I Love
It could be argued that every day is historic, but today is perhaps more so than many. Not only has today seen MPs voting in a total ban on smoking, but it’s also been a day of love.
Today we all learnt, if we hadn’t already, to love PIN. Such was the campaign that told us that from today we can no longer sign for our credit card transactions. Instead, we are now fully reliant on Chip and PIN.
I’ve known about Chip & PIN technology for quite a while longer than most people, working where I did with the things I did. Therefore it was perhaps genuinely a little more interesting for me than many. Still, I don’t think the technology is half as good as it’s being made out to be. Far too many flaws for my liking.
There are much better, more intuitive but as-yet proven fraud proof solutions that could have been used to verify cardholder identity, but sadly we’re stuck with another generic set of four digits.
I say generic, but realistically a lot of people will chose something they’ll be able to remember, usually being something related to them and thus easy to guess. No, your birthday is not a good PIN to choose. Nor are numbers from your phone number. 1066? Don’t even go there.
So what to do on this most historic of days? Well, we went for lunch at Pizza Hut. In celebration I paid with my credit card. Oh, the joy that filled me when I was presented not with a numeric keypad to confirm my identity, but rather a good old fashioned pen. And a very ugly horrible pen at that.
For Pizza Hut at least, I love PEN. Still. I’m guessing Pizza Hut will leap into the 21st century sometime in the next few years. Up until then, they’re leaving themselves open to be responsible for a lot of fraudulent transactions.
