Hacker News Reader

Comment by willhackett | Hacker News Reader

I think the magnetic strip needs to go. We hardly use them in Australia to the point where one of our major banks actually has a touch reader on their machine.

Some sort of one-time verification would be great. An SMS or a push notification would go a long way to making this type of scraping harder.

Or eliminate the card altogether - Cardless Cash.

View on HN

For Mastercard:

> The magnetic stripe will start to disappear in 2024 from Mastercard payment cards in regions, such as Europe, where chip cards are already widely used. Banks in the U.S. will no longer be required to issue chip cards with a magnetic stripe, starting in 2027.

https://www.mastercard.com/news/perspectives/2021/magnetic-s...

I think it has been over a decade since my last magstripe transaction (in a convenience store I frequented that switched to chip readers in 2010).

The only time I've used magnetic stripe in the last decade was in the US.

My hsa card still only has a mag stripe. Every time I use it, I swear the young receptionist doesn't know what to do with the card lol.

We are a relatively impoverished shithole country, you know. Pretty behind the latest tech in most places.

(Kidding/Not kidding)

> I think the magnetic strip needs to go.

Absolutely. Here in the Netherlands, magstripe payments are disabled by default. Only if you’re travelling outside Europe do you need to enable them manually (through your bank’s app or website).

Magstripe is long dead throughout Asia as well. The US (as always) has been behind the curve on this, but contactless became pretty ubiquitous during COVID.

Monzo (UK) doesn't allow magnetic stripes in ATMs unless you enable them in the app.

Chip and pin and NFC terminals have been a standard in the UK for over a decade now. I wouldn't be surprised if magnetic stripe readers still exist only for US tourists.

> I think the magnetic strip needs to go

As a person who was quite amused by a [quite gentry, ie recently entered the workforce afain] Domino's staff who didn't even knew how to handle a magstripe in 2016 I find this is quite baffling.

> one of our major banks actually has a touch reader on their machine

Not sure I understand what you mean. NFC readers?

Not just one, every merchant bank and payments terminal operator supports NFC.

I haven't seen a terminal that doesn't accept NFC for years.

I have no idea why, but chip cards always fail on me within six months of receiving a new one. Been this way for years.

I find it's the chip readers that are very flaky. Certain stores I go to simply have unreliable chip readers and I often have to fall back to the stripe. This has even happened at a couple places right after they replaced their readers. It seems to be related to alignment of the card in the slot, which has led me to a procedure that on the second try, I'll put the card in while sliding it pressed against the left edge of the slot, and on the third try I'll slide it in on the right edge of the slot. This small bit of offset often makes the difference.

I suppose after the stripe goes away, they'll have to improve these machines in a hurry. I just don't understand how they're so shitty and yet the rest of the world seems to be using them without issue.

As a person who used the chip for almost a decade I can assure you what or you had extremely shitty readers all your life or somehow you bank provided you with extremely shitty card somehow. I struggle to even remember when I needed to reinsert the card again.

Do you work at a magnetron manufacturing plant?

No, but I have similar issues with electronics in general.

Personally I've never had a chip fail.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com