Why American Credit Cards Suck

By Laura Northrup,

If you prefer to use a credit card when traveling abroad due to safety and better exchange rates, bad news. Other countries have adopted smartchip technology in their bank cards, and soon we Americans may be forced to use cash when traveling.

Smartchip technology is sort of a banking equivalent of the metric system—it's superior to magnetic stripe cards, every other country is using it, and the American banking system simply isn't interested.

Twenty-two countries, including much of Europe, Mexico, Brazil and Japan, have adopted the technology, according to the Smart Card Alliance, a nonprofit association that promotes chip cards. About 50 other countries are in various stages of migrating to the technology in the next two years, including China, India and most of Latin America, according to the association.

In the last year, Canada began rolling out chip-and-PIN cards and plans to stop accepting magnetic stripe debit cards at A.T.M.'s after 2012 and at point-of-sale terminals after 2015.

These governments like the cards because they reduce fraud. With an embedded microcontroller, large amounts of data can be stored on the card itself rather than in a central database, and counterfeiting such a card is difficult.

Canada, nooooo!

We understand that American banks have enough problems right now, and tourists' ability to buy train tickets or rent bicycles at a kiosk is not high on their list. So consider this a travelers' advisory instead of a consumer complaint.

For Americans, Plastic Buys Less Abroad [NY Times]

(Photo: Ciaran McGuiggan)

Aces Wild: IT Exec Builds RFID-enabled Poker Table

This is an Update to my post last week.

By Jose Fermoso

The chairman of an Australian IT company has built an RFID enabled poker table that could bring the same level of detail seen in televised games to the weekly rounds with your buddies.

Hoping to find a way to enjoy his hobby even more, Andrew Milner placed wireless RFID chips at the bottom of a table, fit RFID tags on a few deck of cards, and fired up quality HD cameras to accurately track every move in a game.

Currently, most poker television programs show each hand through tiny cameras installed on the table, from an individual player's perspective. You follow the game through the feeds, and as cards are shown, drawing odds are automatically generated by a separate program. Basically, we're allowed to count the cards.

Milner's tracking method brings a different dimension to the game. Instead of relying on visual evidence on each hand (plus the interpretation of the announcers), each card is tracked exactly to its placement on the table.

And because the RFID chips are thin, unnoticeable, and quite flexible, they can be used in the same way as regular cards.

The technical details are pretty impressive. Milner uses four color (CCD) cameras and plugs them in through USB to a video encoder to create the main game feed. Then, a piece of software that he wrote (see app below) takes the video streams and mixes them up with the RFID data coming off the cards to create a video presentation, in real-time.

This means that he can actually record every single one his games, down to the last detail, and then broadcast it over the internet.

The result isn't as sleek as something you’d see on a televised tournament of Hold' Em, but it's not like the networks are going to come down to your house and use their equipment to televise it either.

A cool application of RFID could be that we (in the audience) could know where every single card is at all times, even the placement in a vertical deck. This might remove the surprise element for the audience, but it might increase the tension in an anticipatory I-know-what's-gonna-happen-but-he-doesn't sort-of way.

In case you're thinking about pulling this off yourself, it took Milner three months to make the table and cost him almost $7,000.

According to a recent interview, he is also working on a system that uses RFID to track liquor usage. This is an omen, I think. The guy will probably be brought into the fold as a Bellagio executive and will figure out a way how to ruin the invention by making it harder to steal drinks and to win a hand or two.

Check out some pics of the process, all courtesy of Mr. Milner and his site, Videopokertable.net.

The main app to set up the game.

Every single hand in the game has a video file! It's like Madden, almost.

RFID antennas placed inside each player's board.

The cards with the RFID attached.

One of the rail cameras leading down into the feed. Milner used a lamp neck to hold in the camera.