[Gllug] credit cards - chip and pin

[Rev Simon Rumble]

This one time, at band camp, Peter Childs wrote:

> 	As we have said before Pins are no better and no worse than
> signitures. It is just as easy to guess somones pin as it is to fool the
> person on the till that you just signed it correctly.

This is just plain untrue.  With the signature you have a copy of it
on the back of the card, and the merchant keeps a handy copy and
possibly even a carbon from which a would-be attacker can practise
copying it.  A PIN number should never be disclosed to a third party,
so is vastly more difficult to discover.

There was, of course, the problem of those wireless terminals they use
in restaurants in France.  They were apparently sending your card
details and PIN in the clear over the ether.  I believe this has since
been fixed.

-- 
Rev Simon Rumble <simon at rumble.net>
www.rumble.net

 "Never forget that everything Hitler did in Germany was legal"
- Martin Luther King, Jr.
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