Wireless Pickpocketing: Portmanteau Answer

[Ian G Batten]

> I'm not in Japan :), and I'm a little confused - they pop it in a machine?
> then it isn't a contactless card, I guess.

SOrry, it was late, and I was wittering.  What I was saying was that I
have been using two cards:

* My Suica card is the same as an Oyster, using equivalent if not
identical technology.  It's contactless, it'll work through a wallet but
not much further.  It does Oyster type jobs, but the ecosystem of shops
that will take it for small value transactions is much larger, and extends
to most food places I've been in Tokyo, Shinagawa and Kawasaki this week. 
There's a limit on the maximum amount you can have on it, which I think is
about fifty quid.  Interestingly there doesn't seem to be an obvious way
to top it up from a credit card: it's cash only at the machines.

* My Standard UK Mastercard.  What I was remarking on is that I found:

- Places that take it, with a signature

- Places that take it, with a PIN

- Places that take it, with nothing --- two meals each costing about
fifteen quid.

>From this I was speculating that the overall attitude to might be
different in a low-crime society.  Certainly, spending my days shepherding
a UK compliance team from one of our customers through our Japanese
development centre's security policies I'm seeing some cultural
disconnects!

> I had envisaged pickpockets in a crowd with their seconds
> (I don't know the correct word, but they tend to work in pairs
> as a minimum) buying cigarettes on a radio-linked card,

This is the question, which I don't think we ever got to the bottom of, of
if you can read an RFID tag from an extended distance by using an aerial
with some forward gain (to get power out to the device you're querying)
and some receive gain (to pull the low-powered omni response up out of the
noise floor).  If that became possible, the fixes aren't hard for those
that are worried about it.  And one can easily imagine a card that only
works when squeezed slightly...

> I thought your English was OK last time we spoke.

I wish.  Only a week of having to modify my English to recognise the fact
that I speak no Japanese, and I should therefore be grateful for the
limited American English available from those around me, and I feel myself
becoming increasingly incoherent.  You try limiting your spoken English to
simple structures with no intervening connversations with native speakers
and see how you feel after a while.

> All the post office machines are happy with a Cirrus C&P card. Don't
> know whether they're actually doing C&P or fallback to magstripe though.

Apparently, according to my Japanese colleagues, the JPN ATM position is a
shambles anyway, with almost no machines that work universally even for
domestic banks.  The Post Office is apparently the only wide-spread
network that handles international card, as indeed if did perfectly
happily here in the outskirts of Kawasaki.  There's supposed to be some
machines that will do international trsnsactions in major railway
stations, but as I couldn't find one in Shinagawa or Tokyo, it's hard to
think where `major' means.

As of July 11th, 7/11 stores (do you see what they did there?) will be doi
ng international funds withdrawls too.  Which will be handy: they're
easier to find than Post Offices.

Railway fans will be interested to know that I selected my weekend tourist
destination on the basis that 4 hours on a train there and four hours back
was the limit for a weekend.  3hr59 turns out to get you 880km.

ian

-- 
I'm currently in Japan, so I am most likely to respond to any work email
between 0100 and 0900 BST.  I am reading my private email until 1400 BST.