Apple joins the NFC party, providing iOS developers the ability to read NFC tags
developer.ibm.com
developer.ibm.com
Still, it's better than nothing and it represents a huge opportunity for NFC tag providers (where I work). We've been waiting for this for about 4 years.
Regarding your 4096 bit requirements, normally when you have those security requirements you would keep that key offline and use shorter lived 2048 bit keys for actual authentication.
There is 4096 bit support with Yubikey 4 which unfortunately isn't offered with NFC.
Okay, but open-keychain does not provide GUI to just sign or authenticate a user (you can sign as part of encryption process) so I was wondering if the parent was mentioning some application that interfaces with open Keychain (like k9mail or conversations.im) that gives just that: user authentication.
Yes, but OTG adapters work pretty well here or one can use Yubikey 4C if the phone has USB-C input.
Edit: Welp. Looking at the U2F NFC spec it looks like some exchange with the key needs to occur, so without transmit access we're boned.
Unfortunately as far as I know only Yubikey NEO and Fidesmo card support it with Fidesmo being practically not usable. From https://www.fidesmo.com/nfc-u2f-android/ :
> Google’s own account security website, that on desktop allows you to register U2F devices, says that the feature is not compatible with the Chrome browser on Android. The account security site on GitHub seems to support the feature is a bit better. When pressing the button to add a token to the account it properly launches Google Authenticator to register the U2F device. When tapping the card and returning to the GitHub site however it doesn’t seem to have registered that anything has happened.
That's something where you are tapping on/off multiple times a day.
http://codebutler.github.io/farebot/
That said Chicago seems to have the most convenient system along the lines of what you're talking about -- you can use plain old tap and pay at the terminal with Apple Pay or Android Pay.
I understand why it would be cool to let your phone replace your transit pass (as it's cool to let your phone replace your credit card), but I don't understand why it's cool to let your phone replace a transit pass reader.
I will say it's quite great. The time is very near where you can leave your home with only your cell phone as the single item you need to remember. Also scary in that if you lose that single item, you are getting increasingly more screwed. That is now my transit pass, money, taxi ride, and front door key.
Interesting story: I was in London and had an Oyster card but forgot I had the Clipper card for the SF Bay Area too. On seemingly reading the Clipper card, the Tube gate turned orange and basically shutdown.
Even so, I'm kind of surprised that NFC hasn't come up with more interesting use cases than easy pairing and as a mode/location switch to mark you're at home/work.
That's a really basic use case, but popular enough in Japan, where even old flip phones had NFC
I'm surprised iPhones were missing this, its not killer but its definitely useful.
I bought a pair of Bose QC35 headphones recently. There is an NFC tag embedded in the headphones. I just had to tap my phone to the headphones and hit an "accept" button on my phone, and they were paired.
Similarly a friend has a box plugged into their stereo that's essentially just an A2DP receiver with RCA outputs, and has NFC on it for pairing. I wanted to play some music on his stereo at a party, and all I had to do was tap my phone to the receiver and start up Spotify.
But the idea of having it in headphone and routers and printers and other things? I can get behind that. Easy pairing is a use case that makes a ton of sense.
ProTip: Apparently, the QC25 remote cable with buttons works on the QC35 too.
Being able to read my balance on my clipper card with my android phone is something I miss since switching to ios. A promising thing I once used was wifi network ssid/password settings stored on an nfc tag on a wall (think restaurant).
But, really, if there's a killer app it's probably payment and it's rolling out. Pretending that it's somehow distinct from other NFC use cases is pretty silly. It's just one of the most obvious ways it can be useful.
So in the payments space:
- phone as a payment terminal
- peer to peer payments
I'm sure there's more than that but they're the low hanging fruit
You're right, if you only used it as authorization I guess you wouldn't need write access.
On iOS, however, weak NFC implementation means that one must use a kind of janky WiFi transfer system. It works, but it's kind of difficult to use and not very elegant.
The clunky software camera companies ship doesn't help, of course. If I were in charge of a camera company I'd publish an API and SDK and welcome the world's many hackers to make the camera better, but alas I'm not and no one asks my opinion.
Between phones you tap them together while a picture / video is open (which is admittedly less elegant than AirDrop... although significantly more reliable in my experience).
There's undoubtedly great use cases for NFC on phones (payments, travel passes, hotel room keys etc), but it's also a technology that often seems to attract developers solely because it seems 'cool', not because they have a problem that can be solved better with NFC than without it.
I agree there aren't much real uses tho. But we might not know yet.
For example LoRaWAN networks are deployed worldwide fairly quietly.
The trouble is that the category of features they solve can often also be solved by GPS, Network, or other similar technologies.
There are a myriad of cool things that Bluetooth Beacons can do but none of them are particularly consumer must-haves.
I look enviously at other countries that have been using feature phones for banking and p2p banking. The video of a guy in China assembling his own iPhone shows QR codes at each booth used for payment. There's no reason Smart Phones or NFC could do those things better, but we still don't have it and it won't be happening in the U.S. in near future.
QR codes are also used for exchanging contact information... when I give a talk in China, I put my Wechat QR code at the end so any member of the audience can scan it from the slide for follow-up conversations.
For inventory management, it's preferable that each item has its own unique code. So either you need to print a different QR code for every item, or you put on an NFC chip.
It is true that QR codes are supported on more devices, but that is because cameras and screens are ubiquitous with smart phones. An NFC reader is cheaper.
The heavy use of (granted, not strictly QR) 2D barcodes in physical mail/shipping suggests it's both useful and cost effective.
Think of a stockroom. When you get new inventory, you put on an NFC tag on every item, and then you have to register each which is just one sweep. With QR/barcodes you either have to register and then print and put on the items, or you have to scan each individually after.
Both NFC and QR have strengths and weaknesses. I'm certain that we will see both utilized more and more.
I've always been surprised by this (and even more by QR codes in magazine ads and billboards). I'd think that these days, for 90% of applications a regular URL should work. Just as your photo app thee days marks (and often labels) the faces, it could simply highlight all the URLs, email addresses etc in the image and let you click on them.
Yes, QR codes are more robust (at the cost of a small payload for a large image) but I suspect in most cases it's unnecessary.
The farmer coming into the city on a trike selling fruit even accepts payment by QR code :)
Not very exciting but indispensable to me.
I could just as easily save a note with my location, I guess, but I like that the NFC tag stores the data without power, without putting it on someone else's computer, and without making it casually discoverable.
> Read only
> Only supports NDEF formatted tags
> Available only on iPhone 7 and newer
Basically, this is even more crippled than what WP 8.0 did five years ago (and back then I thought it was too crippled to be useful)
Pure guess.
http://registers.accc.gov.au/content/index.phtml/itemId/1197...
Edit: pulled the trigger on this comment too soon - it appears that the API will only support "reader mode" which is not what the main subject of the litigation was about - the banks wanted a 'total' (for want of a better word) public access API.
http://appft1.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO2&Sect2=...
A computer receives user preferences. The computer receives a document, wherein the document includes an image. The computer determines that the image contains embedded text. The computer determines that the embedded text does not satisfy the received user preferences. The computer modifies the embedded text to satisfy user preferences.
Is this stuff actually enforceable? As in, could I, with adequate legal sources, actually get companies and individuals to pay me money for something as generic as "Text resizing within an embedded image", without actually implementing it (whether it be stand-alone code or within some sort of application)? Is Apple shelling out cash to IBM for the privilege of autoresizing labels?
"[...] approaches for preventing an accidental termination of a phone call session.". The patent actually covers the event of when a user:
1) is in a call
2) taps dismiss
3) phone decide to dismiss or continue because [wildcard] reason.
So the functionality in my Samsung that "decide" whether to ignore or continue when I tap dismiss with my chin is patented, cool.
Option 2: they plan to start using it themselves in future products for pairing instead/with BTLE or maybe for some sort of in-store display.
https://gototags.com/blog/apple-ios-11-supports-reading-nfc-...