No no no no... It's bad. Simple as that. Swipe cards are good enough. This is the human-lazy equivelant of people putting shortcuts to shortcuts on their desktops to get 2 clicks down to one. And, of course, one day someone will find a way to crack the system by scanning your a** as you walk by... that would just be a matter of time (and it would literally be "crack"ing the system...oh man, I kill me!... but seriously folks)...

How much faster do we need to verify credit cards? Upgrade the credit card infrastructure in order to go from 4 seconds to .5 second card approvals if you want speed. This really just seems a ploy to get people to spend more money by taking advantage of people's (women's) impulse (shoe) buying habits. Also, and I mean this Big Brother, make the RFID credit cards for the suckers if you want, but the day you make me carry an RFID driver's license... I'm moving to Canada. (idle threat)

Aside from the places using paper receipts, I think swiping wouldn't be so much of a problem if all the stores had it set up where you didn't have to wait for the cashier to hit a button before you signed on the pin-pad device. This is the case at the grocery stores I go to and Meijers.
Despite the posibility for evil, I wouldn't mind having the stuff I buy RFID'd so I could just push my cart out the door only pausing for a moment to swipe or wave (is that the RF equivelent for the verb swipe?) my credit device.
BTW, I already saw a spot to wave this new AmEx thingie on the pin-pad at my local CVS... spotted it about a week or two ago and didn't see anything on AmEx's website at the time.

Do you still sign for these? If so, it ain't quicker than cash, if not, there's the problem of stolen cards.

in aust we've had that blue card with the chip for 2-3 years now.. and used it once just to try it out.. big deal havent bothered going out of my way to find a store that has it so far.. and the stores that do support it, dont even offer it to you when you show the card.. they just swipe it and throw it back at ya sayin, nothing about gettin any special deal for using it at all. time saver getting on the trains i guess.. like japan.

This really really is bothersome. What happens when identity theft thieves develop a handheld reader for these? All they need to do is walk through an airport scanning purses and pockets to collect data. I very well may have missed something on security here. But that was my first reaction.

The information is encrypted and can only be decrypted by the reader. Trust me, they thought about this. Sure you can still have it scanned by someone, but if they want to spend 10 years decrypting the card number, they can have it especially since the card will more than likely be cancelled by then anyways.

"Michael Smith, who helps develop radio frequency identification products, said RFID technology can help make credit cards more secure. Although thieves could try to read personal information off the cards, they would need to be within four inches of the credit card holder to have much of a chance.
"You're going to see someone trying to access the information when they get that close to you," said Smith, business development manager with LXE, a subsidiary of Norcross-based EMS Technologies. "And the credit card holder never has to take the card out of his hand. That also makes it more difficult for someone else to take information off the card. That's an improvement over the magnetic strip."
Chase's O'Donnell also said the new cards have an elaborate security coding system that makes it difficult to steal information."

None of this is reassuring to me. Speedpass has not only been cracked, it's had live, proven exploits in the wild. If anyone still uses this thing they should cancel their account immediately.

I don't do anything wirelessly if it's important. security technologies are abandoned (WPA)--that really scares me.

That was my first reaction too. I mean sure, I'm sure they thought of that, but someone else smarter will always find a way to crack encryption.

It would be very easy to get withing 4" of someones new-and-improved creditcard. You could "bump" into a bunch of people's wallets and purses and just hope for the best.

I have not seen very promising wireless technologies yet. Bluetooth has already become a problem and doesn't look too good for the future. Until our current wireless gadgets are more secure, I am not gonna use these swipeless creditcards.

Really, how hard is it to swipe a creditcard?

Have you ever stood on a crowded subway car or bus? I think I've been crammed so close to people I'm pretty sure we swapped pants on the way off the bus. 4" is not all that close - look at how many pick pockets lift peoples wallets without them even knowing they were there. It's not like you have to come in contact with the device to make it work. Although that would make more sense. Maybe you have to push a button on the card (or the speedpass device) before the reader can be allowed to read it. This way it couldn't be read just by someone walking by with the right type of reader.

Also - you don't need to know the decrypted card number - just program your "device" with the same encrypted data and as far as the system is concerned, you have a valid ID. Maybe I'm wrong on this last one, but that's what it sounds like to me, there's no computer in the speedpass to do some sort of validation back to the scanner on the pump.