Then again carbon copy machines are still sometimes used so I guess they could explain that particular quirk.
How will magnetic stripes help in an outrage ?
Walmart wants you to be inconvenienced by not being able to tap to pay so that you’re more likely to get the Walmart app and use that instead.
lol. chip+pin isn’t the norm anywhere in the US. chip+signature is, but that’s a different ball wax (and a very stupid one).
But we do have thousands of banks and other institutions that issue payment cards, and the smaller ones (and their customer merchants) haven’t caught up.
Chip and sign?
No. Not the norm in the US. Chip and hit “OK” for most transactions under $50. Walmart uses Chip and pin for anything over $50. So does almost every place else except gas stations.
As for the whole Chip and sign thing, the terminal accepts a squiggly line for a signature so anyone could grab your card, run it as credit, squiggle a line, and buy a high ticket item before you realize your card is gone.
I don’t see the point of needing magnetic stripes because of having multiple bank.
Magnetic stripes is really a US thing. Never used or needed it in Europe for 30 years.
Never saw the chip failed ever once.
The US is about 15 years behind in payment tech – here in australia I had this exact same problem way back then when chip first came in, readers would be really fussy about my card so I’d need to fall back to magstripe practically every time.
But now we’ve been on tap and pay for maybe a decade, and it’s been great. And after phones got the capability my entire card is purely a fallback for the vanishingly rare instance where my phone battery is flat.
“a fallback for the vanishingly rare instance where my phone battery is flat”
or when the screen is broken because you’ve dropped it…
or when you’ve sat on it
or when it fails to function because of some silly update (and everybody in the queue behind you needs to wait for your phone to reboot)
or when you’ve lost your phone… (because when some people loose their phones they instantly are thrown back into the stone age)
or when some smart hacker has found a way to make something that is believed to be “secure” has been compromised (payment methods should de dedicated hardware)
the rare instance when the battery is flat, will become less “rare” as soon as it’s two years old and the charging connector starts to fail. Wireless charging is an option, but instead of making a very complicated non contact option to charge a phone, shouldn’t they invest in designing a proper connector. For instance my decades old power outlets in the entire house have never failed me, so I know the technology exists, no need to make some silly 6-% efficiency charging contraption when all you need is two simple pins.
you can’t use the phone, since you’re in an important call that cannot be interrupted
TIP1: don’t store you payment card in your phone case
TIP2: always carry some form of cash, a big payment terminal failure might leave you stranded for several hours.
Assuming you’re talking about USB-C and not Lightning, I’ve never seen a problem with a USB-C socket. To the point my macbook dropped about 50cm and landed smack on the USB-C plug. The plug howled in pain, the Macbook howled in heat. Removed the cable to see a sad bent USB-C plug. Looked at the socket and it was in perfect condition. I had the same USB-C phone (Samsung s8) for about 6 years and in the end the battery was getting weak but the USB-C connector was 100% reliable still.
Only recently got into mobile NFC payments, which meant I could leave my wallet at home and go the beach with just my phone. If the phone had an issue it wasn’t too far to get the wallet, but there never was an issue. Updates are offered and I can choose when to install them, why would I think to install an update when I need to use the phone?
Usb-c is better yet somehow my fiancee still managed to bust his charging port on his Samsung phone after a year and a half , i bought him a dock n told him to stop plugging the dumb thing in
“I’ve never seen a problem with a USB-C socket”
I had one break twice. One within 1 month of use. Another after 6 months. I was very careful. These things are just too flimsy and small. Bigger is better.
I got Samsung Pay on phone and watch…phone has been very reliable but every time when Watch Samsung Pay gets updated it forgets my info and I have to call Samsung…They tell me, it’s my bank but after I put my card # in, it would verify permissions…Samsung fixes it somehow but it s real annoying
FYI my phone is now 5 years old, and is still working perfectly fine. Some people mistreat their devices, I’m not one of them.
And just because it’s in my phone doesn’t mean the payment system isn’t using dedicated hardware nor that it’s guaranteed to be cracked.
No talented black hat is going to waste time and money mounting single card transaction attacks, because it’s so much easier and more profitable to attack the weak link in the chain – the human. Why spend thousands of hours to develop an attack that nets you $100 when you can scam someone out of $500,000 over a phone call in one day?
The only reason credit card fraud existed in the first place is because there was effectively no security, so even the dumbest criminal could get a skimmer cheaply and make some money. But that is no longer the case with modern payment tech.
“a fallback for the vanishingly rare instance where my phone battery is flat”
Spoiler, phone batteries are always flat, if they refuse to stay flat (and start to bulge) you should begin to worry.
Now all you have to do is keep 3billion hackers out of you phone
No, the US is not 15 years behind in payment tech. I’ve been paying with NFC since Google Wallet was Google Wallet. Some banks here are behind, sure, but we have more banks than some nations have citizens so it takes time for all those banks to catch up. We don’t have just 3-4 banks to choose from like Australia or the UK. Then again I haven’t gotten a card that wasn’t equipped a chip and NFC (outside of my FSA card) for at least 10 years.
You’re behind. Deal with it.
“The cashiers behave like this is a frequent problem, so I don’t think I’m the only one having this problem.”
Sounds like a problem with their payment terminal, not the cards of customers. I never had a problem with my chip. I think they need to clean the contacts of their terminal or replace their terminal.
“I think they need to clean the contacts of their terminal or replace their terminal”
I know exactly what you mean and let’s be honest. How many customers a day use these terminals, if they all stick their “dirty” card in the machine, the filth builds up and it is just a matter of time before the contacts become unreliable. Contactless is a huge improvement on that part. At my local supermarket it was a game changer.
This is definitely part of the issue. I’ve had bad reads where I pull my card out, wipe the contacts and put it back in and all is well. I’ve yet to have a chip card straight up break. I have had instances where one reader will not take the chip and I have to swipe. But then an hour later at the next store it reads perfectly fine.
I don’t understand why is it so hard for the US to catch up with these things, when here in supposedly backwards Latin America most payment innovations just work and have been for years now. You invented these things for God’s sake.
Exactly. Canadian banks continue to support the mag-stripe only because Canadians need to be able to use their cards in the US.
Well, let’s think about it. It’s reasonably reliable given the simplicity – better than the chips usually since they get dirty – and yet unlike nfc, it can’t really be read without you knowing. It doesn’t contain any information that isn’t printed or punched on the card where anyone can see it, so security wise it’s not actually the worst method currently supported. You can charge a card just by entering the information you read off the sides of it, and while the card owner just has to report a fraudulent charge and be issued a new one if that happens, a modern security camera or a good memory is all it takes to accumulate card info.
Plus it works for loyalty cards and things; you get to put your logo all across instead of a QR code or something and it will still read if it’s a bit dirty but not demagnetized. Of course people like to consolidate into their phones now, but I’ve had enough network outages, issues with my phone, issues with someone’s payment processing, etc that having them run it on trust can beat having to grab cash.
You pointed out one of the flaws of magstripe. “This increased risk of fraud means payment processing companies charge merchants higher credit card fees for transactions that are completed with a magstripe.”
Most of my loyalty cards have always had barcodes or QR codes.
Does it really matter if your backup method is slightly less efficient? It doesn’t reveal anything unless you swipe it, and at least you have some chance of spotting a skimmer. Plus you can erase it after receiving the card if you don’t like the tradeoff. I appreciate the average security benefit of making single transactions with chip or tap instead of giving someone all the details to charge as many times as they want, but it really doesn’t bother me to have the backup option. With our convention in restaurants of letting someone walk off with your card, we’re obviously not trying very hard.
Requiring a PIN with the swipe would be nice though; at least then you need something other than the card, and hopefully you could change the pin periodically so that people who you previously bought from no longer know it. Could apply to the online use too, where otherwise there’s not much protection. If you couldn’t just charge a card by reading what’s written on it, then maybe not being able to swipe it would be more of a priority.
I guess some of my loyalty ones were the little keychain kind with a barcode and small print on one side and the logo on the other. Gift cards and other things with some greater meaning were at least stripes, but after that I think they just went with apps, or some NFC when it was meant to be more permanent or identifying and less marketing sales fluff.
The US was a relatively early adopter of card-based payment terminals, so we had a ton of legacy infrastructure in place by the time EMV chips were introduced.
Coupled with the country’s geographic size (and the commensurate number of brick-and-mortar locations operated by large chains), retailers were reluctant to invest in new equipment and software on such a large scale.
When high-profile data breaches generated negative publicity – and card issuers began shifting fraud liability to merchants – companies were finally incentivized to upgrade their systems.
The emerging popularity of contactless payments (years after cards with standalone NFC chips failed to catch on) also spurred adoption, given that modern chips and card readers supporting NFC invariably support EMV as well.
I don’t remember the last time I used a credit/debit card’s magnetic stripe, so I think we’ve largely caught up. (I wish I could say that about American society as a whole.)
We have literally thousands of banks here that all have to make changes to update to new standards. That’s not a situation you see anywhere else. Look at any “Google Wallet has added new banks” post and 99% of the article is small/local banks in the US.
Mag stripes are going away. I haven’t had an instance where mine has failed in years. Once places can’t fall back on magnetic stripes they will fix their readers.
It’d really suck if your $400 grocery shopping got held up by a faulty chip reader and no longer had a magnetic stripe as a backup. From what I understand, Walmart throws out any perishables if it has been out of the cooler as there’s no way to tell how long it’s been out.
If the magnetic stripes were removed for good and the chip reader goes hur dur, a lot of shoppers would be forced to abandon their shopping and Walmart could start seeing massive food loss pile up. Although with Walmart pushing Walmart+ and online shopping with curb side pickup, they may close the building to public and require everyone to shop online and pay first to avoid broken card reader issues.
Where country do you live in ?
In France I never saw anybody swiping a card for 30 years. Chip+pin for everyone.
Well clearly if John Q Rando here hasn’t seen it, it must not happen.
It sounds like your store needs to step up and get their chip reader fixed/cleaned.
You have to be very careful in those instances. People often break the chip readers in order to get you to run the card through the strip reader so that the magnetic strip can be easily copied and fake duplicates of your card can then be made snd used at retail locations.
Most gas pumps support pin and tap to pay. They finally hit a deadline where failure to upgrade would result in much higher liability for fraudulent transactions.
It seems almost like there’s a correlation between terminals that have chip reading problems and not supporting tap to pay.
And when magstripe goes away, they’ll have to fix their equipment. The magstripe fallback is the only reason their stuff is still broken.
All of you arguing about chip vs mag stripe, yo Im 35 and i still use checks….i like old school lol
Stripe? Or strip?
The Title Photo reminded me of the mag stripe cards used by some HP and TI calculations of the latter 1970s.
The ironing story reminds me of people cutting up mag tape gluing sections to cardboard and using an iron to transfer data from legitimate BART tickets to get free rides on the San Francisco transit system.
Actually mag stripes were used on more than the lowly credit card…it was used in accounting machines as well. NCR (National Cash Register) had a large mechanical bank accounting machine back in the 60s called either the class 23 or 39 and 59 (I believe). Large ledger cards (8×8 ?) with your printed account totals on it had a mag stripe running down the back. Say you made a deposit to your account. The accountant would take your personal account ledger from a file drawer and insert it into what looked like a giant adding machine. The card would be sucked in and the mag stripe would be read with your current balance. That data would be saved on an early hard disk holding 30 bits of data (I think) that was a 1/4 inch thick and rotated around 300 rpm and also in mechanical gear memory. The operator would index your deposit and it would be added to the data in gear memory like a large adding machine and the the “hard disk” would be updated. As the operator inputed deposits and withdrawals the “adding machine” would print these on the ledger card. When all entries were completed the operator would press a key that would cause the ledger card to go up and down several times rewriting the mag stripe with previous balance, deposit/withdrawal information and the new balance. Your ledger card would then be put back in your file. This accounting machine was based on R-T-L (resistor transistor logic). I saw one in use in late ’79 when I was on a team to replace it with a new in house mainframe, online teller terminals, and MICR check processing/sorting equipment.
The old tech discussion reminds me of when I worked as “stock” clerk in a bank proof and transit department in the 1970s. I’m not sure that department exists these days at most banks because tellers are equipped with POS terminals which read the MICR routing and account number on checks, then inscribe the dollar amount in MICR and put the bank endorsement stamp on the back.
The department where I worked received bundles of checks from tellers brought in several times a day by couriers. There were 32 IBM 1260 inscribing machines which were about the size of a large refrigerator laid on its side. An operator had to visually read the Federal Reserve routing number and press a button to select which Fed district, from memory, where that check should go. The Dollar amount was visually read and keyed in. Finally the operator would drop the check in and the machine would stamp the MICR, endorse the back and send the check to a stacker pocket.
Periodically someone from the platform room would come by with a cart to unload stackers for taking to two huge IBM readers which could read several thousand checks a minute.
The IBM 1260s were loud because there was a ton of mechanical works inside run from a half horse motor. There were boards of 1960s era square silver IBM SLT (solid logic technology) integrated circuits. The programming for the machine was a wire plugboard. The memory was about the size of a pizza box. Inside the memory box there was a large spiral spring which was an acoustic delay line which recirculated bits. If the cart person from the platform room bumped hard enough into a 1260, the memory would be scrambled and the operator might have to re-run an hour or more work.
There was almost no networking. The operation was extremely manual labor intensive. The communication with the Federal Reserve was our courier driving the bank’s AMC Gremlin with bags full of checks to the Fed facility once a day. The only thing resembling networking was a TWX Teletype used to manually type wire transfers.
I almost forgot. The Gremlin full of checks also took a locked case of several reels of nine track tapes which were produced on the IBM 360 mainframe from the data supplied by the check reading machines. The tapes were the electronic representation of the paper checks in the shipment.
Very cool info bro, damn times have changed.
At least in the USA, cards are still being issued with magnetic strips. I still remember cards being issued with embossed lettering well into the early 2000s. Though I haven’t seen an old manual embossed card swiper since the 1990s.
I’m European and I have never seen an embossed card swiper here – only time was in 1994 when visiting the US, and the only in a very remote gas station, but my new credit card still comes with a magstripe and embossed letters.
Some banks here have an ATM behind a door so at night, only one person can use the ATM, that door opens with a magstripe reader, though I know that any magstripe (at least, the IKEA card) will do.
We had them here in the UK until I guess the 1990s, but they went from ubiquitous to gone in a matter of a couple of years.
They used to be very common in the 70s when credit card and bank card started becoming common. The last time I saw one was when I bought some trading cards some 20 years ago. They changed to magnetic reader not long after that.
I had to use the physical embossed letter swiper in Europe once. It was like from another world experience. Year 2008. Location: a restaurant in Santorini. Their payment system was out of order and we didn’t have cash with us.
I miss those old embossed card swipers!
Why?
He embossed card readers started going away in the 90s because it was easier to just extend the receipt tape, place the card underneath, and rub something over the top to emboss the info.
We used a credit card imprinter in the hotel business as recently as 2018. At our hotel, we had to shut our entire system down nightly and it took about a half hour for it to come back up. If someone came in to check in during that time, we would take an imprint of their card and call the credit card company to authorize it. Literally just last night, the power went out at our hotel and we had no way to run cards, we just handed out room keys anyway and once things were back online, it turned out that 2 separate groups didn’t have a way to pay. I wish we still had this as a fallback
All of my CCs are still embossed. Just got a replacement last year.
I remember when my Samsung S4 had MST simulating a magnetic strip.
https://www.theverge.com/2021/1/14/22231392/samsung-pay-mst-feature-discontinued-galaxy-s21
I was shocked to find out they still use this obsolete technology in the USA. When I was there a few years ago they couldn’t swipe my card because the magnetic stripe was damaged (I haven’t used a magnetic stripe in over half a decade). Also it’s weird they kidnap your card and take it to the back. In Europe they bring the wireless payment terminals to your table. Why are they so much behind there?
Um, to be fair, here in German part of Europe we used to be quite behind as well.
Before Corona, paying via credit cards or bank cards was hit and miss.
Sometimes, we couldn’t use them for bills lower than 10€.
That’s because shop owners or bar owners were somewhat unwilling to pay transactional fees for the card terminal.
So you had to have enough cash with you in your purse.
If you had not, depending on the situation, the shop or bar owner would either call the police or send you to the next ATM down the street,
rather than to just allow you to use his/her card terminal to pay your dept.
Very social.
Credit cards.. Credit cards were well known to our banks for ages, but they hesitated to provide them to us.
Travelling was an good argument to get a credit card.
Otherwise, we were limited to our bank cards (debit cards?) in daily life.
‐ Or the rarely used “Geldkarte” (money card) which worked in offline locations, like trams.
Our debit cards had used EC system, Euro Cash/formerly Eurocheque, for a long time until it got deprecated in favor of things like V-PAY (Visa Pay) or Maestro.
The latter have been introduced by banks to limit us citizens further, or so it seems.
The term giro card also appeard somewhen in the 2000s..
Banks are seemingly paranoid and afraid that money gets stolen in neighbor countries, so they impose higher limitations with the intent that they don’t have to be responsible if something goes wrong.
Speaking under correction, though.
It hasn’t changed much after corona though. Coming from the Netherlands where you can pay with your debit card or phone everywhere, a lot of places even refusing cash, and then going to Germany is like going back in time.
Cash is still king, and I even still get 1 and 2 cents as change over there. I don’t think that’ll change anytime soon, at least not outside the major cities
Well, you can now pay things in super market (Penny etc) via debit card no matter the price.
About the time travel thing.. Well, yes and no, it depends I’d say.
Cash is still king because it means freedom/democracy and is anonymous.
You can get your loan or pension at the bank counter or ATM and then use it the way you like.
There’s no financial institute involved anymore past this step, if you use cash.
Also, physical money is special. You can touch it, feel it. That makes it more real and causes a deeper relationship.
I think that’s among the reasons why citizens do like to keep using cash here.
But yes, it would be nice to have other methods of payment at disposal.
Especially if the next ATM or bank is far away.
If I had to go to a place were I couldn’t pay in cash, I’d feel like if I had ended up in some sort of sci-fi dystopia.
I would definitely like to have the option to pay in cash anytime, no matter how or less something costs.
Likewise, I find it strange that some countries nolonger have a fax machine in daily life, not even as part of a multi function device.
That thought is really mindblowing.
I mean, it’s not even 25 years ago that the fax got mainstream here.
It should be as normal as the landline phone or fresh tap water.
In the 90s, the fax had just started to become popular in places like family homes and pizza houses.
I remember children TV shows from that era that explain3d use of the fax machine and how it belongs to modern era of telecommunications,
just like ISDN had been perceived as fururistic at the time.
In the 90s, computer modems had been advertised with data/fax compatibility, fax software for Windows 3.1 and DOS was very popular.
Courts and city administrations had used fax since the 80s, at least, of course.
Because, what else do you do if no fax machine is available?
E-Mail? That’s a joke, it’s not a legally approved medium.
We had De-Mail and E-Post, but they didn’t catch on?
So what remains? Printing the documents out and take a train ride/car travel to the client or use a carrier pidgeon?
WhatsApp messages with snapshots of documents?
Seriously, I don’t understand why some people try to even get rid of fax in this country.
It’s the only thing fast and reliable there is. If we get rid of the fax, we’re back to early 20th century.
You seriously must never have been responsible for maintaining the telephone system at any modern organization.
Fax doesn’t “just work”. You have to do a LOT of really annoying stuff to make it work, all of which is fragile and fiddly.
It’s only still even supported because, in some legal contexts, a fax is, as per court precedent, sufficient, and no other sufficient option is cheap or easy to arrange.
I recently heard from my successor at that company that, except for working with medical records, everything else the company does can finally now be done via actual direct email rather than via fax, so the last T.38 adaptor finally was disposed of. There was a small party in the IT department that day.
It’s true that creditcard support in Europe is pretty bad. Especially in the Netherlands. However creditcards are an obsolete technology and not supporting it is not being behind in my opinion.
I’ve never experienced not being able to pay for things by card under 10€. Sometimes they charge a 0.10€ fee, but I no longer see that.
Part of the reason the US is behind is because they used to be so much ahead. US had a huge installed base of non-wireless mag stripe reading credit card terminals from before wireless and before chip cards. So for decades, the procedure was to take your card back to where the terminal was, because thats where the phone line and power outlet was. And eventually this was tied into the software the used such as aloha so now there was a full on pc at the server station instead ot a stand alone credit card terminal.
The fact that the US very heavily invested in an early credit card technology, meant that it was much harder for them to change as newer tech came out. Eventually visa and mastercard had to change the rules around fraud liability to force both the merchants and issuer to adopt smart cards. And even then there was a lot of reluctance for merchants to spend hundreds of dollars getting new credit card machines. In 2014 I was working on a product that would allow a chip read pin pad to connect to older credit card terminals to support chip read cards because it would be less than half the cost of a new terminal.
This is true in other domains as well. Much of New Zealand, for example, never had wired telephones. Instead, the jumped straight to cell phones. Thus the US still has lots and lots of telephone poles, but they are unknown in areas that jumped over wired phones into wireless phones.
That’s wild! Are there stationary phones in New Zealand, at least?
Maybe using cellular technology, using SIM cards?
Like those battery-operated “stationary phones” that construction workers use in their construction trailer on a construction site?
Because to me it’s hard to imagine that in 21th century some office desks do have PCs on them, but no stationary phone.
Do the people in New Zealand not have cable modems or DSL modems with a VOIP capable router? So they can use a DECT phone or an analog wired phone?
Please excuse my ignorance. I’m just curious. I’ve never been there yet.
Bro goes to maybe one city and thinks that’s representative of the 3rd largest country in the world. Or he’s lying. Nowhere, and I mean nowhere, I’ve eaten out of 10+ states has taken my card anywhere. You either pay up front, there’s a terminal on the table to complete payment, or you’re able to pay with an app. I’ve maybe had to have my card taken back once in the past 5 years and that’s because they neglected to charge up the payment terminal at my table.
I’ve been to 4 states. Never had to pay up front in a restaurant. Never seen a wireless terminal. Maybe they suddenly changed everything in the last 2 years. We have had different experiences.
Hm. The magnet stripe and the embossing on credit cards were useful for taxi rides, maybe.
Because taxi drivers often couldn’t make use of the chip.
Probably because the chip requires an online connection to the bank.
Chip transactions can totally be done offline (aka stand in mode). All the communication with the chip happens before there is any message sent to the gateway.
There is something iconic to the act of swiping the card.
It was like a metaphorical knife cutting into your bank account as you slowly bleed yourself financially dry with every purchase…
I love that analogy! It’s so spot on, I think! 😃
I love how some cardboard membership cards I have come with a black strip at the back, which is definitely not a magstripe, but just looks like the part.
I found out recently from my barber that the rates are different for mag swipe, chip, and tap. Chip is evidently the most expensive, followed by tap, then mag swipe. He was using a mag swipe for all his transactions for that reason.
There’s agreements with all the major credit card companies that businesses are responsible for any fraudulent charges with mag swipe, because it’s so insecure. It makes sense it could be cheaper when not accounting for fraud on the bank’s side.
The fees could be related to who’s responsible for fraud. If you take payment via a fraudulent mag stripe then I believe you are liable as you chose the insecure method, but as you are willing to take the risk so the fee is lower.
Meanwhile chip fraud is pretty much 0 thus no risk to you, but instead a higher fee for the ‘peace of mind’. Sounds almost mafia like :)
Contactless fraud is somewhat possible, in the simplest case somebody steals your wallet and taps your card before you have chance to cancel it. I don’t see how that could be the fault of the retailer though.
They could ask to see photo id to verify your name is the same as on the card.
Cloned magstripe cards can have whatever name you wish printed on the card (likely one matching your fake ID). Yes the magstripe contains your name, but that’s not visible as part of the transaction.
Sure it wasn’t the other way around? For us, it is tap being cheapest, followed by chip, with swiping being VASTLY higher, typically a full percent more. As the first two are more secure, their rates are lower, whereas Bob with his $60 amazon card cloner can copy your swipe card in 30 seconds.
The card brand/tier also matters. Amex charges higher rates than most to earn back some of the promos they offer. Amex gold cards cost us more than a everyday cash card.
I’ve had three cards that have the mag strip, chip and RFID. Never had to use the mag strip but all three cards the RFID function stopped working. Half the time the chip has issues reading so I now rub the chip contacts with my thumb before inserting the card.
Recently I got a new gas card. The old one used a mag strip and was quick. The new card uses a chip and takes a whole 1.2 minutes to use. I’m talking about from inserting to removal.
Engineer Parry’s lab assistant during the first mag stripe test: “Swipe, Forrest! Swipe!”
The problem with all payment readers (mag stripe and chip) is that the businesses NEVER clean them. The manufacturers recommend using a cleaning card at least once a week. You can buy cleaning kits at most office supply stores. Just spray the cleaning card with some alcohol and run it through the reader a few times.
You can read a mag stripe card with some iron powder mixed with alcohol in a spray bottle and a cheap magnifying glass The bit density is very low and nothing is encrypted just plain numbers with a header and trailer.
Funny that here in Brazil we simply do not use the stripe. The machines have the slot, the cards have the stripe but is not used at all (I slid my card’s stripe for the first time ever when in the USA in 2011). Chip is the way to go, and more recently tap to pay.
I lived in Tokyo in the late 80s. You could buy a telephone card with a magnetic stripe to make international phone calls on pay phones that were everywhere. A magazine called Radio Life ran an article on how to use two strips from a metal cassette tape, taped to the card, to clone the card. The phone would read the card from a narrow central area of the magnetic strip, deduct the cost of the call, then write the remaining value of the card to a wide area for reliability. By placing the tape from the cassette on either side of the central area, the phone would write to the original card and the two strips of metal tape. You could then put those two metal tape strips on two dead cards that you could find left behind in any phone booth and make 3X the calls you paid for. Some enterprising gangsters went commercial with this and started selling phone cards at a discount. They’d step off a train onto the platform, sell a bunch of cards to whoever was around, then step back on the train before the doors closed. After one of copied card sellers got busted, the courts ruled that making, possessing, and selling the cards was not illegal, only using them was. Then you’d see people with thick stacks of cards in their hands selling them in front of the police boxes at train stations. At that point NTT started updating the phones so this would not work and of course, eventually all the phones just disappeared as cell phone service started taking over.
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blockquote>eventually all the phones just disappeared
News of the disappearance of pay phones here are greatly exaggerated. The green pay phone outside of our mansion is still very much there, it actually works (I tried it recently for fun), and it takes yencoins as well as, yes, magstripe “telephone cards” which to my knowledge can still be bought in convenience stores.
https://www.ntt-east.co.jp/en/ptd/contents/mag_card.html
https://www.ntt-west.co.jp/ptd_e/mag_card/kind.html
“So, while you’ll still find mag stripes on a few cards here and there,”
Really?
Every card in my wallet, debit, credit, membership and loyalty, with the exception of Costco and National Trust has a mag stripe on it, I don’t think I’ve ever seen a debit/credit card without one.
I think it depends on country. Long time ago I have red article about RFID blocking wallets. One of the commenter asked how many people actually have a card with RFID? Appeared in his country magnetic stripe was still a thing whereas in my country you couldn’t get a card without it for many years already. Maybe Al lives and visits countries that said good bye to magnetic stripe long time ago. So maybe you live in country that just couldn’t (or didn’t want to) let go.
Yes ourside the US magnet stripes do not exist anymore
I’m European (the Netherlands). We can’t use magstripe for transactions for about 5 years now, and many payment terminals don’t even have the magstipe reader. But both my bank card (issued Q3 2023) and my credit card (earlier this year) still have a magstripe.
Recently my chip failed at a payment terminal (and tap to pay was broken on my previous bank card – I had bent it once, and I never needed it that much) and the terminal said “Pleas use magnetic reader”. I tried it and it didn’t work. So I paid with cash. Next day I came to the same kiosk and they told me it turned out that a little piece of paper had jammed itself in the slot.
Mag stripes and chips have made Silence of the Cards a current reality. You aren’t really connected with your consumerism except for the beep and the message of if you approve the amount has made your purchase very virtual. However, in the past the credit card machine that was brought from under the counter to steam roll your embossed card numbers into a 2 part form with carbon paper (and then later carbonless) with a ka-chunk ka-chunk sound and as part of the purchase ceremony you were handed to sign, connected you physically with the item you had in hand. You knew you made a commitment to purchasing something important to you. The sounds and feel of the old days have been replaced with the soulless beep of technology. (/exit Luddite mode) 😁
Crazy thing about the magnetic stripe is I still have to use the damn thing at the Lidl supermarket. Due to a screw up with an upgrade to their POS (both meanings of the term) terminals, Discover Card’s do not work correctly. Used to be able to use NFC but that stopped. Now you have to put the chip in the slot. An error comes up and says you have to swipe the card. Mind you, you have to do it in that order. Stripe first does not work nor does chip only. Very weird and has been going on for months. I only use the Discover there right now because I am getting 5% back on supermarket sales through September.
Does it mean we will see all the equipment being sold for peanuts? Can’t wait to see all those hacks with them and than a glorious swan song in few years when they will make a retro nostalgia come back.
About the usage – don’t forget famous Kid Koala trick made for Baby Driver movie where main character uses magnetic cards for scratching.
A quick googlfu suggests scale issues
and thats just one business sector.
Austrailia may have around 83% of our landmass but its has less than 8% of our population. We are have the worlds third largest population and you have to go pretty far down that list before youll hit another first world nation. Thats a whole lot of small independently owned businesses that are slow to invest in equipment that does nothing to increase their slim margins. So legacy systems remain supported longer here. No surprise, change is easy on a smaller scale.
Rubbish, I had magstrip card rejected in Australia and the US in the 2000s “oh it doesn’t work with some newer cards sorry”
what’s the point. fiat currency is now worthless. we will own nothing and be happy. who cares how the lint in my pocket gets stolen?
Well this will mean Walmart will finally be forced to do tap and pay!