Blog

The magnetic tape on the back of your credit card begins to give up its white unconditional position in the market to the integrated radio chips. RFID-technology can dramatically change the usual method of payment that consumers use when buying goods or services. At least, supporters of the new technology hope so.
Contactless payments using a chip with built-in radio frequency identification (RFID) technology allow credit card holders to pay for purchases simply by holding a card two to five centimeters from the card reader. You no longer need to carry the card through the reader, there is no need to give it to the store employees, in other words, no more contacts of your credit card with unauthorized people.
If you’ve ever ordered food from Arby’s, drank morning coffee at 7-Eleven, or went to the cinema in Cinemark, you’ve probably already seen or even used that very contactless card reader. However, if you do not live in New York, Connecticut, Denver, Atlanta or in other places where American Express, Bank of America, Chase, Citibank, Key Bank, Wells Fargo and other issuing companies have conducted pilot programs for the implementation of contactless payments , you probably don't have a contactless card yet. In fact, only 7 million of the total number of Morgan Chase plastic card holders (90 million) use Blink cards (banking version of contactless payments).

Imagine a future in which not only people, but also things can communicate and exchange information. And this is not science fiction. The development of communications has led to the fact that today almost everything is connected to a single telecommunications infrastructure. We can no longer live without communication, just as we cannot exist without oil and electricity.
Translation difficulties
It is not the first year for linguists to argue about how to translate the beautiful ubiquitous society into “great and mighty” beautiful Americanism. This is a society in which, according to experts, you and I will soon have to live, they call it “omnipresent”, then “open”, or simply “ubiquitous”.
In fact, the word "ubiquitous" is not news in the field of IT. The term "ubiquitous computing" (literally - ubiquitous computing) was proposed as early as 1991 by Mark Weiser, the former chief scientist at the Xerox research center. There was a lot of talk about “total computing”, but until recently they didn’t really believe in the possibility of implementing this idea.
With the help of ITU [http://www.itu.int/ubiquitous/], who launched the Ubiquitous Network Societies project in late 2004, the minds of experts were captured by the idea of creating a world in which information technologies fit into everyday life . The day is not far off when using miniature radio transmitters, IP addresses or hyperlinks you can “see” almost any object (from remote controls to disposable razors) and manage it.
Continuous development of communication implies a constant increase in the number of users, operators, services, communication channels and types of information transmitted. As a result, bandwidth, speed of information exchange, traffic volume and network usage time will also increase. We can say that we are building a “On Line” community. Or the fact that in the near science literature recently began to be called "Ubiquitous Society".
The world is made up of bricks.

The name "cash 2.0" is glued to contactless payment cards more and more strongly. On the one hand, there are grounds for such a term, as small cash payments are more often replaced by the delivery of a smart card or mobile phone with an RFID chip to the reader window in a transport turnstile, vending machine or a cashier’s store terminal. But on the other hand, such a substitution of concepts is not entirely correct, since the most important properties of cash — anonymity and non-traceability of payments — are not provided for in the now widely implemented contactless payment systems. For the so-called "cash 2.0", on closer inspection, does not differ in principle from ordinary credit or debit cards that are tightly tied to specific people and their bank accounts.
From a commercial point of view, there is no need to link payment smart cards to its owner. But from the point of view of security, according to many independent experts, contactless payment cards based on RFID chips not only carry a heavy legacy of badly protected magnetic stripe credit cards, but also generate a lot of new problems. However, the card payment industry, vigorously promoting a new technology, strongly disagrees with such views and tries to convince people of the opposite - that the contactless system is safer than the traditional one. So who is right in this dispute?