[HN Gopher] The tiny chip that powers Montreal subway tickets
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The tiny chip that powers Montreal subway tickets
Author : todsacerdoti
Score : 884 points
Date : 2024-06-23 17:22 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.righto.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.righto.com)
| kens wrote:
| Author here for all your NFC chip questions :-)
| cypherpunks01 wrote:
| How difficult is it to clone MIFARE Ultralight EV1 chips? You
| mention the UID is signed, can you simply copy this signature?
| Do you just need to buy one of the magical chips of the same
| design, that allow uid/serials to be written?
|
| What is the actual mechanism behind the DESFire and other
| secure NFC chips that prevents cloning?
| kens wrote:
| I haven't really looked into the security aspects. I think
| that you could clone one of the Ultralight chips, but it
| wouldn't gain you anything because the security is in the
| backend. It's a lot like a printed concert ticket or boarding
| pass. You could print as many as you want, but the ticket is
| still good for just one admission.
|
| The DESFire and other secure chips contain a cryptographic
| key that you can't access. Without the key, you can't make a
| clone of the chip. The cryptography provides authentication
| and encryption that you don't get with the cheap Ultralight
| chip.
|
| I think this is all market segmentation; they don't put more
| security into the Ultralight chip because they don't want to
| cannibalize their higher-end sales.
| lxgr wrote:
| Ultralight supports password authentication, and you can
| diversify the password from the serial number, meaning that
| until that password is revealed by a legitimate reader as
| part of a validation transaction (at which time the ticket
| is invalidated anyway), you can't clone it.
|
| Ultralight C does support actual cryptographic
| authentication.
| kens wrote:
| I don't think the password authentication helps against
| cloning. You could start a transaction and stop after you
| get the password. Then you could clone the card. (The
| system could invalidate the ticket as soon as they get
| the UID, but that would be a reliability nightmare since
| a failure during the read would invalidate someone's
| ticket.)
| lxgr wrote:
| You could do that, but it still greatly raises the cost
| for an attacker, since they need to hang around a ticket
| validator for every ticket they want to clone, as opposed
| to e.g. a QR code ticket, which can be trivially copied
| by a simple screenshot.
|
| Also, many of these transit systems are eventually
| consistent (they're usually offline-capable for
| resilience, but usually manage to send all validation
| transactions to a backoffice system within at most a day,
| and often minutes).
|
| This allows detecting duplicate usage fairly quickly. In
| systems where you need to tap out as well as tap in to
| leave the turnstile, that's where ticket inspectors might
| take a sudden interest in you if you tap out with a
| cloned ticket.
|
| In the end, as with most security systems, the goal is
| not to make fraud absolutely impossible, but to make it
| economically non-viable.
| szundi wrote:
| You have to hang out to get the id of a simple 125khz tag
| too - this is what cloning means
| amluto wrote:
| In general, the card emulation devices (e.g. the chips in
| phones) try to avoid letting any arbitrary UID be set. This
| makes cloning these cards more difficult than it would
| otherwise be. It's not terribly difficult to find devices
| (USB-connected things and battery-less cards) that do allow
| arbitrary UIDs to be set, though.
| josephcsible wrote:
| > the card emulation devices (e.g. the chips in phones)
| try to avoid letting any arbitrary UID be set.
|
| I can't think of a much worse way to do security. That
| feels like trying to flood the market with lockpicks that
| don't work instead of making a more pick-resistant lock.
| amluto wrote:
| I imagine this is because the locks contain chips from
| NXP (PN532 chips), the name-brand MIFARE chips are made
| by NXP, and the lock picks (also PN532 chips!) are made
| by NXP.
| jeffbee wrote:
| Is this the same system used by Boston MBTA? I was surprised to
| see single-use tap cards when I visited there for the first
| time yesterday. I wondered why the ticket isn't reloadable.
| cypherpunks01 wrote:
| Most people who live in Boston use the reloadable CharlieCard
| (https://www.mbta.com/fares/charliecard) - these report as
| Mifare Classic 1k, which is a similar chip
|
| There are single-use fares as well, the "CharlieTicket" that
| you might've encountered.
|
| More CharlieCard NFC info:
|
| https://medium.com/@bobbyrsec/operation-charlie-hacking-
| the-...
|
| https://media.defcon.org/DEF%20CON%2031/DEF%20CON%2031%20pre.
| ..
| jeffbee wrote:
| Yeah I figured but you can't buy a charliecard online to
| load into your smartphone wallet, and I only needed it the
| once, and since it took more than an hour to get to
| Cambridge due to some combination of circus acts I used
| Blue bikes for the remainder of the day.
| cypherpunks01 wrote:
| Ah yes, it's not quite there, but almost. Contactless
| payment directly at the turnstile is coming to Boston
| MBTA this year, I believe. Like how NYC works now, where
| you can just use your credit card for entry.
| chgs wrote:
| This is the London system we've had for a decade, it was
| licensed to other areas a few years ago.
|
| I found myself in Paris having to cross the other day and
| forgot how terrible the old way of buying tickets was,
| amazed that it's still the norm in so many cities
| jcynix wrote:
| Single tap cards are usually just used with their "hardwired"
| chip serial number. That is stored in a central system which
| invalidates the number once you used it. This makes it rather
| easy (even if its environmentally unfriendly) to issue these
| cards: load a number of cards into your machine, register the
| serial number and invalidate it when used.
| lxgr wrote:
| That's no longer the case: Many of the newer single-use
| ticket ICs (including the MIFARE Ultralight one mentioned
| in the article) actually support data storage and (very)
| basic cloning protection.
| account42 wrote:
| That the chips support data storage doesn't mean that
| that feature is used. There are systems that use MIFARE
| Ultralight cards for the UID alone just because they are
| cheap and easily sourced.
| lxgr wrote:
| Definitely, but my point is that that's not the only way
| to do it.
|
| You can also store only an ID in a QR code, but you could
| also fit more information and a digital signature of it
| in there.
| jcynix wrote:
| While it is possible to use advanced features from newer
| chips, I know more than one actual system where they just
| use the serial number, even when rolling out more
| advanced Mifare based cards. So your "that's no longer
| the case" is a bit too general/optimistic IMO.
|
| And sure, simply using the serial number might pose a
| security risk depending on the application, but that
| rarely stops implementors to implement such schemes. More
| often than not do people believe in security by
| obscurity, sigh. For a simply ticket system the serial
| number should be secure enought as it is a use-once
| application.
| modeless wrote:
| I am interested in the plastic layer with conductive traces for
| the antenna. How are these made? Do you know of a source that
| talks about the production process for them?
| kens wrote:
| I don't know personally about the antenna manufacturing, but
| one web page talks about printable conductive silver ink for
| producing RFID antennas.
| https://www.sunchemical.com/product/printed-antenna/
| politelemon wrote:
| Could someone just use an nfc enabled phone to get it to act as
| a ticket?
| lxgr wrote:
| For MIFARE Ultralight, yes - it's essentially just a bearer
| token with no encryption/authentication. I believe there's a
| password mechanism, though, which might just be good enough
| for single-use tickets. That password can be
| derived/diversified from the card's serial number, making
| such a scheme still significantly better than e.g. simple QR
| codes.
|
| MIFARE Ultralight C and larger/more expensive chips allow
| challenge-response authentication, making them pratically
| uncloneable. These are usually used for reloadable and
| monthly passes.
| numpad0 wrote:
| Layer 3 and down yes, 4 and up depends
| ak217 wrote:
| Thanks for the write-up.
|
| How does this fit into the broader NFC ecosystem? What do other
| big metro systems like Omny, Clipper, Smartrip etc use? Apple
| and Google seem to implement some NFC protocols in their
| devices but in a much more programmable way, how does that
| work? Is the protocol used in credit cards related at all? And
| how do these relate to Felica, the system used everywhere in
| Japan (which was in the news for a while because the factory
| where they made the chips burned down and they had a chip
| shortage - giving Apple an opening to move into the market with
| iPhone NFC)?
| kens wrote:
| That seems like a question for @lxgr :-)
|
| As far as I can tell, the NFC ecosystem is a mess of
| competing, incompatible protocols from different companies,
| as well as incompatibilities for historical reasons. For
| example, Clipper uses MIFARE DESFire, which is the more
| secure sibling of the Ultralight chip that I examined.
| Washington's SmarTrip cards use MIFARE Plux X. New York
| City's OMNY, on the other hand, is apparently built on top of
| the Mastercard payment network using EMV. Montreal's
| rechargeable OPUS card (not the disposable one I examined)
| uses the completely different Calypso standard. FeliCa was
| developed in Japan along a different path and has a different
| standard (NFC-F vs NFC-A) with different modulation,
| protocol, and data rates. The NFC chips used in phones try to
| be compatible with as much as possible. These NFC systems all
| use the same 13.56 MHz frequency, so the radio hardware is
| compatible across them.
| Tijdreiziger wrote:
| How and why did you learn about this topic? :)
| lxgr wrote:
| On it, but I couldn't have said it better :) To expand on
| Felica vs. ISO a bit:
|
| Theoretically Felica is a different stack from ISO 14443,
| but it's close enough that it almost got specified as a
| variant of ISO 14443 as well (C; MIFARE and most other
| systems use A). NFC does specify Felica as one possible
| official tag type (then called NFC-F, as opposed to NFC-A
| and NFC-B), so practically, most mobile devices can just
| also read it.
|
| For anybody wanting to experiment a bit, I can highly
| recommend getting any Android device and installing NFC tag
| reader by NXP; it'll show you what technology exactly a
| given card uses, and in some cases can show you other
| interesting information as well. There's also an app that
| lets you read the current balance of various transit cards.
| Tijdreiziger wrote:
| > Is the protocol used in credit cards related at all?
|
| In e.g. London and the Netherlands, the readers were upgraded
| to support tapping in and out with a debit/credit card or
| Apple/Google Pay.
|
| However, Apple also seems to have an 'Express' mode, which
| even works when the battery is empty ('Power Reserve').
|
| It seems to me that there must be three protocols: the one
| for the disposable and stored-value tickets (ISO 14443?), EMV
| for debit/credit/Apple Pay/Google Pay, and Apple Pay Express.
| lmz wrote:
| EMV (specifically EMV contactless) is also based on ISO
| 14443, it's more like an application layer protocol on top
| of it.
|
| Apple Pay Express is just Apple Pay without the need for
| the full system UI: "If iOS isn't in use because iPhone
| needs to be charged, there may still be enough power in the
| battery to support Express Card transactions." it interacts
| the same way as the physical card equivalent (otherwise
| they would need a reader upgrade).
| MBCook wrote:
| Right. Much like the fact Find My functionality can still
| let you track your phone when it's "dead", the power
| requirements are just so low that when the phone can't
| get going due to the requirements of the CPU + RAM +
| display there's plenty to power NFC/BT beacon stuff for a
| while.
|
| An AirTag can operate on a CR2032 for two years. An
| Energizer datasheet says that's 235 mAh. An iPhone 13
| Mini has a 2438 mAh battery (~10x). It makes sense the
| phone could do it for at least a day or two with the left
| over charge.
|
| (I don't know how long it would actually keep working)
| lxgr wrote:
| Both EMV and MIFARE (and similar solutions) indeed sit on
| top of ISO 14443-4 (or -3 for the older/lighter MIFARE
| versions), but they're conceptually very different:
|
| EMV is an account-based payments protocol, and the card
| only confirms its presence in a transaction; balances are
| managed on the backend. The reader does not authenticate
| itself to the card at all.
|
| MIFARE is a stored-value service and as such keeps track
| of the card's balance on-chip. This requires another
| smartcard on the reader side, holding the necessary keys
| for mutual authentication, but allows two-sided offline
| transactions, which is quite useful for transit
| applications (e.g. buses dropping out of network
| coverage, allowing higher volumes even during short
| server outages etc.)
| account42 wrote:
| > MIFARE is a stored-value service and as such keeps
| track of the card's balance on-chip. This requires
| another smartcard on the reader side, holding the
| necessary keys for mutual authentication, but allows two-
| sided offline transactions, which is quite useful for
| transit applications (e.g. buses dropping out of network
| coverage, allowing higher volumes even during short
| server outages etc.)
|
| MIFARE cards are used in all kinds of applications and
| not all of them require the reader to authenticate
| itself. And even in authenticated uses the keys don't
| neccessarily need to be stored in a smartcard (SAM)
| depending on the security requirements. For the simpler
| MIFARE cards a secure enclave for the keys doesn't even
| provide any additional security since they key is
| transmitted to the card anyway - and the simplest ones
| don't have any authentication at all.
| lxgr wrote:
| > a secure enclave for the keys doesn't even provide any
| additional security since they key is transmitted to the
| card anyway
|
| I'd assume that the keys (more accurately passwords,
| since a key would never be transmitted to the card over
| an unencrypted interface) are diversified by card serial
| number though? In that case, it would still be useful to
| have an SAM to hold that diversification key. You could
| further store some MAC authentication tag on the
| password-protected tag that the SAM needs to see before
| revealing the password over the radio.
|
| I'm not saying that this is how every transit system
| practically does use MIFARE Ultralight, but based on the
| design, it's definitely possible.
| lxgr wrote:
| Apple and Google achieve the same outcome (i.e. something
| called "card emulation", where an NFC chip can act as an
| emulated ISO 14443-4 smartcard), but they achieve it through
| very different ways:
|
| Google just has an Android API for it called HCE (Host Card
| Emulation), and anybody can write an app that implements it
| (i.e. Google Pay has no special position compared to
| competitors). In a nutshell, you just get a callback for
| every APDU (protocol message) the phone receives from the
| reader and get to respond as you wish.
|
| Apple embeds a secure element in their devices, which is a
| chip almost identical to that you'll find in actual physical
| cards, but with an additional interface that connects it to
| the application processor, so that the OS and (privileged,
| i.e. Apple Wallet only) apps can interface with it and load
| new card applications. That's why the storage in Apple Wallet
| is limited to 50-ish cards, but Google Pay allows many more
| :)
|
| Felica is not part of the ISO 14443 family, but closely
| related and also an official physical layer of NFC (NFC-F),
| so many devices practically support it as well. To my
| knowledge, there is no software-based emulation for it though
| (that's always a bit risky for stored-value cards), so Suica
| etc. only work on Japanese phone models that have the
| necessary secure element, as well as on all iPhones (Apple
| installs a Felica applet into their secure element on
| demand).
| abhayhegde wrote:
| Is it possible that the Android implementation could be
| less secure given the lack of a dedicated secure element?
| Perhaps not, but I am curious why Apple does it that way.
| teruakohatu wrote:
| That was a god read, thank you.
|
| Do you have any insight into the economics of this in general
| compared to other disposable solutions. Are manufacturing old
| school magnetic stripe tickets, or just optical
| scanning/barcodes a lot cheaper?
|
| I imagine magnetic stripes have a higher failure to read rate
| at the turnstile causing issues, while both them and optical
| scanning requires the ticket to be inserted into the machine,
| adding complexity and moving parts.
| kens wrote:
| I couldn't find a nice price breakdown. I'd expect the
| magnetic stripe tickets to be cheaper to manufacture, but
| since the NFC tickets cost pennies, there isn't a lot of
| money to save. I agree with you that magnetic stripes would
| have a much higher maintenance cost due to the mechanical
| aspect and the read/write head. Optical scanning seems less
| likely to work the first time, based on my experience with
| airplane checkins. NFC is probably the best from an ecosystem
| perspective since it can work with credit cards and phones as
| well. NFC readers are probably the cheapest since they are
| produced in large volumes for credit card point of sale.
| amluto wrote:
| I've occasionally gotten to watch transit workers open up
| and service the magnetic stripe card readers in the BART.
| Those things are _complicated_. It may well cost less to
| outright replace a contactless reader module on a fare gate
| than to service a magnetic stripe ticket machine once. Even
| an Adafruit PN532 board is only $40.
| teruakohatu wrote:
| And if a machine jams not only do you need staff to spend
| hours to repair it, but you need to pay staff, or
| contractors, to do it.
| edub wrote:
| I've not worked with the Adafruit PN532, but for an extra
| $10 you can get a Pepper C1 USB from Eccel which is very
| easy to work with. It is a stand-alone device, so you
| don't have to connect it to anything but power. Has WiFi
| & BT built in and has a built-in web server to configure
| it with, you can have it make calls via REST, MQTT,
| WebSocket.
| crote wrote:
| Interestingly, the Pepper C1 is essentially a PN518
| (presumably a sibling of the PN532 on Adafruit's board)
| hooked up to an ESP32. So a very simple device - and I've
| had a project on the backburner which is pretty much a
| DIY clone of it. If they made a USB-C version I'd ditch
| mine and buy it in a heartbeat.
| mjg59 wrote:
| BART stopped accepting paper tickets last year,
| presumably because of the complexity (not just the ticket
| barriers, but also the fare machines and add value
| machines that also had to handle them):
| https://www.bart.gov/news/articles/2023/news20230911
| sofixa wrote:
| Yeah, they moved to a native integration with
| Apple/Google/Samsung Wallets, and Clipper cards as a
| backup (but they really try to discourage them, at least
| for tourists).
|
| The cool thing is that their thing doesn't work with all
| Android phones for an unknown reason (various people from
| the transit agency said "oh Android? Yeah it doesn't
| always work with Android"), which you have no way of
| knowing before topping up money and trying to use your
| phone.
|
| If anyone is curious, it was a Xiaomi Redmi phone, a
| midrange one that has no issues paying over NFC. A
| OnePlus next to it with the same Android version worked
| just fine.
| jszymborski wrote:
| FWIW, Montreal used to have mag strip paper tickets and
| turnstiles to match, but ever since the new paper tickets
| rolled out we have new svelte turnstiles with an NFC reader
| exclusively.
|
| They've been trying to get contactless bank card payments
| going on the same turnstiles but roll-out has been bogged
| down by other transit agencies apparently.
| seizethecheese wrote:
| I've been curious about the orientation of these devices. For
| examples, if I want to track an item's presence in a box, would
| I have to coat the entire item in these chips to get one to be
| in the right orientation?
| kens wrote:
| I think it depends on the type of antenna. A linearly
| polarized RFID antenna is sensitive to the tag's orientation,
| but a circularly polarized antenna is less sensitive to
| orientation. Systems can also use more than one RFID antenna
| to get better coverage.
| maaarghk wrote:
| Not an NFC chip question, but what kind of microscope do you
| need to get silicon photos of a chip so tiny?
| kens wrote:
| The trick is to use a metallurgical microscope, which shines
| the light down through the lens. A regular microscope
| illuminates from below, which works fine for cells, but not
| for opaque chips.
|
| Specifically, I use an AmScope ME300TZB-2L-10M microscope,
| which my friends consider an entry-level microscope, but it
| works for my needs.
| throwadobe wrote:
| How much cheaper and smaller can they get before we see them
| used in parcel and freight?
| poslathian wrote:
| Several such pilots for this have been in flight the last
| couple years.
| account42 wrote:
| You already see RFID tags used in retail so I would not be
| surprised if that isn't already the case somewhere in the
| shipping industry as well.
|
| I imagine those can use even simpler chips that are
| completely read-only over the air and only have a UID
| programmed.
| rendaw wrote:
| Kind of a software question, but why isn't nfc with asymmetric
| keys a thing? It seems like at best this is a custom javacard
| app on select expensive cards ($4 per card if you buy 1000 on
| aliexpress) or $70 for a yubikey otherwise. Is getting the
| signature time fast enough just impossible with current
| hardware/tramission power restrictions?
| jFriedensreich wrote:
| as always a delight to read ken! im curious about speculation
| how to do the bonding and mounting of these chips at scale. at
| this size even the general handling and cutting of wafers are
| hard to imagine for me. how did the connections to the antenna
| look like and was there an indication of different glue /
| adhesive layers apart from the coatings you described?
| caf wrote:
| I'm curious about how the unique ID is programmed into each
| chip. Presumably all the chips on the wafer come out identical
| - at which point in the process are they individually selected
| and given a unique personality? Is it done with direct
| electrical contact that is then fused off, or using the near
| field link?
| grishka wrote:
| Maybe some kind of custom NFC command that writes the UID
| into the EEPROM and sets a flag that it's now read only?
| account42 wrote:
| It's probably done through normal write commands if there
| is any explicit lock bit at all (it could doesn't just
| check if any of the UID bits are already non-zero and then
| reject the write). You can actually make other parts of the
| memory read-only too by setting bits at a specified address
| [0] (which then cannot be unset again).
|
| [0] https://www.nxp.com/docs/en/data-
| sheet/MF0ICU1.pdf#G4008599
| kens wrote:
| Since they need to probe each die to test it on the wafer,
| they set the UID at the same time. According to the
| datasheet, "These bytes are programmed and write protected in
| the production test."
| qaisjp wrote:
| I really enjoyed this read, thanks.
|
| In the footnotes you said:
|
| > One complication is that the counters have an "anti-tearing"
| feature for additional security
|
| Two questions:
|
| 1. Why is it a "complication"? Is it just that it makes the
| counters more complicated, or is there something frustrating
| about the counters? 2. I would love to learn more about how the
| anti-tearing feature works!
| kens wrote:
| The problem is that if the user tears the card away from the
| reader in the middle of an update, that card can end up with
| corrupted data. This makes implementing the increment-only
| counters more complicated. For instance, the straightforward
| approach might hold 00 FF in two bytes. If you increment the
| counter by updating the low-order byte first, but the card
| gets torn away before you update the high-order byte, you end
| up with 00 00, and the counter has gone backward.
|
| A simple way of preventing tearing is to have two copies of
| each counter; if there is tearing, then the two values will
| be different.
|
| Looking at an NXP patent [1], they use a much more
| complicated approach, using a level of indirection. They
| write the new value to a different memory page and then
| update a pointer to the new page. There are various progress
| bits recorded along the way so they can roll back as needed.
|
| [1]: https://patents.google.com/patent/EP3226141A1
|
| Here's an article describing an attack on the anti-tearing
| feature: https://blog.quarkslab.com/rfid-monotonic-counter-
| anti-teari...
| crote wrote:
| How do they make the chips so incredibly thin?
|
| Surely they're not using 75um/120um wafers throughout the
| entire production process - that's literally the thickness of a
| human hair! Can a 200/300mm wafer of that thickness even
| support itself, let alone all the stresses in the production
| process?
| abainbridge wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wafer_backgrinding
| bobthepanda wrote:
| This wasn't super obvious to me until later in the article but
| this is about the single use tickets.
|
| Neat stuff, though I can't say I love the concept of e-waste NFC.
| adolph wrote:
| It isn't different from other anti-counterfeiting measures, the
| printing just happens to be really small and electrically react
| to certain frequencies.
|
| Part of the "software eating the world" story is the decreased
| cost of precision that enabled the hardware substrate of
| software to be inexpensively and ubiquitously included in any
| mass produced object.
| kwhitefoot wrote:
| Assuming that it doesn't become litter on the street what is
| the actual impact of such waste?
| Teever wrote:
| All of the waste that went into producing it of course.
|
| IC fabrication produces a lot of chemical waste, and I would
| imagine that these ICs aren't fabbed in a place that has a
| great track record on pollution.
| kwhitefoot wrote:
| These devices are so tiny that presumably this is also a
| tiny part of IC fabrication.
|
| I'm not saying there is none, just trying get an idea of
| how much of a problem this really is. We also need to
| consider what impact any alternative solution would have.
|
| What struck me from the description of the system was that
| it seems that no electronics is really needed at all, a
| unique QR or barcode would be just as good because the back
| end system records the use.
|
| But that would require the installation of optical readers
| in a system that might not have them but does already have
| NFC readers. Adding those readers would add a considerable
| amount of e-waste too.
| kens wrote:
| I don't like the e-waste aspect either, but realistically, the
| chip is so minuscule that the amount of waste is trivial
| compared to almost anything else you might discard. The chip is
| literally the size of a grain of salt.
|
| The other factor is that people who use tickets regularly would
| use the rechargeable plastic cards, rather than the disposable
| tickets, so the amount of waste is reduced.
| bboygravity wrote:
| The chip is the size of a grain of salt, but there's a
| relatively huge antenna inside made of conducting material
| (metal?) and glue and all that.
| gruez wrote:
| all of that is probably negligible compared to how much
| disposable foil is used for cooking or packaging.
| lxgr wrote:
| On one hand it is probably small in comparison, but on
| the other hand, it seems much more feasible to reuse
| transit ticket ICs than e.g. food packaging.
|
| Many transit agencies do explicitly incentivize reuse,
| e.g. by offering cheaper fares using a reloadable
| contactless card and often charging a deposit for that
| card.
|
| Even then, many of these systems have been struggling due
| to the IC shortage, given the low margins these single-
| use tickets have to operate on. In some Asian countries,
| including Japan and Malaysia, it was tricky to get a new
| transit card for several months or even years, even
| though there is a deposit charge.
| idunnoman1222 wrote:
| just let people use their phones to open the gate
| ximus wrote:
| I don't know about justifying or rationalising waste by
| pointing to a greater source of waste.
| wkat4242 wrote:
| Yeah but also the antenna and I wonder how many chemicals are
| used in the lithography process.
| Reason077 wrote:
| > _"the chip is so minuscule that the amount of waste is
| trivial"_
|
| It does add significant costs to the transport system.
| Single-use NFC cards must cost at least a few cents to
| produce and dispense, which adds up when you're talking about
| hundreds of thousands or millions of rides every day.
|
| Even _reusable_ NFC cards are costly in terms of providing
| all the infrastructure to support them: software, servers,
| enough top-up machines in stations to handle peak demand,
| commissions to retailers selling the cards, extra staff to
| deal with customer support, delays and congestion caused by
| top-up /ticketing queues, etc.
|
| That's one reason London's TfL has been pushing everyone to
| just use their bank-issued contactless credit/debit cards (or
| NFC-enabled phones) for years now.
|
| It's also more convenient, of course, to never have to worry
| about your balance or recharging the card.
| n_plus_1_acc wrote:
| Do they still issue single use tickets for transfers
| between the Heathrow Terminals?
| Reason077 wrote:
| Last time I checked, yes. There's a machine where you
| press a button for a free ticket that works the ticket
| gates.
|
| Unfortunately the days where you could ride the buses for
| free around the whole Heathrow area are gone, however.
| ComputerGuru wrote:
| You are discarding both the chip and every consumable that
| went into making that chip, though.
| bobthepanda wrote:
| I don't really see why a chip is needed at all for single use
| tickets. Those have existed forever and there are a plethora
| of non-chip options ranging from the simple holepunch to the
| optical printed barcode or QR code.
| ianburrell wrote:
| Because that would require a completely different way to
| read tickets than are used for stored value cards. Every
| ticket machine needs way to print which is less reliable
| than writing NFC chip. It is likely that printing a ticket
| costs more than NFC. Every fare reader needs two sensors,
| one NFC and one optical. The optical ones are going to be
| slower. People are going to get confused about which reader
| to use.
| bobthepanda wrote:
| If people can manage the existence of both an optical
| scanner and contactless at the self checkout grocery
| store, this is way overblown.
|
| A ticket needs to be printed anyways, the single use
| ticket with chip does not come from thin air.
| ianburrell wrote:
| But why are you making it worse and more complicated?
| Disposable NFC card is better, cheaper, and easier to
| use.
|
| The NFC doesn't need to be printed. It just needs to be
| dispensed.
|
| My city went from printed paper tickets, that didn't even
| need to be scanned, to contactless fare system with paper
| NFC tickets. It saves money having simpler and less used
| ticket machines. It helps that most people use
| contactless credit card or fare card. They really should
| have more signs that can tap phone or credit card cause I
| suspect tourists think they need to buy ticket.
| rtpg wrote:
| throughput, throughput, throughput.
|
| Magstripes tend to work not so well when you have the
| ticket in your pocket for a couple days, printed codes
| involve people futzing with cameras. You can use a sort of
| card ingestion system to line up a QR code or the like...
| but those things are complicated and break down a lot! You
| end up needing staff to constantly be opening it and
| unclogging it. This works alright if you have like 6
| turnstiles, less so when you have 2 or 3.
|
| Obviously you can work with those models anyways, and
| plenty of transportation networks do! But if your rush hour
| involves moving a million+ people, you really do need this
| stuff to go fast.
| lxgr wrote:
| > Magstripes tend to work not so well when you have the
| ticket in your pocket for a couple days
|
| How very true... SWIPE CARD AGAIN AT THIS TURNSTILE in
| glowing turqouise-ish dot matrix letters will be forever
| etched into my brain long after the Metrocard is finally
| gone.
| muxator wrote:
| Agreed! In Rome for some time now one can top up his paper NFC
| ticket; there is no reason to throw it away.
| tzot wrote:
| Yep, the ones in Athens can be refilled too.
| dheera wrote:
| I feel like 99% of people would not benefit from single use
| public transportation tickets. Even if you are a tourist, if
| you use public transportation once, there is a high likelihood
| you will use it multiple more times, in which case it makes
| sense to get a regular card. Most systems let you return the
| card and get the deposit back if you'd like.
|
| Personally I collect the cards instead because I have a
| tendency to revisit cities years into the future. I just wish
| cities wouldn't make their cards expire so damn quickly.
| Wuhan's metro is nice, the cards don't expire until 10 years
| later. But I've found Singapore and Taipei expire within 3
| years and you lose your stored money.
|
| I have this "brick" of public transit cards for about 20
| cities. It feels powerful. I kind of wish I could just swipe
| this brick in any city and just go. Unfortunately they all
| interfere with each other.
| bbarnett wrote:
| I don't know how many times I've been in a city for a single
| day, or part of one, and have zero interest in spending
| precious minutes finding, buying, and returning a card.
|
| Just let me pay with coins, or a credit card in seconds, with
| no return work.
| dheera wrote:
| I believe Singapore's public transit does support tapping a
| credit card directly at the gates now, but there's an
| annoying step of having to register your card in advance on
| an app before it actually works.
|
| My guess is this might be because on-the-fly credit card
| authorizations still take too long. Waiting 3 seconds for
| an EMV contactless verification would seriously hold up the
| line at rush hour in a country where most people live by
| public transit.
|
| If I were to guess, the registration is probably what
| enables them to pre-authorize a credit line and allow you
| to tap in in a fraction of a second.
| kccqzy wrote:
| Credit cards do not require online authorization.
| bbarnett wrote:
| Interesting, and this hypothesis shows why twmp cards
| might be preferred.
|
| I have no issue with temp cards, if I can buy them right
| at the pickup location. I once flew into a place late at
| night, and only stores had cards to buy, and all were
| closed.
|
| Duh.
| dheera wrote:
| Yeah that's a stupid system and I've seen it in many
| places. Being asked to go to <some random convenience
| store> to get the official public transit card, even the
| dude at the station couldn't sell me one.
|
| The vending machines at every station should be capable
| of directly vending public transit cards. I think most of
| the better systems around the world do work that way.
| ianburrell wrote:
| That is a flaw of Singapore's system. Other places let
| people use contactless credit cards without any delay.
|
| London has been using contactless for a while.
| lxgr wrote:
| That's odd. Most open-loop transit payment systems I know
| give new/unknown cards the benefit of the doubt, and put
| the card on a block list if it turns out to not be good
| for the fare that's eventually distributed to all
| readers.
|
| Are you sure that's true? Their website says otherwise:
|
| > Do I need to sign up for a SimplyGo account to use my
| contactless bank card for transit? You do not need to
| sign up for a SimplyGo account to use your contactless
| bank card for transit.
| dheera wrote:
| OK, it's confusing, I had seen some other information
| that suggested app registration was necessary. It seems
| that it's only necessary if you want to track your
| journeys which makes sense.
| gsa wrote:
| > there's an annoying step of having to register your
| card in advance on an app before it actually works.
|
| Did this change recently? I travelled a little over a
| year ago and my Wise card worked right after I landed at
| the Singapore airport.
| mattkrause wrote:
| I'm pretty sure that the Montreal paper tickets are non-
| refillable but can "contain" multiple rides or a pass
| (weekend, weekly, etc) if you buy them together.
|
| I'd bet a lot of them are sold at the airport: the fare to
| downtown comes with a 24-hr pass for other buses and metros.
| ClumsyPilot wrote:
| Indeed, I didn't know what kind of ticket we are talking about
| - folks please include a picture and some context in your
| blogs, for people from other places and countries
| kens wrote:
| The title says "Montreal" and the second photo in the blog
| post shows the specific ticket. I'm not sure what else I can
| do here.
| bobthepanda wrote:
| Background information in an article is normally presented
| first.
|
| Ticket in english sometimes refers to a season or monthly
| ticket, so it's pretty ambiguous.
| ClumsyPilot wrote:
| Photo of the ticket / ticket machine is an obvious thing to
| include.
|
| Some people live on a different continents and their
| environment looks completely different. This is giving me
| same vibes as those 'probe you are not a robot' tests that
| ask you to identify things that are specific to USA'
| mig39 wrote:
| The ones I've used in the Netherlands and Portugal are similar,
| but can be refilled.
|
| In Portugal, you pay extra for the initial ticket, but
| subsequent uses are cheaper, because you are using the same
| physical ticket.
| lxgr wrote:
| I've actually always wondered what type of system the
| Portugese cards use: They don't seem to be based on anything
| ISO 14443 (or 15693) at least, since they don't react to my
| phone or external reader at all.
| webwielder2 wrote:
| So how much more powerful is this chip than the ones NASA used in
| the the Apollo program?
| kens wrote:
| I think this chip is implemented with a state machine rather
| than a processor, so it's meaningless to compare their
| processing power. The Apollo Guidance Computer had about 17,000
| transistors, while I estimate that the NFC chip has about
| 45,000 transistors. So the NFC chip has more complexity, but
| the same order of magnitude.
| astrobe_ wrote:
| For the fun of it, what about radiation hardening ?
| kens wrote:
| The Apollo Guidance Computer would be more radiation-hard,
| due to its large transistors and magnetic core memory.
| BOOSTERHIDROGEN wrote:
| I would like a comprehensive analysis of FeliCa.
| lxgr wrote:
| Same here! It seems like a fascinating system, especially in
| the federated way in which it's being used by various Japanese
| transit agencies and issuers. Compared to MIFARE, it was
| definitely ahead of its time.
|
| Unfortunately, most things I could find are in Japanese, as
| expected; I suspect that the really interesting parts aren't
| public, as usual in this industry (there's still a lot of
| belief in security by obscurity, even if the systems actually
| don't need it).
|
| Singapore's CEPAS seems very similar conceptually to Felica (at
| least in application, in that there's multiple issuers of
| stored-value cards with interoperability), and the
| specifications for that seem to be available for purchase, but
| I'm not curious enough to bite that bullet yet :)
| rtpg wrote:
| It's not really on the technical side of thigns, but the
| unification of IC cards across transportation companies has a
| good write up [0] that has a bunch of fun details. My
| favorite thing is how the people working on the project just
| had a bunch of card readers from various transport companies
| all in one room.
|
| [0] https://www.ejrcf.or.jp/jrtr/jrtr62/pdf/6-15_web.pdf
| lxgr wrote:
| That's great, thank you!
| landedgentry wrote:
| I'm a big fan of this blog:
| https://atadistance.net/2023/04/04/final-frontiers-how-
| suica...
|
| The author understands Japanese sources and writes about how
| the various Felica-based systems operate and evolve.
| lxgr wrote:
| I'm also a big fan!
|
| One small caveat: As much as I appreciate his writing, I'd
| take some of the technical explanations with a grain of
| salt - the approach is definitely more that of an
| (extremely knowledgeable and experienced!) outsider looking
| at the system and coming up with hypotheses for its
| workings than that of an authoritative source with hands-on
| experience working on the system. It's sometimes not that
| easy to figure out what's hypothesis and what's "confirmed"
| knowledge as a result.
|
| That said, much of what I've learned about Japanese transit
| payment systems (without ever having visited) was via that
| blog. It's amazing!
|
| Somebody from the tiny intersection of people apparently
| having hands-on experience with Felica and writing about it
| in English is this pseudonymous Reddit user (often also
| quoted on the blog):
| https://www.reddit.com/user/FelicaDude/
| piombisallow wrote:
| The diameter of a neuron's axon is about 1 mm, this is getting
| close to biological levels of miniaturization.
| therein wrote:
| It is using a relatively old manufacturing process. It may be
| small but it is because modern chips are small, not because
| this is a feat of engineering where they've achieved incredible
| compute densities.
| phoebos wrote:
| It's small compared to the size of the card, sure, but not
| small for typical modern lithography techniques.
| localfirst wrote:
| Comparing Montreal subway with Vancouver's skytrain:
|
| - Montreals subway stations have this gritty, distinctively
| french atmosphere i loved it.
|
| - Vancouvers above/below stations have no soul, distinctively
| anglo but above ground ones i liked.
|
| - Montreal train cars use rubber wheels to my shock! Extremely
| loud.
|
| - Vancouver train cars use some sort of electric system which im
| not familiar with ( have a few variants (newer hyundai rotem
| cars, old ones: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W_BoeXqaV9c)
|
| - Montreal subway does not cover the entire region like
| Vancouver's skytrain. Getting around is difficult without uber.
| Road conditions are horrible (pot holes remain unfixed for
| decades, city went broke hosting olympics long time ago), I just
| shudder how you can get around during the winter.
|
| But the biggest shock was that in some instances, it was _faster_
| for me to walk then walk to the station and wait for the subway.
|
| - Arriving at YVR: Skytrain runs directly from airport to a
| satellite city where its numerous public buses cover almost the
| entire MV. I could just tap through the toll gate with my credit
| card and wait for a bus which arrives on time quite frequently.
|
| - Arrriving at YUL: Have to take a bus from airport for 30
| minutes to Montreal but doesn't seem to respect time schedule.
| Got off somewhere in Montreal I don't remember (there was a large
| open artsy area) tried to wait for a bus but never came, gave up,
| got uber.
| osnium123 wrote:
| In addition to how hosting the Olympics hurt Montreal
| financially, there was substantial tax revenue loss from the
| trend of corporate headquarters moving from Montreal to Toronto
| staring in the 1960s due to Francophone policies.
| localfirst wrote:
| Yeah they seem to do this every recession. I don't see any
| value in forcing French language which btw, people from
| France laugh and make fun of Quebecois. I've seen it at work
| too.
| dgudkov wrote:
| >Montreal subway does not cover the entire region like
| Vancouver's skytrain.
|
| It's not supposed to. The new REM train network (a few stations
| already in use) will cover the region. By 2027. Maybe.
|
| REM will also go to YUL.
|
| PS. Fun fact, REM is also driver-less just like the Skytrain.
| kens wrote:
| Strangely enough, I used the ticket in the article for the
| REM train (from Du Quartier, where I was staying).
| mardifoufs wrote:
| Yeah the Montreal area transport system uses the opus
| system (the disposable cards are part of that) for
| everything. Sadly, it's now bizarrely more complicated with
| the weird zones that they recently added after half a
| decade of consultations that were meant to... stream line
| intercity travel! for example, if you take the metro in
| Montreal, then ride it until Laval, you have to buy a
| specific type of ticket with the two zones.
|
| Meaning that if you just buy the normal ticket in any
| Montreal station and make the mistake of going to Laval,
| you can be fined and they do tons of ticket traps because
| they know that people make that mistake pretty ogten. It's
| not even a separate line or something. And the same card
| wouldn't let you take a bus in Laval because again, it's
| another ticket (but not the same as the one for the dual
| zone metro that I was talking about earlier...). Just a
| huge mess when it used to be much simpler before they
| "streamlined" it.
| nsguy wrote:
| When I visited Montreal I mostly walked and used their rental
| bicycle. I did take a few subway rides and being from Vancouver
| it didn't leave any specific impression on me one way or the
| other - I got where I needed to get to (some suburb).
|
| The Skytrain to YVR is indeed very nice - built for the winter
| Olympics. Maybe not as "connected" as some European airports
| but quite convenient.
|
| The problem with transit in Vancouver is that most of it is
| rays emanating from downtown, i.e. you have fairly decent
| (though IMO worse than most large European cities) transit if
| you need to get downtown but it's terrible useless if you need
| to get across. My work used to be 20 minutes drive time, >2
| hours transit time.
|
| Skytrain doesn't exactly cover the entire region, as you get
| further away from the downtown core the coverage gets much
| spottier until when you get far enough (but still part of metro
| Vancouver) it's non-existent.
|
| There are certainly times when buses don't show up on time. I
| take transit these days to work and back and I would say
| something like 30% of the time the bus isn't on time. About 5%
| of the time the bus I'm supposed to take just never shows up.
| rangestransform wrote:
| clean and soulless >>>>>>>>>> distinct and gritty for public
| transit
|
| i'm from vancouver, and every day I take the NYC subway i wish
| it was cleaner and more soulless, more hospital sterility,
| harsh 6500K lighting, glass and stainless, and less literal
| grit
| Waterluvian wrote:
| On the topic of NFC: my iPhone ApplePay thing taps so much more
| reliably than any of my credit or debit cards. Is this because it
| has its own power supply and doesn't have to first be powered up
| by the machine?
| adolph wrote:
| Additional conjecture: a device with upgradable software can
| take advantage of updates to readers and protocols. Whereas the
| physical card is stuck at the version it was created with.
| kens wrote:
| NFC supports passive mode (where one side is powered and the
| card is not) and active mode (where both sides are powered).
| So, yes, your phone is probably more reliable because it
| provides a powered data transmission.
|
| An NFC card doesn't actively transmit data. Instead, it sends
| data using "load modulation", where it switches a load across
| the antenna to change how much power it absorbs. The
| transmitter can detect this change in power, but the signal is
| extremely weak (80 decibels below the transmitted signal), so
| it's amazing that it works at all.
| Waterluvian wrote:
| That's insane. And yet when I see what we can do with coax or
| twisted pair, I anticipate we'll get to gbps speeds one day.
| :)
| lxgr wrote:
| The iPhone doesn't actually use NFC's peer-to-peer/"active"
| mode (since contactless payments aren't an NFC application;
| see my other comments on that), but it does specifically
| include an NFC "field amplifier" IC (shown in some iFixit
| teardowns), which most other smartphones and of course all
| physical cards/tags lack.
|
| This does mean that iPhones can't do cool tricks like booting
| up the secure element purely from the field with a completely
| dead battery though that some earlier Android and Windows
| Phones could do (or at least Apple has intentionally
| deactivated that capability for a more consistent/secure
| experience) :)
| lxgr wrote:
| The primary reason is probably just that the secure element in
| more recent iPhones is probably just an order of magnitude more
| beefy than the IC in your physical cards.
|
| Powering up the IC actually doesn't take long, but the
| processing itself can: Contactless payment transactions
| (mostly) use asymmetric cryptography, and old one at that too
| (usually RSA), so simply crunching the numbers takes these
| fairly underpowered ICs quite some time, even when they include
| cryptographic coprocessors.
|
| Compare that with (symmetric key based) transit ticket
| authentication, e.g. for MIFARE DESfire or Japanese Felica
| cards: These usually use DES or AES, which is lightning fast in
| comparison.
| justusthane wrote:
| This is fascinating. We were just in Europe where we experienced
| these tickets for the first time. I had trouble with them; I was
| trying to figure out how to scan them because it never occurred
| to me that they might contain an NFC chip.
|
| My wife, on the other hand, who is not at all technical, took it
| for granted that you would tap them and immediately figured it
| out intuitively.
| hammock wrote:
| Where do you live? Chicago has had these contactless paper
| tickets since 2013
| cbhl wrote:
| Atlanta has been using a form of these contactless paper
| tickets since 2006.
| szundi wrote:
| Romans have used tickets before AD, guy at the gate checked
| it without any contact
| justusthane wrote:
| Thunder Bay, Ontario. Pop. 110k. We still have the sort of
| carnival-style paper tickets. I would guess that most smaller
| cities don't have fancy NFC tickets.
| hammock wrote:
| I'm surprised you have a subway at all
| justusthane wrote:
| We don't, we have a bus line.
| bluGill wrote:
| For small cities a bus is better than a subway. There is
| no traffic so a bus moves fast enough, and roads don't
| cost that much. You need those roads anyway for trucks,
| so may as well reuse them. When a city grows close to a
| million they should start installing metros - but cities
| have plenty of warning and so should start reserving
| space for the metro at 500k.
| marssaxman wrote:
| That's funny - I'm sure I would have shared your confusion, as
| all tappable objects in my world are made of plastic. I wonder
| how your wife thought of it?
| TacticalCoder wrote:
| > ... as all tappable objects in my world are made of plastic
|
| yup in mine plastic and metal but not paper.
| lxgr wrote:
| Probably a mix of plastic and metal: Full metal cards don't
| actually support contactless interfaces!
|
| Two common ways of getting around that is to either
| sandwich a plastic part containing the antenna to a metal
| one, or to punch out a circular part in the middle of the
| metal card and put the antenna in there (and close it all
| up using more plastic).
|
| One card that doesn't do either is the Apple Card - and as
| a result, you can't tap it!
| TacticalCoder wrote:
| > Probably a mix of plastic and metal: Full metal cards
| don't actually support contactless interfaces!
|
| Well it's really annoying: the "metal" card (maybe as you
| say a mix of metal and plastic) is harder to swipe, so I
| got use to present it face down instead of face up, for I
| noticed that that way I get a better percentage of
| success on the first try.
|
| I don't have the problem with my full plastic
| credit/debit cards.
| lxgr wrote:
| Yeah, the sandwich-type cards usually have one preferred
| side for contactless taps. That's one advantage of the
| cutout-style cards, I suppose, but I haven't seen many of
| these lately.
| selcuka wrote:
| > I wonder how your wife thought of it?
|
| Probably because it's around the size of a credit card and
| has fake smart card contacts printed on it. That being said,
| I would probably get confused myself too.
| socksy wrote:
| The ones in Athens are thin white cards and as such easy to
| see the aerial through it. Additionally there's no slot to
| put it through, and a big tap surface at each gate with the
| RFID logo with someone tapping a card on it.[1] I think it
| would be hard to miss for anyone familiar with the concept of
| tapping cards.
|
| [1] https://www.athenstransport.com/english/tickets/
| markus_zhang wrote:
| I have found the same thing with my wife. I'm a technical
| person, but I'm extremely bad with tools and such, including
| the ticket thing. If no one shows me how to use it I'll
| probably figure out a way to insert it somewhere. My wife won't
| have any problem with this and other small tools.
|
| The same thing with IKEA: I always rely on the manual and just
| blindly follow the instructions, and gets very frustrated if
| the instructions miss one step.
| II2II wrote:
| > The same thing with IKEA: I always rely on the manual and
| just blindly follow the instructions, and gets very
| frustrated if the instructions miss one step.
|
| Following instructions is a good thing. Plenty of people
| damage stuff when putting it together since it looks obvious,
| but they usually miss critical details. I would imagine that
| the people who designed the card scanners had to put a lot of
| thought into their design simply because they know many
| people won't read instructions and would do as you suggest:
| figure out a way to insert [the card] somewhere.
| markus_zhang wrote:
| Yeah...but apparently she is more handy than me. I always
| joked she should work as an engineer of some sort.
| bluGill wrote:
| For things like IKEA furniture there often is a good
| engineering reason to do things in a specific order that is
| not obvious. For furniture this is okay - nobody does it
| often (or if you do it is a few things that you memorize
| the instructions for).
|
| Transit has different considerations though. It is critical
| that doing the right thing is obvious without reading
| instructions. Someone might have an important meeting to
| make and the time to read the instructions (or wait for the
| person in from of them to read the instructions) means they
| are late. Or (worse?!?) that time spent in line is annoying
| enough that someone decides to buy a car. You can somewhat
| get around this with more fare machines - but they are
| expensive and take up a lot of space. Fortunately we have
| human-machine interaction specialists who can tell you how
| to make a fare machine that is easy to use correctly
| without needing any instructions.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| > _The same thing with IKEA: I always rely on the manual and
| just blindly follow the instructions, and gets very
| frustrated if the instructions miss one step._
|
| Thing I figured out assembling IKEA stuff in the past few
| years: if it seems like they skipped a step, look carefully
| at the details in pictures. Perhaps use a magnifying glass.
| There's going to be only one way to get from step N to step
| N+1, and all the information to figure it out is there. The
| drawings of all the pieces, from major parts to tiniest of
| screws, have accurate details, and there's enough of them to
| disambiguate the situation.
| girvo wrote:
| You really do need a magnifying glass for some of those
| details, as the (asymmetrical) holes that ID which way some
| part _must_ go become dots at the scale they print some of
| the manuals. You 're absolutely right though: all the info
| is there, just got to work it out
| windex wrote:
| Ikea also doesn't use Philips screws. They have pozidriv
| screws and need pozidriv bits if you dont want to strip the
| screw heads. I learned the hard way.
| voidUpdate wrote:
| I've never had an issue using my normal Phillips head
| screwdrivers with Ikea stuff
| lukan wrote:
| "I always rely on the manual and just blindly follow the
| instructions, and gets very frustrated if the instructions
| miss one step"
|
| But why do people make incomplete manuals? If I have a step
| by step guidance and it doesn't work, because some steps were
| left out, than this is just a wrong manual!
|
| (I share your frustration)
| gumby wrote:
| Typically this means they stepped the design and didn't
| bother to revise the doc, or used up the stock of manuals
| for the old version before starting on the new ones.
| crote wrote:
| Because most companies view the manual as an afterthought.
| You've already bought it. What are you going to do if the
| manual is bad, return it? And even then, you're returning
| it to a third-party store - the manufacturer isn't going to
| care care. You bought an ShelfExpress for 50% off at
| Furniture Mart, can you really expect them to care?
|
| Ikea, on the other hand, prides itself on user experience.
| Everything is Ikea-branded, so any complaint will come back
| to Ikea because the buck stops there. Everything is sold
| internationally, and they don't want to translate it into a
| dozen languages, so they _have_ to make clear assembly
| diagrams. Their entire brand is built around having great
| assembly instructions!
| vundercind wrote:
| I've never seen them skip a step.
|
| Basically all other flat pack furniture I've ever bought has,
| but none of the dozen or so ikea items I've assembled. It's
| part of why I only buy flat pack if it's ikea, now.
| jeffparsons wrote:
| I recently assembled two non-IKEA flat-packed items from
| two different vendors.
|
| One left out details in the diagrams in each step that they
| had deemed irrelevant to that step. This apparent attempt
| at simplifying the instructions stumped me for ages because
| I kept thinking I'd oriented pieces wrong due to the number
| of holes in the picture differing from the number of holes
| in the physical thing.
|
| The other had switched some parts since the instructions
| were made, and hadn't bothered to update the instructions.
| This was a bit more obvious, but still kinda irritating for
| someone like me who is uncomfortable with uncertainty when
| I believe certainty should be attainable.
|
| Whatever else can be said of IKEA, their manuals and
| quality control are excellent. I think of them as the
| McDonald's of furniture -- it's never the best product, but
| it's damn good for the price, and you know exactly what
| you're going to get.
| danieldk wrote:
| Also, their more expensive furniture can be of a pretty
| good quality (e.g. Idasen for office furniture).
| TheJoeMan wrote:
| Does the card not have the three-arcs nfc symbol? Similar to
| the wifi symbol. To me the fake printed dip-chip is more
| confusing!
| kens wrote:
| No, the card doesn't have any symbols like that. It does have
| a pictogram of the card getting tapped on a reader, along
| with the text "Apposez sur le lecteur".
| michaelt wrote:
| Most metro stations have a much simpler way for travellers to
| figure out what to do: of loads people who _do_ know how it
| works, ahead of and beside you.
| ghaff wrote:
| It's getting better but, in my experience, once metro
| systems got away from manned booths and tokens, the systems
| worked fine for commuters but led to lots of fumbling and
| long lines for tourists.
|
| Trains in the UK still have a certain amount of "Which of
| these tickets/receipts go where?" while a line of irritated
| locals is building up behind you. Fortunately, also being
| the UK, someone will help you if you're struggling with
| something sooner rather than later.
| djbusby wrote:
| With a requisite amount of Tsk-ing I hope.
| ghaff wrote:
| Not really. My last trip to the UK I ended up--because of
| a complicated trip--with more of a bag than I should
| really have had on public transit. I was actually a bit
| embarrassed but a few folks were super-helpful with tube
| stations that were, shall we say, not exactly mobility
| friendly.
| seabass-labrax wrote:
| I'm not a Londoner, but I am British, and so feel
| qualified to say that you don't need to feel embarrassed
| :) I've travelled with over 100L of luggage on the Tube
| before - it's my contribution to the trains' traction!
| oopsallmagic wrote:
| Is that the fault of the system, or the fault of the
| tourists for visiting a new place and not reading up on
| local customs?
| Aeolun wrote:
| "Make the damn train work" is not a local custom. Aside
| from that the UK rail system is so complicated and
| expensive you'd expect a manned gate at every station at
| the least.
|
| PS150 from London to Leeds?! I can fly halfway across
| Europe for less...
| seabass-labrax wrote:
| PS165.90, to be precise (anytime single). Or, if you
| travel late-morning to early-afternoon, PS70.20 (super
| off-peak single). By booking weeks or months in advance,
| you can travel for as little as PS22.50 (advance single).
|
| The unofficial BR Fares[1] website does a lot to untangle
| the complexity, although it can only do so much to
| mitigate the expense.
|
| [1]: https://www.brfares.com/
| ghaff wrote:
| Making purchases ahead varies quite a bit across Europe.
| The UK seems to fall pretty hard on the you really should
| buy well in advance side or you're going to pay through
| the nose.
|
| I used to work with someone who, even on an expense
| account, would roll their eyes if someone wanted them to
| do a last minute trip to London.
| varenc wrote:
| I always read up on how the local transit system works
| when I visit a new place. But that's never adequately
| prepared me to smoothly use a public bus like a local
| would the very first time.
|
| Some transit systems are just inherently more confusing
| than others. It doesn't matter to the locals who know the
| quirks, but that doesn't mean something can't be
| improved. NYC has a great subway system, but I find the
| signage and general wayfinding quite lacking. Tokyo's
| system is on a similar level of complexity but has
| excellent wayfinding and is generally much easier for a
| tourist to use.
| Ekaros wrote:
| Poor UI is poor UI. Recently visited system which
| supports contactless payment. So the terminal is there.
| And it has arrow to left with logo of contactless
| payment. Logically first thought is that you just swipe
| card from right to left over it right? No keeps failing,
| is something wrong with my card? Also other card does not
| work...
|
| In the end assholes designing it hid the payment terminal
| in such way that you can't see it from usual angle of
| use.. Amazingly hostile user design for those that rarely
| use that transport system...
| bregma wrote:
| I recently visited Paris. I read up and watched videos on
| how to use the metro. They didn't really cover many of
| the important local customs: I let people off the train
| before trying to cram in and I held the exit gates open
| on my way out of a station so they didn't slam in the
| next person's face. I must have stuck out as a tourist.
| The "act like a local" public info available is never
| sufficient.
| ghaff wrote:
| Ah, yes. The good old "It's the user's fault for holding
| it wrong."
| bluGill wrote:
| I'm into transit and so I did my best to understand the
| system last time I went someplace - and it still took me
| a few minutes to figure out what I needed to do last time
| I went to a new city. And the tourists who didn't think
| to look this up in front of me took even longer. Nothing
| was hard, but when you don't know exactly what you need
| it takes some time to figure that out.
|
| The above assumes you know you will be there and so can
| look things up. I wasn't planning to leave the airport in
| one city so I didn't look up what locals do - then
| weather made me miss the connection and I was stuck in a
| city for a day.
|
| Locals going to a new part of their own city often have
| the same problems trying to read the map and time tables.
| They are faster than tourists, but still need extra time
| because they don't know what is going on.
| lxgr wrote:
| The fake chip is definitely weird!
|
| The logo you mention (four arcs actually) is owned by EMVco
| though, and they let people only use it for credit and debit
| card contactless payment cards.
|
| There's also an NFC logo, but as mentioned elsewhere, these
| cards aren't really NFC cards, so that would also not be the
| right thing to use (I believe the NFC forum wants something
| to happen when you touch anything bearing that logo with your
| phone).
| account42 wrote:
| My guess would be that they used plastic chip cards before
| (those often also do NFC) and only switched to the paper
| cards later - at which point they either deliberately copied
| the whole design including the chip contacts to make the
| switch as unnoticeable as possible or just lost or couldn't
| be bothered to find the original design files and scanned an
| existing card for the print template.
| devl547 wrote:
| All Moscow public transport powered by these chips (actually it
| was, nowadays the chips we use are clones, made in Russia itself)
| - trains, metro and buses.
| thriftwy wrote:
| For a few years now, you may usually do a contactless card
| payment - just tap your bank (debit or credit) card. The fare
| is often higher but so is convenience.
|
| Back around 2010 I remember reading these accusations that
| significant part of revenue went directly to Mifare for the
| massive number of chips.
|
| And for single rides, some of Metro systems still use these
| steampunk brass tokens. Sometimes, less authentic plastic.
| 1oooqooq wrote:
| every single transportation system that uses disposable nfc
| are definitely making a ton of money for the vendor.
|
| and every transportation system that pretends to run as a
| profit center and not a cost center also makes ton of money
| for the vendors.
| thriftwy wrote:
| Building roads and selling cars, though, also makes an
| awful lot of money for the vendors.
| Tijdreiziger wrote:
| In the systems I've ridden, there's usually some kind of
| plastic stored-value card for regular riders, and the (more
| expensive) disposable tickets are only used by occasional
| riders.
| Symbiote wrote:
| A system I used in China had NFC plastic coins for
| occasional use, which were collected and refused by the
| exit barrier.
| amluto wrote:
| > Presumably, the makers thought that making the card look like a
| smart card would help people understand it. The card actually
| uses an entirely different technology.
|
| It's kind of the same, though. The physical communication layer
| is different, but the higher protocol layers are basically
| identical. Smart cards with contacts follow ISO 7816. These
| MIFARE contactless cards are ISO 14443 Type A cards, and their
| protocol follows ISO 7816-4.
|
| This shouldn't be terribly surprising -- the entire ecosystem
| built for smart cards with contacts wants to support contactless
| cards with minimal changes, and this includes the host software,
| the readers, and the logic in the cards. There are even plenty of
| devices where the same device supports contact and contactless
| uses -- plenty of credit cards, bank cards, and FIDO devices are
| like this.
|
| This is analogous to WiFi and wired Ethernet. They're have very
| different physical layers, but they are logically compatible, and
| the same software supports both.
| lxgr wrote:
| Only ISO 14443-4 uses the same protocol as ISO 7816 (another
| way of saying this is that ISO 14443-4 represents the higher
| layers of ISO 7816 over a different physical interface),
| though.
|
| MIFARE Ultralight does not actually implement
| 14443-4/7816/"smartcard"-style APDUs; it's significantly
| simpler, since the ICs are much less powerful.
|
| To make things more confusing, _some_ MIFARE ICs really do
| implement ISO 14443-4 (e.g. their fixed-function MIFARE DESfire
| cards, and their programmable smartcard ICs like SmartMX), but
| not all of them.
| m463 wrote:
| It would be more analogous to your wifi antennas looking like
| 6" cat 5 cables with an RJ-45 painted on the end :)
| schmidtleonard wrote:
| ...and now I want one.
| amluto wrote:
| We're almost there. Try zooming in to the first picture on
| this RJ45 connector:
|
| https://www.truecable.com/products/cat6a-field-term-plug-
| shi...
|
| At that price point, there should be a wifi module hidden in
| it somewhere :)
| xnzakg wrote:
| Two things spring to mind: a whole computer inside an SFP
| module[1] and the O.MG cable[2]
|
| [1]: https://blog.benjojo.co.uk/post/smart-sfp-linux-inside
| [2]: https://shop.hak5.org/products/omg-cable
| TowerTall wrote:
| One of my claims to fame was being part of the team that built
| the first online banking site for a bank in my country around
| 1997.
|
| One of the things you could do was pay certain types of widely
| used paper invoices. When I was brought on, the UI for this was
| just a standard HTML table with labels and input boxes. I
| decided to build a prototype with a paper invoice image as the
| background and a textboxes places where the numbers appearred
| on the paper invoice.
|
| When people paid the invoice, they would have the paper version
| they had received by postal mail next to them. Now, their
| mission was to enter the numbers so they would end up with a
| visual one-to-one copy of the paper invoice on the computer
| screen. It made it easy for everyone to figure out which
| numbers to enter.
|
| People embraced this immediately, and all forms were changed to
| follow this principle. All banks implemented it in their
| banking apps and still use it today.
| onion2k wrote:
| Around the same time (2001) I worked for a startup that was
| doing the same thing but with Flash instead of HTML. We were
| building European export forms. People really liked the UI
| side of it.
| crote wrote:
| In my country we used to have a heavily standardized type of
| money transfer card. It'd be used both for regular wire
| transfers in a "fixed payer, flexible payee" form where you'd
| get a booklet of them to fill out later, and "flexible payer,
| fixed payee" form you'd get mailed to your house to pay your
| bills, only having to write your account number on them, sign
| it, and mail it to your bank.
|
| They were designed to be machine-readable from the start for
| easy processing at the bank, and one of the ways they did
| this was by having all the fixed data encoded in a special
| font. When we started using smartphone banking apps, you'd
| just be able to scan a bill with your phone and it'd
| immediately read out all the data, fill in the missing stuff,
| and you'd only have to tap "confirm" to do the actual
| payment.
| lxgr wrote:
| > There are multiple NFC standards with differences in speed,
| protocol, and range, including NFC-A, NFC-B, NFC-C, NFC-F, and
| NFC-V. The MIFARE Ultralight cards use NFC-A, which is defined by
| the standard "ISO/IEC 14443 Type A".
|
| Pet peeve: Calling these chips "NFC" is a bit misleading. NFC-A
| isn't defined by ISO 14443-A, but builds on it.
|
| NFC is an umbrella standard that defines a way of storing
| structured data on a wide variety of existing contactless IC
| technologies (including, but not limited to ISO 14443) and
| products (such as NXP's various MIFARE chips, which in turn are
| based on various layers of ISO 14443 up to -4).
|
| For the concrete example, it's correct to say that one possible
| implementation of an NFC-A tag is MIFARE Ultralight (that would
| be a NFC forum type 2 tag), but neither is NFC the only thing you
| can do with MIFARE Ultralight (and this transit use case almost
| certainly doesn't put an NDEF container on the ticket), nor is
| this the only type of tag you could use for NFC.
| moralestapia wrote:
| >NFC is an umbrella standard that defines a way of storing
| structured data on a wide variety of existing contactless IC
| technologies [...]
|
| Yeah, then it's appropriate to call this NFC.
| lxgr wrote:
| Except that the highest layers in that stack is not used by
| many contactless systems. As an analogy, you wouldn't call
| HTTP or TCP "web protocols" either, even though the web uses
| both (but it can also run on QUIC, which is UDP, and you can
| do non-web-things via HTTP).
|
| Importantly, NFC standardizes a way of storing structured
| data like URLs or phone numbers on NFC tags; transit tickets
| most likely don't use tags in that way.
| account42 wrote:
| Did you google all of that on your PC?
| mschuster91 wrote:
| > The Ultralight chip has a few features beyond a printed ticket,
| though. The chips are manufactured with a unique 7-byte
| identification code (UID). Moreover, the UID is signed, ensuring
| that fake UIDs cannot be generated.
|
| The problem is, they can be just as easily _cloned_. Your average
| Flipper Zero can do that.
|
| If you want actual security, you have to go for a challenge-
| response scheme - i.e. every card is provisioned at the factory
| with a unique private / public key pair, and the public key gets
| signed by the factory. Then, to verify authenticity, the terminal
| gives some random nonce, the card signs it using its private key,
| and the terminal verifies that against the factory's public key.
|
| > Even so, there were a couple of times that I lost track of the
| chip and had to check some specks under the microscope to
| determine which was the chip and which were dirt.
|
| That is the really amazing part for me. We as humans have
| difficulty handling them, but how on earth does a machine even
| _manufacture_ these, much less orient them consistently for the
| bond process to work?!
| lxgr wrote:
| > The problem is, they can be just as easily cloned.
|
| Not if the validation system uses the password feature of
| MIFARE Ultralight. For single-use tickets, which are
| invalidated immediately after being read, this can be good
| enough and is much more lightweight on the IC side.
| chx wrote:
| It's utterly not worth it. Your time to get it working, the
| equipment... but even if you have all of those if you get
| caught they will throw the book on you to scare away others.
| You can be charged by Unauthorized use of computer, Fraud and
| who knows what else. All of that to save four dollars on a
| ticket? When every station has cameras?
| mschuster91 wrote:
| The thing is, you have to do it only once, and then the
| clones and knockoffs come.
|
| Like what, there's Tiktoks advising young dumbasses precisely
| what they need to steal and joyride cars.
| ForHackernews wrote:
| > Like what, there's Tiktoks advising young dumbasses
| precisely what they need to steal and joyride cars.
|
| Yeah, because cars are valuable and joyriding a stolen car
| is impressive and cool to lots of teens. Getting a free
| ride on the bus is like negative street cred.
| GuB-42 wrote:
| > If you want actual security, you have to go for a challenge-
| response scheme
|
| Another option is to just store used UIDs in a database. In
| fact, you could do a system with only UIDs. For a single use
| ticket, validate the UID signature and mark it as spent the
| first time it is used, then every use after that will be
| denied.
|
| A card can be cloned, and it will work, once, it means one
| could steal a ticket by walking by and using appropriate
| equipment (not just a Flipper Zero as it is too short ranged)
| and use it before the legitimate owner does. I don't think it
| is something to worry about for a single use subway ticket.
|
| To improve security for multi-use tickets, one could use
| rolling codes: every time a ticket is scanned and its UID
| validated, some code is read from the NFC memory and it has to
| match a sequence, the next code is then written back to memory
| and has to be provided next time, invalidating any clone.
| Tickets can still be stolen, but you can't beat the system
| unless you crack the server-side encryption.
|
| More valuable tickets like commuter passes can use a different
| system with a challenge-response scheme.
| lxgr wrote:
| This scheme implies a low-latency, high-availability
| connection to a backend database. That's not easy to achieve
| in many transit system environments, hence the relative
| popularity of systems with some level of distribution.
|
| Practical systems often are online these days, but only use
| that connection for eventual consistency style
| reconciliation.
|
| > A card can be cloned, and it will work, once, it means one
| could steal a ticket by walking by and using appropriate
| equipment (not just a Flipper Zero as it is too short ranged)
| and use it before the legitimate owner does.
|
| Even MIFARE Ultralight supports a basic password
| authentication scheme, where only legitimate readers know (or
| can derive) that password, so there a bit better protected
| against cloning than pure passive storage cards.
| akira2501 wrote:
| > If you want actual security, you have to go for a challenge-
| response scheme
|
| Sure you just have to accept that you're now vulnerable to
| Denial of Service attacks, or just DoS due to unrelated service
| infrastructure outages caused by things like backhoes.
|
| > much less orient them consistently for the bond process to
| work?!
|
| It's not all that consistent. They have a 3% failure rate. And
| you have to accept a unique map of "broken chips" with every
| single order you receive.
| kevincox wrote:
| > The problem is, they can be just as easily cloned
|
| But you can only clone a ticket who's ID you use. So you can
| buy a ticket and clone it, but what have you achieved? It is
| still validated "on the backend" once you use either the first
| time.
|
| So the only real risk is that you clone a random person's
| ticket between them buying it and using it which is a security
| flaw, but probably a very minor issue in real-world use.
|
| Maybe there could be slight issue with day passes? You could
| buy a single day pass then issue clones at a lower price.
| However it is likely not an issue worth paying for more
| expensive chips to avoid.
| johnklos wrote:
| "Tie die"
|
| Ha ha ha ha... Love it! Always informative and interesting :)
| stacktrust wrote:
| You can use these around the house or car for location-tap
| automation. Tap on NFC tag and mobile phone can trigger a custom
| shortcut for local action or SSH script to Linux SBC or micro PC.
| Response time is about one second. Even the iPhone SE2 has an NFC
| reader.
|
| For vision-impaired people, NFC tags can be attached to objects
| and the phone can read an audio description when the object is
| tapped against phone.
| ck45 wrote:
| This reminds me a bit of Nabaztags, or maybe the reverse. They
| would also read something that resembles NFC and could perform
| an action.
| Tijdreiziger wrote:
| Around that time, I recall there being a lot of hype around
| RFID tags. E.g. the Touchatag was just a bunch of RFID tags
| and a USB RFID reader, but marketed as a consumer product.
| This never really seems to have caught on, though.
|
| Nowadays, I suppose most consumers do have RFID tags (debit
| cards, transport cards, building keys, e-Passports), they
| just might not be aware of the underlying technology.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| All the patents and "sekhurity" isn't helping. A decade
| ago, I ended up with a bunch of programmable NFC stickers
| that my Galaxy S7 suddenly wasn't able to read, because
| some MIFARE intellectual property issue retroactively
| bricked this class of NFC stickers. Good luck figuring out
| where on the compatibility matrix the Amazon listing you're
| looking at is.
| stacktrust wrote:
| We need a name for the phase of innovation curves after
| IP warlords have completed vision quests, leaving a
| stable landscape.
|
| This vendor has an array of RFID products:
| https://gototags.com
| lxgr wrote:
| MIFARE (classic) tags were never really compliant with
| any industry standard (whether freely available or
| patent-encumbered) and are not actually NFC tags, so many
| systems betting on that but later wanting to e.g. change
| reader chip vendors ended up with issues such as this.
| (There's a way of writing NFC/NDEF-formatted data to
| them, but it's only readable by NXP chips.)
|
| If you buy any standard NFC forum tag, chances are pretty
| good that it'll work with any Android or iOS device. The
| Ntag series has worked pretty well for me on both OSes
| and across various phones; I have one that instantly and
| cross-platform rickrolls everybody tapping it.
| lxgr wrote:
| Given that these things are essentially QR codes via
| another medium, I'm not surprised that it never caught on:
| QR codes are much cheaper to make (it costs nothing to
| include them on a leaflet other than some extra ink/toner!)
| and basically serve the same purpose.
|
| Where they make more sense is when they actually include
| dynamic information: Some of the newer tags can e.g.
| include an authentication tag in the URL part, which lets
| you verify the tag's authenticity (together with a web
| service that keeps track with the high watermark of opened
| sequence numbers).
|
| I wouldn't call that "RFID" anymore, though; to me, RFID
| means transmitting only an identifier, with all the logic
| happening on the backend, but ISO 14443 tags get most
| interesting/useful when they go beyond that and do things
| like authentication or local processing.
| cypherpunks01 wrote:
| My favorite household NFC usage? NFC alarm clock.
|
| Makes me get out of bed and tap my phone on a specific NFC tag
| placed somewhere around the house, in order to turn off the
| alarm. Then, I may as well wake up, since I'm already out of bed
| : )
|
| It's a nice companion to help perform 'habit stacking' as Atomic
| Habits calls it. Want to do pushups right after waking up? Place
| an NFC card under your workout mat, so you're forced to the mat
| first thing in the morning.
|
| NFC Alarm Clock
| https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.nfcalarmcl...
| is a really great and simple Android alarm. Share if anyone has a
| good iOS recommendation.
| scrollaway wrote:
| > _Makes me get out of bed and tap my phone on a specific NFC
| tag placed somewhere around the house, in order to turn off the
| alarm._
|
| Neat, but is there an advantage between this and "Place the
| alarm clock further from the bed"?
| unholythree wrote:
| The noise maker (alarm) is still close to him.
| jeffreygoesto wrote:
| Fair. My mother used to put one of those old rattling alarm
| clocks with two bells on top into a metallic dish and
| placed that combo at the other end of the room. Similar
| concept.
| cypherpunks01 wrote:
| Not a huge advantage, but I'd say mostly range and
| flexibility. You may want to put the tag farther away than
| you could hear an alarm clock, if you want to go to another
| room. And you could customize the alarm so you're guided
| towards a different tag every day of the week, without
| needing multiple (or any) alarm clocks.
| actinium226 wrote:
| > You may want to put the tag farther away than you could
| hear an alarm clock, if you want to go to another room.
|
| _cries in studio apartment_
| exe34 wrote:
| I have one set up with guest WiFi credentials, and somehow it's
| still a novelty to my friends when they visit for the first
| time!
| hlandau wrote:
| The NFC chip I want still doesn't exist: a CPU and flash I can
| write a program for, directly, no VMs, no Java, without an NDA'd
| datasheet.
|
| These exist, but they're all behind NDAs and you're not allowed
| to have them. They're used for e.g. EMV.
| userbinator wrote:
| How about something like this:
|
| https://hackaday.com/2009/06/27/avr-rfid-tag/
| bsder wrote:
| Is there a problem with the TI NFC chips? They all seem to be
| purchasable and have available datasheets.
| Gibbon1 wrote:
| I saw an NFC chip that has 512 bytes of eeprom. Talks to a
| micro via I2C and has an interrupt that can be used to wake it
| up.
|
| I think it's a M24LR04E.
|
| Costs like $0.50.
|
| I think these could be useful for devices where you have a
| limited amount of data you want to read or transfer. Like why
| have bluetooth and all the crap that entails when all you want
| to do is configure a device once.
|
| Advantage of a separate IC is you can use it with whatever
| microcontroller development stack you have working.
| crote wrote:
| The problem is that it is simply a dual-interface EEPROM. It
| only _holds_ data, it doesn 't process it. Great for
| something like a device whose configuration you can update
| via NFC tap (think e-paper display), not so great if you want
| to do a whole challenge-response dance between
| microcontroller and NFC smartphone.
| hlandau wrote:
| See comment below.
|
| More generally what I'm seeking is something in the card form
| factor which is suitable to store cryptographic secrets
| (i.e., a smartcard).
|
| Separate IC is a disadvantage here since it creates a
| vulnerable security boundary and makes it infeasible to
| integrate the chip into a thin card.
| G4E wrote:
| You should check out the lpc8N04 from NXP then ;)
| hlandau wrote:
| This is interesting but clearly not intended for
| security/cryptographic applications... no security hardening,
| no hardware cryptography, and it's also not available in a
| card form factor according to the datasheet.
| Nition wrote:
| How is a chip like this actually manufactured? Especially the
| analogue components area.
| kens wrote:
| It's manufactured pretty much the same as any other chip, using
| photolithography. Most of the analog components would be CMOS
| transistors, just larger. They might use a BiCMOS process with
| a few extra steps to make bipolar transistors. And there might
| be an extra step for the capacitors. But overall, the chip uses
| an old, simple manufacturing process, much easier than cutting-
| edge processors.
| rwmj wrote:
| The chip seems like it's almost _too_ small? I don 't even
| know how they would cut up the wafer and how they would pick
| each die and mount it in the paper card.
| kens wrote:
| They cut the wafer apart with a diamond blade, 20 um thick.
| Laser cutters can make thinner cuts, but they cost more.
| Die pick-and-place machines can manipulate even smaller
| dies at high speed:
| https://www.syagrussystems.com/dts-2-die-sorter
| Sytten wrote:
| They are going away soon (TM), the tech is cool but they are
| impractical. I will be happy to use my credit card or phone.
|
| Too many times I have been stuck in 15-20 minutes queues to buy
| those tickets and you cant refill them with an app... Plus south
| shore and north shore have they own system it's a mess.
| rendx wrote:
| I dread the privacy implications. No thanks.
| vhcr wrote:
| No need to worry about privacy, facial recognition already
| takes care of that.
| akira2501 wrote:
| Is that admissible as evidence?
| Sytten wrote:
| What privacy implication? You already buy the NFC with a
| credit or debit card so if they want to track the card use
| they can.
| lxgr wrote:
| Many of the systems that account/payment card based
| ticketing is now replacing used to allow cash top-ups for
| their stored value cards.
| sircastor wrote:
| But you can still purchase these one-time use cards with
| cash? That's the case with my local transit system. Are
| there places that are eliminating cash altogether?
| lxgr wrote:
| In NYC, there will soon be no more single ride tickets.
|
| There's the OMNY card, and I believe the original plan
| was to outsource sales and top-ups to third-party stores,
| but lately I've also seen some vending machines for that
| in some stations, so maybe they're going back a bit on
| that idea.
| kccqzy wrote:
| It is theoretically possible to refill it with the phone. You
| either have a stored value card where the value is stored on
| the card and have the phone's NFC talk to it, or you store the
| value in a server that has an API to add value and have the
| reader at the subway deduct the value from the server.
| Reason077 wrote:
| That's exactly how online top-ups, and credits/refunds, work
| with the Oyster card system.
|
| In the old days you'd nominate a specific station, and the
| credit would be transferred to the card the next time you
| tapped in at that station.
|
| But now days I don't think you need to do that: presumably it
| maintains the balance primarily on the server side now rather
| than on card.
| lxgr wrote:
| I think Oyster cards are still stored-value based, but I
| suspect that either the backend servers and connections are
| now fast enough to poll pending top-ups in real time, or
| they just fan out the pending top up dataset to all
| turnstiles.
|
| I remember using that feature in the SF bay area, and while
| it took a day for the top-up to actually propagate to all
| readers, it even worked on buses, so they must be uploading
| that data everywhere.
|
| That type of connection needs to be there in any system
| that supports lost/stolen card value recovery, in any case,
| since that's how card block lists are distributed.
| Reason077 wrote:
| The Oyster card balance is certainly maintained online in
| real-time (or near to real-time) since you can view it in
| the Oyster card app/website.
|
| But yes, for speed/redundancy they are still probably
| using the stored value balance too.
| lxgr wrote:
| It's most likely near real time.
|
| TfL likely need that mechanism primarily to synchronize
| the list of blocked open-loop bank cards with unpaid
| balances to all readers. Faster Oyster transaction list
| updates and any-station remote top-ups are probably just
| a side effect of that.
|
| Clipper doesn't (yet) support open-loop bank cards yet,
| so for them, it's probably enough to update more remote
| readers every time the bus goes back to the depot, for
| example.
| speed_spread wrote:
| You can refill them with the Chrono app since last March. No
| more queues. Can't do nothing about Laval and Longueuil though.
| mardifoufs wrote:
| Yeah they added refills but you can't use your phone as an
| NFC pass yet :(. I've always been curious to know more about
| why, you'd think if you can refill your Opus card with your
| phone, to then use it on the terminal, you could just skip
| the card step entirely but I'm sure it's not that simple!
| Sytten wrote:
| Yeah I wish I could buy the one way tickets there. I dont
| have an opus card.
| vaughnegut wrote:
| They're actively working on allowing you to just use your
| phone, iirc targeted for like 2026 or something. Basically,
| its' a work in progress and they delivered the update to
| the Chrono app as a stop-gap.
| lxgr wrote:
| I agree in that they are much more convenient for tourists and
| occasional users, but when living in a city and taking public
| transit every day, I actually prefer stored-value cards, as
| there are still some advantages that arguably make them a
| better fit for the transit use case:
|
| - Full offline support (i.e. both the reader and payment device
| don't need network connectivity), making the system more
| resilient
|
| - Symmetric cryptography and highly optimized transaction flow,
| making reads more reliable and allowing faster customer flows
| through transit gates
|
| - Upfront transparency about charges, monthly passes, capping
| etc. - you immediately see your balance left after tapping.
|
| - No "transaction spam". This is more on my specific transit
| provider (NYC MTA), but I'm really not a fan of getting an
| individual credit card charge for every. single. tap. It can't
| be cheap in terms of fees for the operator either! At least
| other systems, like TfL in London, aggregate taps over a day,
| but it's still not great.
|
| Singapore's public transit agency recently attempted to switch
| from a stored value based model to an exclusively account based
| one, but had to backpedal quickly due to public outrage about
| the move.
|
| Ideally, a system supports both payment methods: Open-loop
| payment cards for infrequent users, and stored-value cards
| (both physical and in digital wallets) for heavy users and
| anybody else that prefers them. But realistically, maintaining
| both is too much of a burden for many transit agencies.
| inkyoto wrote:
| > I agree in that they are much more convenient for tourists
| and occasional users [...]
|
| I would argue that contactless debit/credit card or mobile
| wallet taps are substantially more convenient for tourists
| and occasional users - if you are fresh off the boat (or off
| the plane - for a more modern twist), not much can beat the
| convenience of turning up at the turnstile, tapping on and
| getting on with the trip on the local public transport
| network and tapping off at the end of the trip.
|
| No need to look for a place that sells local rechargeable or
| disposable NFC cards, having to be aware of a low balance,
| looking for a place where the card can be topped up, actually
| top them up and stuff like that. For frequent travellers, it
| also entails having fewer non-portable mass transit payment
| cards to carry.
|
| Bonus points: debit/credit card/mobile wallet payments also
| eliminate the problem of the discovery and consolidation of
| lost balances when a card gets lost, and it reduces the
| environment impact (manufacturing + energy consumed during
| the process) and the wastage (the disposal or, rather, the
| lack thereof) that disposable NFC cards inherently possess.
|
| That is what Sydney (the one that is not in Canada) has done:
| they went straight from prepaid paper tickets to their own
| rechargeable Octopus/Oyster style cards (with the name also
| beginning with an <<O>> - Opal) followed by enabling
| debit/credit card (Visa/MC/AmEx) and mobile wallet NFC
| payments later within the larger metropolitan area public
| transport network on buses, ferries, trains and trams.
|
| Convenience, as always and of course, comes at the expense of
| privacy, though.
| lxgr wrote:
| Yeah, that's what I meant, sorry if that wasn't clear -
| open-loop payment card based systems make more sense for
| infrequent users and tourists for all the reasons you've
| mentioned; dedicated card purse-based systems can be better
| for regular commuters.
| inkyoto wrote:
| > [...] dedicated card purse-based systems can be better
| for regular commuters.
|
| I suppose it is a matter of personal or circumstantial
| preferences so I won't go into that, but through reading
| this discussion, I have learned that, e.g. the Boston
| MTBA's CharlieCard, have an expiry date and has to be
| replaced _in person_. From the _regular_ commuter 's
| point of view it is a nuisance of epic proportions - to
| turn up at a bus stop or a station only to find out they
| are unable to pay because their dedicated card has
| expired. The commuter is only interested in the act of
| paying the fare and not in complexities of the local mass
| transit system's payment network shenanigans.
|
| I also can't help noticing that the wallet (the purse
| style) making business has taken a hit in recent years
| due to the rapidly decreasing circulation of cash and the
| rise of mobile wallets. Many people now leave their homes
| with their smartphones and keys only. Eventually and
| inevitably, all cities will embrace either the
| integration with or adoption of mobile wallets, but that
| will take a while depending on how well each government
| funds its local public transport agency.
| lxgr wrote:
| Mobile wallets are not a contradiction to dedicated
| transit cards, though!
|
| Apple Wallet supports transit cards for dozens of transit
| systems, and most of them have some associated app to
| allow managing monthly passes or topping up the balance.
| Arguably, that's the best of both worlds.
| inkyoto wrote:
| Yes, I am in a full agreement on the best of both worlds,
| with a couple of caveats.
|
| Apple Wallet supports neither the Montreal (the subject
| of this discussion) nor Boston CharlieCard transit cards
| nor many more. Apple Wallet has promptly shown some
| transit cards from mainland China, 1x from France, 1x
| from Hong Kong, 3x from Japan and only 3x (!) from the US
| (Clipper, SmarTrip and TAP). That is all it supports.
| Android may support more.
|
| The said CharlieCard[0] supports a bespoke mTicket app
| that is neither integrated with the mobile wallet nor
| fully supports all modes of transportation in Boston:
| [?] Best for Commuter Rail and ferry riders who don't
| often take the subway or bus [?] No transfers to
| other modes
|
| Which brings me to the main caveat. Compared to
| debit/credit card payments originated in a mobile wallet,
| supporting each transit card in existence is an extra
| effort that places the onus at least on the vendor of the
| mobile operating system and usually on the local
| government as well. Generally, governments do not have a
| good track record at delivering modern digital solutions
| to their citizens and are inefficient at engaging the
| smartphone vendors. So at the very least, the governments
| are slow to instigate a technological change.
|
| And, since the onus is also on the government to upgrade
| NFC readers across the entire network anyway - to support
| modern ways of paying, the question is which one is more
| future proof: 1) natively supporting a local transit card
| at the smartphone level + upgrade the NFC readers to
| support a variety of NFC protocols, or 2) upgrade the NFC
| readers to support the debit/credit card and mobile
| wallet payments only? I am inclined to think that (2) is
| more efficient and more cost-effective for taxpayers.
|
| [0] https://www.mbta.com/fares/charliecard
| lxgr wrote:
| Definitely - the challenges and cost of maintaining these
| individual systems should not be underestimated.
|
| But practically, a lot of them are run by a small set of
| contractors anyway, not any government entity directly.
| These only need to integrate with wallet providers once;
| beyond that it's just a matter of contract terms and
| uploading a few new assets to Apple's and Google's
| servers. (I believe Apple can even launch new transit
| cards without an iOS update these days.)
| jszymborski wrote:
| Montreal has mostly followed this trajectory, be we haven't
| yet stuck the landing yet on bank cards. Most turnstiles
| now are equipped to handle them but the project has stalled
| a bit.
| jszymborski wrote:
| > you cant refill them with an app
|
| You can now refill the rechargeable OPUS cards using an app.
| ForHackernews wrote:
| > a per-chip price of nine cents
|
| That still seems expensive for a $3.75 metro fare.
|
| 2.4% of the cost of your ride is the chip in the ticket itself?
| Maybe it's worth it because it lets them eliminate mechanical
| ticket-reading and unify paper tickets with other NFC payment
| methods.
| lbourdages wrote:
| These single use tickets are used essentially only by tourists
| and those who use public transport only on occasion.
|
| The vast majority of users will use rechargeable Opus cards [1]
| that can contain a variety of different fare types (single
| tickets, monthly tickets, etc).
|
| From an operator's point of view it definitely makes sense to
| only have to maintain one type of reader, even if that means
| losing a few cents profit on the low single digit percent of
| rides that use the disposable tickets.
|
| [1] https://www.stm.info/en/info/fares/opus-cards-and-other-
| fare...
| idunnoman1222 wrote:
| That's not true in Montreal if you buy a single ride you get
| a paper ticket with a magnetic stripe that you feed into a
| completely different reader.
| lbourdages wrote:
| I've never seen these mag tickets, the ticket machines all
| give out Occasionnelle cards even for 1 ticket. Maybe if
| you walk up to the clerk?
| tomoyoirl wrote:
| I assume all regular customers will be paying a fare of $3.25
| or less per ride on the reusable Opus card (fare purchased in a
| 10-ride pack). Essentially you're paying for the chip with the
| very-occasional-commuter one-ride convenience fee.
| crote wrote:
| That's the per-wafer price, via a distributor. I bet you get a
| decent discount if you buy a few thousand wafers straight from
| the manufacturer.
| chgs wrote:
| Mifare is what's been used in London's Oyster cards for 20 years
| (not the ultralight ones mind), and Hong Kong for even longer.
|
| However oyster really is in its way out for most uses.
| contactless and especially a phone is far more convenient for non
| season use, and far less wasteful.
| akpa1 wrote:
| I'm looking forwards to the day they somehow manage to link a
| National Railcard to a contactless bank card.
| bobthepanda wrote:
| I feel like the approach will probably be that railcards
| become digital wallet compatible.
| paulmd wrote:
| costco already has this for ID cards in the states (and
| I've also seen it for account ID for home depot and some
| other places where it's tied to discounts). the app will
| pull up an ID card with a QR code that changes every 60
| seconds or so to prevent screenshotting and trivial reuse,
| which is analogous to the function the chip performs in
| terms of challenge-authentication.
| emmet wrote:
| I'll have aged out before they ever manage this. Been on the
| to-do list for years.
| chgs wrote:
| You'd have to have a national railcard first. The only
| railcards that exist are specific ones for specific groups.
| akpa1 wrote:
| National Railcard is the name that TfL uses to refer to all
| of those different types of card.
|
| https://tfl.gov.uk/fares/free-and-discounted-
| travel/national...
| randunel wrote:
| There's a noticeable delay between contactless cards and
| oysters. Some people I know prefer oyster cards simply because
| they open the gates faster, in spite of having to top them off
| all the time.
|
| I'm looking forward to not having to choose one trade-off over
| the other.
| Reason077 wrote:
| It's noticeable if you're used to the instant response of
| Oyster, but we're talking about a few hundred extra
| milliseconds. Not something that bothers you once you're
| accustomed to it.
|
| It's still fast enough that it will read my Apple Watch
| before the gate starts to close from the passenger in front
| of me.
|
| One saved trip to an Oyster top-up machine will make up for a
| lifetime of contactless NFC latency!
| lxgr wrote:
| Is it not possible to top up a digital Oyster card on an
| iPhone or Apple Watch via an app or Apple Wallet?
|
| The Japanese transit cards that are supported by Apple Pay
| have that option, and it's arguably the best of both
| worlds.
| Reason077 wrote:
| > _"Is it not possible to top up a digital Oyster card on
| an iPhone or Apple Watch via an app or Apple Wallet?"_
|
| It is, there's even an auto top-up option that adds
| credit automatically if your balance drops below a
| certain level.
|
| But there's no "digital" Oyster card, only physical ones.
| If you want to use a device to pay you have to use
| contactless.
|
| And either way, it's still kind of a pain to have to
| maintain a balance - especially if you're a tourist or
| visitor and don't know exactly how much credit you're
| going to need.
|
| I agree that being able to load a transit card into Apple
| Pay etc is also a good solution. The convenience of not
| having a physical card that can be easily lost or
| forgotten is probably the biggest benefit for me.
| lxgr wrote:
| Sorry, I always get Oyster and Octopus mixed up, and it
| happened again here :)
|
| Octopus (used in Hong Kong) is the one that supports
| virtual cards in Apple Wallet.
| rtpg wrote:
| At peak hours it can definitely be a problem, you really
| need the entire pipeline to work well. There's going to be
| somebody behind you most of the time, and you really don't
| want people stuck at the gates.
|
| In Japan credit card transactions routinely take a couple
| seconds. Imagine each person taking 5 seconds to go through
| the gate! I think what trials for credit card payments in
| transportation services there are doing is simply not
| processing the transaction inline, and just doing it after
| the fact (assuming it will go through).
| Reason077 wrote:
| Yes, the TfL system does a partial authorisation. It
| checks the card is valid and not blocked etc but doesn't
| necessarily do a real-time authorisation all the way to
| the issuing bank.
|
| If you try to use a card that is valid but has no
| available balance/credit, it might work for the first
| ride but then be blocked when you try to use it for the
| return trip.
|
| Fares are batched throughout the day and you are charged
| once, overnight, for all rides that day (after applying
| any multi-ride discounts, etc).
|
| This is different from some other cities where I've used
| contactless payments and they'd charge you immediately
| for each ride, giving you lots of annoying little charges
| on your bank statement!
| rtpg wrote:
| Wonder how they block the card, my impression was that
| tokenization was meant to make it harder for card
| chargers to be able to track a card through multiple taps
| like that.
| reitanuki wrote:
| They must have the card identity because you have to
| explicitly 'tap out' at the other end, if you don't want
| to be billed with a maximum fare.
|
| Don't ask me how though
| rtpg wrote:
| I love this reasoning! Absolutely succinct
| shiroiushi wrote:
| >but we're talking about a few hundred extra milliseconds.
| Not something that bothers you once you're accustomed to
| it.
|
| Wrong. With the traffic volumes normally seen in Tokyo,
| those few hundred extra milliseconds will cause huge delays
| at the fare gates. There's a reason the systems here use
| the Felica card which processes in 100ms: it's really
| needed for this kind of pedestrian volume.
| wenc wrote:
| Apple Express Transit works with Octopus cards.
|
| https://support.apple.com/en-us/118625
|
| You don't have to unlock your phone -- just tap. If you have
| an Apple watch, just put your wrist to the reader.
|
| I use this all the time in NYC and it's so fast.
| landedgentry wrote:
| The MIFARE protocol (which Oyster cards use) takes 300ms to
| 500ms per tap. EMV (i.e. contactless cards) take ~500ms,
| which slows down normal walking speed.
|
| Here's a good summary of NFC protocols used for transit
| gates: https://atadistance.net/2020/06/13/transit-gate-
| evolution-wh...
|
| The Felica standard is fastest at 100ms per tap, and is used
| in Japan (e.g. Suica card) and Hong Kong (Octopus card).
| mardifoufs wrote:
| I think there are plans for contactless smartphone tickets in
| Montreal too. I wonder why they haven't done that yet, it's
| been years since they've started talking about it.
| lxgr wrote:
| Hong Kong's Octopus card uses Felica, as far as I know.
|
| It's conceptually very similar to MIFARE - a fixed function IC
| implementing a fully offline stored value purse - but uses a
| stack that differs from ISO 14443 A on pretty much all layers.
| (It was planned to possibly become ISO 14443 C, but that never
| happened.)
| shiroiushi wrote:
| >Hong Kong's Octopus card uses Felica, as far as I know.
|
| Yes: Felica was developed by Sony in Japan, but was actually
| first adopted in Hong Kong, then later in Japan. It's far
| better than other standards, because it's so fast.
| ghaff wrote:
| I used up the balance of my Oyster card last time I was in
| London and just started using my credit card. If there's a
| difference I didn't notice.
| landedgentry wrote:
| Hong Kong's Octopus card uses the FeliCa standard, not MIFARE.
| grishka wrote:
| Isn't Mifare in different forms a de-facto standard for NFC
| subway tickets around the world? St Petersburg uses Mifare
| Classic (and tokens), Moscow also uses Mifare Classic for the
| refillable Troika card and Mifare Ultralight for disposable
| ones, Dubai "nol" card is a Mifare Desfire, Los Angeles "tap"
| card is a Mifare Classic, and, yes, the London Oyster is a
| Mifare Desfire EV1. Yes I actually went through my stack of
| transit cards and scanned those of them that I wasn't sure
| about.
|
| The only ones that I came across that are _not_ Mifare, and not
| even readable by Android (but readable by the Flipper Zero),
| are the paper tickets used in Brussels. Then, of course, there
| are non-NFC tickets. For example those that use magnetic
| stripes, like the cute tiny ones in Paris or NYC 's MetroCard.
| ascorbic wrote:
| Japan uses FeliCa for its integrated transport cards (I just
| read an Osaka Metro ICOCA card with NFC Tools to check). This
| is used by quite a few systems around the world, including
| Hong Kong's Octopus.
| grishka wrote:
| Update: some of those that I labeled as Mifare Classic are
| actually Mifare Plus, it's just that the app I'm using didn't
| distinguish them -\\_(tsu)_/-
| account42 wrote:
| That's a lot more MIFARE Classic than I would have expected
| considering that reader support for those is a lot less
| guaranteed these days. I guess a lot of them might be legacy
| systems.
| ralferoo wrote:
| > the London Oyster is a Mifare Desfire EV1
|
| There are two distinct types of Oyster card, but I don't know
| which is which, other than from a user perspective. All I
| know is that I had an old style one (the one without the
| white D in a blue square on the back) and you could still use
| it, you just couldn't "connect it" to the app so you couldn't
| look up your travel history.
|
| There was a complicated process for returning it and getting
| a replacement, but as they'd already phased in paying by bank
| card by then, and the only advantage of an oyster card was
| for season tickets, I just returned it and got my deposit
| back.
|
| But if you're into collecting different card types, you might
| want to try to get hold of one of these old ones as well.
| They're probably somewhat rare now, as they were encouraging
| people to upgrade to the new ones at least 5 years ago.
| MBCook wrote:
| The article says the chips are made on a 180 nm process and they
| come out about the size of a table salt grain.
|
| We're now down in the single digits for fabrication in
| nanometers, although I know that sort of just a name. This chip
| is so tiny already, if you were to fab it on a process like 7 nm
| I'm guessing it would be unworkably small. Too hard to cut, too
| hard to manipulate individual chips once you did manage to cut
| them.
|
| So here's my question: how small can we make a chip _in area_
| while still being able to cut them out and easily use them?
|
| It's obviously not a concern for the hundreds of square
| millimeters of a large processor, but I've never heard about the
| opposite end of the spectrum before.
| kens wrote:
| There are a few issues. First, you lose 20 um due to the saw
| cut between the dies. I saw an NXP patent that said this was
| wasting 30% of the die for their tiny chips. If you made the
| chips smaller, you'd be wasting even more. Another issue is
| that you need some area for the bond pads, so you can't make
| your chips arbitrarily small or they will be useless.
|
| Looking at a random die pick-and-place machine [1], it handles
| dies down to 0.2mm in either dimension. So you could handle
| smaller dies than mine with an off-the-shelf machine, but not a
| lot smaller.
|
| [1] The video of the die machine in action is pretty cool:
| https://www.syagrussystems.com/dts-2-die-sorter
| MBCook wrote:
| 0.2mm per side? Wow that's smaller than I'd expect. Thanks.
|
| The increased losses due to cutting make sense too. I was
| expecting the cuts to be wider than 20 um, so that's not
| actually as bad as I was imagining.
| EncomLab wrote:
| Ken is a treasure - he's a walking encyclopedia of all things
| electronic!
| egl2021 wrote:
| Phosphoric acid, hydrochloric acid, and boiling sulfuric acid: I
| should have paid more attention in chemistry lab. This is a neat
| project and answered a lot of questions.
| kens wrote:
| It's not as scary as it sounds :-) For a chip this small, I
| only need a few drops of chemical, which cuts the risk way
| down. I don't have beakers full of hydrofluoric acid and red
| fuming nitric acid, like the real decappers.
| AbraKdabra wrote:
| Yeah, I read it's cheap, like, really cheap... But I refuse to
| believe this is cheaper and simpler than a piece of paper with a
| barcode, why add complexity to something that has to be discarded
| after like, 1 minute?
| varenc wrote:
| The user experience seems superior with an NFC chip like this.
| It's easier and more reliable for the user to tap a card than
| scan a bar code. It's also probably cheaper and simpler for the
| subway system to use a NFC reader for everything since they
| already need to read NFC for their non-disposable tickets or
| tap-to-pay. And as a user it seems nice knowing that no matter
| your type of ticket you tap them all the same way.
| Charon77 wrote:
| I wonder why they don't use magnetic paper instead like how Japan
| is using? Seems cheaper
| lxgr wrote:
| Magnetic paper can't do computations, so these tickets are a
| storage medium only and as such can usually be trivially
| copied. That puts higher requirements on the backend's
| availability in order to prevent fraud.
|
| Most people in Japan actually use (reloadable) IC cards, as far
| as I understand, and railways seem to be in progress of
| switching magnetic stripe tickets for QR code based ones:
| https://english.kyodonews.net/news/2024/05/362243d2c187-japa...
| jszymborski wrote:
| Montreal used to but transitioned to these NFC ones recently.
| numpad0 wrote:
| Those electro-mechanical ticket readers are borderline lost
| technology and sadly don't belong in this software-eletronic
| era
|
| 0: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Vn-QxQOoqQ
| CraigJPerry wrote:
| QR codes seem like a better ticket medium.
|
| This is like a 100 bytes, a qr code can be over 2kb
|
| This is a cheap plastic substrate with ink printing over the top.
| A qr code is just ink - or some other even cheaper printing
| process if you prefer.
|
| This needs a specific ticket technology supplier over the next
| 10's of years. QR codes can be drawn on screens or printed on
| paper and you can change suppliers for every component - from
| mobile phone apps to paper type to physical printer and reader
| devices - until your heart's content over the next years. That
| flexibility can't be underestimated in a space like public
| ticketing over decades.
|
| Issuing replacement tickets needs physical presence to collect
| the ticket, vs qr code which can be emailed, sent on whatsapp,
| shared as a screenshot or photo if you need to, but of course you
| can still exchange physical paper qr codes if you prefer.
|
| The rfid reader for these are cheap and durable, the optical
| reader for qr codes can be almost as cheap and almost as durable
| but not quite, the rfid wins this one point by a small margin.
| s0rce wrote:
| RFID is less angle dependent on reading well quickly. There are
| delays boarding planes trying to get everyones phone to scan
| while the NFC seems to work a bit better just hold it up to the
| reader and walk through.
| grishka wrote:
| The problem with QR codes is that they are read-only.
|
| I don't know about Montreal, but Moscow public transport uses
| similar paper tickets, also Mifare Ultralight, except you can
| get them for different number of trips. When you use your
| ticket, the turnstile or validator would increment those one-
| way counters so that the next one would know how many trips you
| have left. You can't do that with a QR code without either the
| reader or the user's device having a persistent internet
| connection to some sort of central server that would keep track
| of _all_ tickets, which is impractical.
| Forricide wrote:
| You're correct, there are a bunch of different ticket
| options. Not sure about how it's actually implemented,
| though.
|
| Slightly tangential, but when I was in Montreal, I was blown
| away that you just purchase a ticket from a machine and you
| get a printed out ticket with an NFC chip inside. Not my
| favourite part of the trip (Montreal is beautiful!) but
| definitely a cool piece of technology to see being put to
| such a mundane use.
| chii wrote:
| it would be interesting to create a wipe mechanism to erase
| the existing QR code (may be a belt/sander, or a laser like
| those rust cleaning lasers), and print a new one on (may be
| even use the same laser as the wipe!).
| grishka wrote:
| If you really want a system that uses optical scanning and
| allows one ticket to be used multiple times, just make sure
| that there's enough room on the ticket for one QR code per
| trip. When validating, you'd print a new code in free
| space. You can also either print something over the old one
| to invalidate it, or just leave it and let the system
| itself figure out which of the codes is newest.
| chii wrote:
| i'd assume the QR code would contain a record of the
| transactions, but yea, i hadn't thought about multiple
| trips that overlap.
| tjohns wrote:
| IC transit cards in Japan use heat-rewritable ink for
| something similar.
|
| The ticket vending machines print your monthly transit
| passes right onto the face of your card at the beginning of
| the month, and erase it after it expires.
|
| It's not a QR code though. Just human readable text for bus
| drivers. (Turnstiles in the subway still read the pass via
| NFC.)
| Fej wrote:
| NJ Transit uses QR codes for all train tickets and it works
| well enough. It's not quite as seamless as a tap card but NJT
| has moved largely to mobile ticketing and they're in the odd
| position of having to scan tickets both at turnstiles and by
| train crew (handheld scanners); cards would be awkward in the
| latter case. The paper tickets used to have magstripes but
| once they adopted QR codes for the mobile app, the tickets
| lost the magstipe and gained a printed QR code.
|
| So the central server model is practical. The user's device
| has to have an internet connection at some point to activate
| the ticket within a reasonable period before using it but the
| connection doesn't have to persist after that. I don't know
| how their handheld scanners work in the Hudson River tunnels
| where there is no cell service but they do, so long as the
| user activates their ticket before the train departs.
| user_7832 wrote:
| > cards would be awkward in the latter case
|
| Do you mean it would be hard for staff to scan cards? Here
| in the Netherlands both qr and cards (travel cards + bank
| cards) can be used at stations, and are read by the staff
| on the train.
| karunamurti wrote:
| Once I searched how Japan do the synchronization of the data
| in the IC card because I can't imagine how they handle all of
| the traffic for millions of people especially in the rush
| hour.
|
| So the solution is the transportation card is writable, and
| each train station acts like a small data center. They sync
| the data periodically to the main data center.
|
| I think the syncing tech is getting better, Japan train
| companies are going to experiment with QR code soon. So read
| only is feasible.
| grishka wrote:
| > So the solution is the transportation card is writable,
| and each train station acts like a small data center. They
| sync the data periodically to the main data center.
|
| That's also how the two subway systems I'm most familiar
| with do it here in Russia. In both Moscow and St
| Petersburg, the data stored on the refillable tickets
| (Troika and Podorozhnik respectively) was thoroughly
| reverse engineered. People who did it, of course, tried to
| write them too -- for example, you'd make a dump, enter a
| station, then restore the dump with your old balance. It
| worked, but only for a day or two, after which the card
| number was added to a blacklist that all turnstiles check
| cards against. The conclusion was that there's a server on
| each station that turnstiles talk to, that syncs with some
| central server each night (when the subway is closed),
| where all system-wide transactions for the day are
| collated, and if anything is off, the card is blacklisted.
| teknologist wrote:
| Oyster in London works like this too so I've heard. Some
| terminals (e.g. those on buses) are offline until the
| terminal is docked and connected to the main centre.
| RF_Savage wrote:
| The Helsinki metropolitan area public transit system
| "HSL" used to be like that. Bus passes were first mifare
| and the DESfire after some upgrades, but the readers in
| the busses contained the transactions and worked offline.
|
| If they got filled up the the standard practice was free
| fares. :)
| innocenat wrote:
| Japan railway companies in Kanto region are moving to QR
| code for individual ticket in 2027.
|
| The bulk of the ticket will still be the Felica card
| though, because as far as I know neither the QR code or EMV
| open-loop system can handle required throughput of 60
| persons/minute/gate.
| hnick wrote:
| I think semi-persistent internet is not such a big deal for a
| lot of providers. For Opal here in Sydney AU it uses a
| connection for some features. Cards can be anonymous or
| assigned to an account, the account shows all your trips
| online, so there's some required connectivity for that. The
| cards have a smart chip, but credit cards or phones can now
| also just be tapped directly, so it needs to match up when
| you tap off and determine where you started and how much to
| charge. This includes buses, which use 3G IIRC, and may drop
| offline sometimes.
|
| To support the above, they did away with multi-trip tickets
| like you describe. It instead tracks and discounts once you
| hit a weekly limit (yes, you have to give up your privacy for
| this with an account or use your credit card directly). Not
| great for intermittent travel.
|
| For systems like this the question is: if the internet is
| down and a few people get a free trip, does it really matter?
| You don't always need 100% accuracy if it makes everything
| else simpler, like removing paper tickets, printers, litter,
| etc.
| contingencies wrote:
| Fun tangent: I hit a bug in Opal recently with the stored
| value cards. I was able to obtain a balance that read out
| higher on the exit turnstile than on a top-up machine. I'm
| pretty sure this was related to a recharge that failed and
| then eventually succeeded. Multiple top-ups later and the
| difference seems to persist.
| mav3ri3k wrote:
| I am not sure which part is impractical. In India we already
| use QR code for metro tickets. The system design is
| definitely different from one mentioned and mimics more of
| how airport tickets work.
| grishka wrote:
| How does the system know that the ticket was already used?
|
| The thing with plane and long-distance train tickets is
| that you buy them for a specific route. So all the checking
| only needs to be done at your departure station/airport,
| the code for which is encoded in the ticket, and the rest
| of the system doesn't need to know anything about it. But
| you can't do that with city transport. When there aren't
| multi-use tickets, people would often buy multiple single-
| use ones at a time and use them as the need arises, without
| knowing in advance when, where, and from where they'll be
| going.
| mav3ri3k wrote:
| Fair enough. I went through qr code of my previous metro
| ticket to see what info they encode. It is non standard
| so there were - some hashes - type of ticket, in my case
| single use, - time of issue, - valid upto time, approx
| 10hrs, approx journey time was only 30 min - ticket id -
| I could not directly see source/destination address, but
| it is my hunch that atleast the destination address is
| encoded
|
| Now this one time ticket needs to generated before
| entering the metro station and the qr code is scanned at
| * both entry and exit*.
|
| I think the entire system works on daily rotating ticket
| id validated using unique hashes where a ticket validity
| period is tracked. I think this should be enough to
| ensure non-reuse of same ticket.
|
| The caveat is, I have always only bough one time ticket
| which is the only mode allowed in qr. For daily
| traveller's, they need to buy token/card which is NFC
| based.
| grishka wrote:
| Thinking of it, QR codes make sense for when you buy a
| single-use ticket at the station with the intention to
| use it immediately.
|
| We actually have this for suburban trains, it's just a
| receipt with a 1D barcode on it. You use the barcode to
| open the turnstile (on some stations where they are
| installed), but otherwise the tickets are checked by
| controllers that occasionally go through trains.
|
| For getting around a city though, I don't see much of a
| good use case. In my city, if you're here for at least
| several days, you're expected to buy the refillable card.
| If you're only here briefly and only need to use the
| metro a couple times, it's 1.5x more expensive but you'd
| buy tokens or tap with your bank card.
| DiogenesKynikos wrote:
| The system can just keep track of whether the ticket has
| already been used before. You don't have to store the
| information on the ticket itself. You can store the
| information on a central server, connected to all the
| gates.
|
| The ticket itself just has to encode an ID, and then the
| central database contains an entry for that ID that is
| checked by the gate in real time. When the ticket is
| scanned at a gate, the database gets updated.
| grishka wrote:
| That server would have to process thousands of requests
| per second during a rush hour with very little delay. In
| addition to QR codes just being much more finicky than
| tapping a card or sticking something into a slot.
| DiogenesKynikos wrote:
| It only has to process requests inside a single station,
| and then periodically sync up with a central server. This
| doesn't sound difficult at all.
| tombot wrote:
| >You can't do that with a QR code without either the reader
| or the user's device having a persistent internet connection
| to some sort of central server that would keep track of all
| tickets, which is impractical.
|
| This is literally how all of the UK Mobile Train Tickets
| work. The ticket is a 2D barcode either on screen or on
| paper. Every gate / scanner operated by a guard records when
| the ticket has been scanned. They are synchronised and a
| ticket from being scanned twice. It's not that deep
| grishka wrote:
| But that's a train that goes outside of the city or between
| cities. You usually buy a ticket specifically for the route
| you're taking so no system-wide synchronization is
| necessary, only the origin station needs to know that
| you've used that ticket.
| jhugo wrote:
| When I lived in Shanghai 6 years ago they were trialling QR for
| the metro. It was really bad, always huge queues with people
| struggling to get the right angle/illumination/whatever to make
| it scan. I've never seen similar issues with contactless
| methods and in fact I think SH subsequently moved to them. The
| amount of data stored seems pretty trivial to scale if
| necessary.
| socksy wrote:
| When I was in Shanghai this year I used a metro QR code via
| AliPay, and it seemed everyone else did too. There didn't
| seem to be any issue with scanning them so I guess everyone
| got used to that. There was however a queue by the security
| theatre bag scanning device at every single ticket gate.
| ralferoo wrote:
| Interesting, I didn't think you could pay directly via
| Alipay or Wechat.
|
| Most cities you can use chengchema/dachema mini-apps in
| Wechat to generate the QR codes, but also all the old
| smartcards I had from previous trips worked in their
| various cities (but only work in that city) and usually had
| slightly cheaper fares than the QR-code ones, which were
| the same as the cash price to buy a single-use ticket.
|
| But yeah, the bag checking is annoying in China. Shanghai
| is very relaxed compared to everywhere else - most places
| you even have to have your water bottle scanned to make
| sure it is actually water, or else take a sip from it.
| lxgr wrote:
| The two big things that QR codes have going for them is that
| they're cheaper to make and that they can be trivially
| displayed on a smartphone screen.
|
| Contactless ICs are more powerful in every other aspect:
| They're rewritable (allowing reusable tickets), they can
| support challenge-response authentication (allowing secure
| offline usage, which in turn makes for faster transactions at
| the gate), and they're much less finicky to scan in my
| experience.
| dwild wrote:
| One advantage of the RFID, is that you can modify the ticket
| while using it. This is actually what made Montreal choose that
| solution. There's no internet connection to validate the
| tickets, they just update the ticket to say they are used.
|
| I would have said that make it much more resilient, but I have
| seen so many buses that couldn't accept fares... I'm not so
| sure if it's the case.
| jszymborski wrote:
| My understanding is that the STM (runs the Metro) likes to keep
| fares on the actual paper tickets or rechargeable card, rather
| than in some central database.
|
| The paper tickets can hold many fares, including unlimited
| evening fares or two day fares. I believe this would be hard to
| pull off with QR codes without having to keep track centrally.
| kevincox wrote:
| Unlimited fares should be extra easy with a QR code. Just put
| a signed expiration date.
|
| If course duplication is probably a bigger risk for these
| tickets as they case be simply locked to one use server side.
| rjh29 wrote:
| Your comment sounds good for overland rail, bus, event tickets,
| airlines etc and indeed QR is common.
|
| But for subway/metro, during rush hour throughput it is
| important to able to tap an RFID almost instantly. QR is too
| slow and error-prone for subway/metro.
|
| The world (including Montreal - these tickets are going away)
| has converged on credit card / phone / top-up charge card for
| that reason.
| rswail wrote:
| I've worked in public transport ticketing for the past 30 years
| including the first system outside Japan (Hong Kong's Octopus).
|
| The problem with QR codes:
|
| 1. If they're printed, they can be copied.
|
| 2. "Dynamic" QR codes can be screenshot.
|
| 3. They're read-only (by definition)
|
| 4. Readers are slow, require good orientation by the user.
|
| NFC is good because it's read/write, has a ~10cm range, the
| larger cards can hold up to 4K of data, the ultralights can
| replace single journey tickets and can be recycled like
| magnetics being captured at exit.
| CraigJPerry wrote:
| 1. Thats ok. If you're expecting your rfid tokens not to be
| copied just because it seems inconvenient to do so, you're in
| for a surprise! Your ticketing system cannot assume tickets
| in any form cannot be replicated- they can be and if you
| introduce such a vulnerability in your system, you will lose
| revenue
|
| 2. As per 1, no issue
|
| 3. That'd be a great feature if true, I'm all for
| immutability. However , qr codes can be defaced easily,
| hopefully the built in checksum defend against that. a more
| likely threat your system needs to defend against is that new
| qr codes can be generated extremely quickly
|
| 4. Both systems are the same speed, both systems require
| accurate targeting by the user, an rfid token slightly askew
| of the reader will not read since it won't be able to
| influence / absorb the generated rf - most of these systems
| work by providing power to the rfid token and it communicates
| back not by transmitting its own signal but by exerting
| influence on the signal it's receiving. It's a very very low
| power interaction and very sensitive to positioning
|
| A better problem than 4 is that you entail staff overheads
| with a visual system to keep them clean.
|
| Read / write is a bad feature, you will lose ticket sales.
|
| Recycling these is not practical. Direct reuse risks jamming
| the vending machine (used tickets end up subtly bent, very
| hard to reliably deal with), actual recycling isn't viable,
| the energy required and emissions produced exceed that of
| creation of a new card from raw materials.
| The_Colonel wrote:
| > Your ticketing system cannot assume tickets in any form
| cannot be replicated- they can be and if you introduce such
| a vulnerability in your system, you will lose revenue
|
| Yes, the question is not whether such system would be
| abused, but how much. But this is in the end what
| businesses care about.
|
| Will QR codes be abused more than NFC chips? Likely yes.
|
| Will it produce a larger financial loss than the cost of
| the NFC chips?
|
| Can I mitigate these losses by a centralized validation
| system (each terminal needs a network connection with low
| latency guarantees)? Sure, but how much will it cost?
| stavros wrote:
| A centralized system is how tags work already, so you
| can't toss your ticket to your friend behind you and have
| them reuse it.
| The_Colonel wrote:
| These NFC chips have counters to deactivate themselves
| after the allocated number of trips has been reached.
| hgomersall wrote:
| 40 years ago we had a read-write system based on
| mechanical trimming of a piece of card and a physical
| time stamp[1]. It's absolutely possible to roll out a
| system to keep track of journeys that doesn't require
| fancy embedded ICs.
|
| [1] https://www.facebook.com/uktvads/videos/kerching-a-
| saverstri...
| hgomersall wrote:
| I don't think the suggestion is the QR code contains the
| ticket info, but that the QR code is the unique tag into the
| back end virtual ticket system. 1 to 3 are not relevant in
| that context, and 4 isn't borne out in my experience with
| modern readers (they're used in the bar code mix at parkrun
| and they read time is vanishingly fast with a smart phone,
| generally better than barcodes). The number of bits might
| increase the difficulty if capturing the code, but I would
| very surprised if a fast, robust system can't be built.
|
| The huge disadvantage of NFC in this context is the
| electronic waste necessarily produced.
| sverhagen wrote:
| > and 4 isn't borne out in my experience
|
| To bolster your point, aren't there whole countries where
| stores and street sales float on top of QR codes?
| matsimitsu wrote:
| In China, QR Codes are used for public transport too, and
| I found them just as fast as NFC readers (and faster than
| the slow readers used by the NS in The Netherlands)
| ralferoo wrote:
| Until you go to another city and discover that the local
| bus company has decided that instead of just letting you
| pay by Wechat pay or Alipay, you need to install their
| proprietary app to generate the QR code for the bus to
| scan, at which point the app then just turns it into a
| Wechat pay or Alipay transaction at the end. No benefit
| to the user, it just allows the bus company to extract
| all your PII in the process. Actually, they're not all
| proprietary apps, but there are several from competing
| companies, and you have to use whichever one the city has
| chosen.
|
| Actually, I think part of the reason is that so they know
| who's on the bus in case it's involved in an accident,
| because if you buy a ticket from a bus station for a
| "short distance" (so out of the city, but within about
| 40km), you also have to provide them with a phone number
| even though they never call you or send you an SMS using
| that number.
| pizzalife wrote:
| >Actually, I think part of the reason is that so they
| know who's on the bus in case it's involved in an
| accident
|
| The CCP certainly do want to know who's on the bus, but
| not for the reasons you stated.
| defrost wrote:
| Yes- of interest:
|
| _China 's Big Tech companies taught Asia to pay by
| scanning QR codes, but made a mess along the way_
|
| https://www.theregister.com/2024/06/17/asia_qr_code_obses
| sio...
| account42 wrote:
| An always-online requirement is not feasible everywhere.
| kevincox wrote:
| You can fail open. The QR code contained a signed ticket
| ID and expiry. You locally validate the signature and
| expiry and remotely attempt to validate reuse. If the
| remote validation is slow or fails just accept the ticket
| and log it.
| bunderbunder wrote:
| NFC doesn't necessarily create any additional e-waste. In
| Chicago we have an NFC system, and people typically just
| link their phone to their account and use that to pay.
|
| I still use a physical card - so that I have a backup
| option in case something happens to my phone - but even
| there the volume of waste is trivial. I've had my current
| transit card for ages, and it doesn't expire until 2037.
| It's possible that the only technological decision I've
| made that generated less e-waste was deciding to splurge on
| a mechanical watch instead of a quartz model.
| hgomersall wrote:
| Well, yes, but the article is about a disposable nfc
| ticket.
| teknologist wrote:
| I've found NDEF cards that can hold 16KB & 32KB, even as much
| as 64KB. That may be too much capacity for ticketing but it
| blows QR codes out of the water
| scoot wrote:
| When all you need is a unique identifier, what's the
| advantage?
| teknologist wrote:
| None in that case. But with these cards there's less need
| for centralization of data storage and code logic
| CraigJPerry wrote:
| >> there's less need for centralization of data storage
| and code logic
|
| You make it sound like less moving parts are a bad thing
| :-)
|
| I know what you're getting at though - the decentralized
| tolerance of network partitions and the ability to
| provide higher availability and faster decision speed at
| the entry barrier.
|
| The system design constraints are hard but not
| impossible, my back of napkin maths says 5k/ticket scans
| per second with 99th percentile latency < 1000ms not only
| satisfies every use case that exists today but allows for
| 3x population growth beyond!
|
| There's a few things in your favour when designing this
| system though. For example, in the case of network
| partition, you have geographic locality so a pen drive
| delivered a couple of times per day is likely feasible.
| teknologist wrote:
| 1000ms is a surprisingly long wait at a ticket barrier,
| though! Latency is everything in this use case...
| xaduha wrote:
| > QR codes seem like a better ticket medium.
|
| If it was a short-lived QR code generated on your phone, then
| maybe. But the whole point of MIFARE Ultralight EV1 cards is
| that they can't be cloned. It's for repeated use, not for
| printing and using once.
| esskay wrote:
| QR Codes are fine for one off event entries. For a transport
| medium that requires fast high volumes of people to go through
| its an awful idea. QR Code reading is slow, you can't avoid
| that.
| stavros wrote:
| Why is it slow? And is it still slow in perfect lighting
| conditions?
| esskay wrote:
| Its slow because it's read by a camera. That takes extra
| steps, and like you mention, lighting conditions. A QR code
| has to be detected, read and decoded, and thats after the
| image is processed. An NFC is orders of magnitude faster.
| Heck even an old school magnetic strip is faster than a QR
| code.
|
| A better application for QR codes is scenarios where it
| doesnt matter that its slower. Airline checkins, concert
| tickets, etc work well, a busy subway where people are
| queueing to get through a barrier as quickly as possible is
| one of the worst places to use it.
| CraigJPerry wrote:
| When I travel to work, the time from me rotating my phone
| screen to present it to the qr reader window on the gate
| until the time that the gate opens is <1 second always.
| I've never encountered a delay, it doesn't seem all that
| sensitive to what angle you hold your phone at either,
| it's only sensitive to distance I've found, you need to
| hold it no more than 2 inches away.
|
| Separately we have revenue enforcement patrols with
| handheld scanners. The time from the red flash of the
| scanner on my screen (triggered by the person holding the
| scanner, it's not constantly scanning) until the beep for
| ticket result is < 200ms, I.e. it feels very much almost
| instant but with a little perceptible delay.
| Slartie wrote:
| I was in Rotterdam recently. Their metro system uses multiple
| approaches, some kind of RFID for hard tickets, NFC payment
| (without a ticket at all) and QR codes for time-limited tickets
| that you can buy in a phone app.
|
| Getting those QR code readers to read the QR code was a
| nightmare. Almost all the cameras have heavily scratched
| protective windows in front of them, which makes the reading
| process a struggle of trying to find a working angle. Of course
| the scratching is vandalism, but subway systems must be robust
| against vandalism, cause it's something that happens and must
| be expected.
|
| I switched to per-transit payment via NFC after using one of
| the time-limited tickets and realizing that you need to
| consider yourself lucky if you find just one working QR code
| reader at most stations. NFC worked like a breeze.
| ak217 wrote:
| Lots of others mentioned key downsides of QR codes that make
| them generally unsuitable for this purpose (they are stateless,
| trivially copied, easily fouled from repeated use, too slow
| because of fundamental optical constraints, require a 100%
| available centralized ledger/don't work while the reader is
| offline, etc. etc.) but I'd just point out that decades of R&D
| have gone into making these systems work well at scale at the
| busiest train stations in the world, and QR codes came up
| short. Here is a glimpse of early R&D efforts that went into
| this:
| https://www.jreast.co.jp/e/development/tech/pdf_6/tec-06-40-...
| - it covers some of the technical requirements these systems
| fulfill.
| CraigJPerry wrote:
| Is that a paper from 2005 about a system designed in 1997?
| History is excellent for research but in the decades since,
| many things have changed.
|
| Some of those downsides are positives (immutable, easily
| copied) others aren't accurate, for example here's the Mumbai
| metro in 2023 with qr entry gates
| https://youtube.com/shorts/TxbEgEzY9J8?si=s3gE-7_xbCbDoQ1d
|
| Or that a 100% available central ledger is needed (it's not).
|
| That Qr code systems are in use today in some of the busiest
| locations would probably be the most succinct counterpoint
| though.
| kumarvvr wrote:
| I am apalled at the crazy amount of waste this creates. Millions
| of tickets with chips inside them?
|
| My understanding is that they are one time use?
|
| In New Delhi metro, India, they used to use plastic tokens with
| these chips, but at the end of the journey, to exit the station
| you have to give the chip back.
|
| Nowadays, they use a printed QR system, and they have even gone
| paperless. I can buy the ticket with my mobile app, pay using UPI
| instant payment, and show the qr code on the phone to the scanner
| and then travel.
|
| For monthly card holders, rfid chip based cards are issued.
| zulban wrote:
| The fact that they cost just a few pennies each is a reflection
| of how little waste is occurring. If waste bothers you, focus
| on something worthwhile like canceling just one airline flight.
|
| Lifetime of a plastic opus card may even be more wasteful, by
| mass of plastic and chip, if not used extensively. For example,
| one time use is often for tourists, where a full chip opus
| would be very wasteful indeed.
| lxgr wrote:
| > If waste bothers you, focus on something worthwhile like
| canceling just one airline flight.
|
| That's just whataboutism: If there's an alternative way of
| solving the same problem that generates less waste, why not
| use it?
|
| I find the contactless coin form factor for single rides
| quite clever personally, and I don't see any downsides
| compared to paper single-use tickets (other than that
| validators and gates need some storage container to collect
| them, which could be tricky in buses).
| zulban wrote:
| Just because you don't see downsides doesn't mean there
| aren't any. Coins are lost or broken or intentionally
| damaged, and may need cleaning and staff to handle and
| transport them. It's not zero waste. In fact I suspect the
| STM solution may overall have less waste. If you read the
| article, the chip is the size of a grain of salt.
|
| Airline is not just whataboutism. It illustrates the
| absurdity of scale in your point. Imagine someone who is
| spending 20 minutes to save themselves 4 pennies on their
| electrical bill, but they are running 8 air conditioners
| with their windows open during a heatwave. Yes, that's
| whataboutism, but it's an informal fallacy, meaning I may
| still have a good point.
| lxgr wrote:
| > I suspect the STM solution may overall have less waste.
| If you read the article, the chip is the size of a grain
| of salt.
|
| The antenna isn't, however. In any case, I think there's
| a pretty high chance these tickets will not end up in a
| dedicated recycling facility that can properly separate
| antenna from paper and recycle both, disregarding the
| chip.
|
| For similar reasons, Japan is phasing out even magnetic
| stripe single-ride tickets out of recycling concerns (in
| favor of QR code based ones).
|
| > Imagine someone who is spending 20 minutes to save
| themselves 4 pennies on their electrical bill
|
| That's not an appropriate comparison, though. Buying a
| reusable token doesn't take 20 minutes more than buying a
| paper ticket.
|
| Imagine instead a device manufacturer spending some
| months of R&D to help every single household in a large
| country save 4 pennies on their electrical bills, and it
| doesn't seem so absurd anymore.
| kube-system wrote:
| > Buying a reusable token doesn't take 20 minutes more
| than buying a paper ticket.
|
| No, but it could expend 20x the resources, and not be
| used 20x as much.
|
| As the article mentions, the purpose of these paper
| tickets is for single-use or short term use, and the
| system also supports plastic cards for longer term use.
| lxgr wrote:
| These tokens are collected at the end of each trip (or
| you can't leave). This obviously only works in systems
| that have mandatory exit turnstiles.
| iamjackg wrote:
| You should read footnote #2. You can get an Opus card, which is
| reloadable: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opus_card
|
| I couldn't find any data on usage for one vs. the other,
| hopefully it's not a crazy amount. I'd imagine that most people
| who use transit on a regular basis do not use single-use
| tickets.
| lxgr wrote:
| I find the plastic tokens quite clever, but QR codes are not a
| great option for mobile ticketing at transit gates: Often it
| takes people forever to pull up the code in the right
| orientation and dial up the brightness enough for the scan to
| work. Not something I love to deal with when I want to catch a
| train.
| jimbobthrowawy wrote:
| If the QR code is in an app of some kind, any one I've seen
| maxes out the brightness while it's onscreen. Orientation
| data is built into QR codes anyway, so that's a problem with
| the reader.
| kumarvvr wrote:
| QR code reading does not depend on the orientation, at-least
| as per its spec. there are many apps and devices out there
| that can read a QR code in any orientation.
|
| In the app that is used by me, the brightness of the screen
| is automatically increased by the app as soon as I open the
| ticket QR, and then reduces to its previous state, once the
| QR code display is removed.
| lxgr wrote:
| Not any orientation - if you present a QR code ticket the
| wrong way around, or even just angled away from the plane
| the reader focuses on too much, it doesn't work.
|
| Contactless tickets work both ways, and in addition to that
| usually have a larger, more forgiving "landing area". On
| top of that, they can usually read through a wallet (but
| that's more relevant to regular commuters, arguably;
| tourists and infrequent riders will likely have purchased
| the ticket just moments before using it).
| Rehanzo wrote:
| The chips are slightly smaller than a grain of salt. Doesn't
| seem like the craziest amount of waste.
| kalleboo wrote:
| I recently learned that you can just give a printing company a
| hundred bucks or so and have custom NFC cards printed for you,
| you don't actually have to be a big transit agency with an
| ongoing contract for millions of the things and a custom JavaCard
| NFC application or w/e coded for you.
|
| I used this knowledge to replace the QR code membership card to
| my friend's bar with an NFC card version, it looks really cool in
| your wallet compared to all the flimsy paper stamp cards from the
| other bars.
| Ekaros wrote:
| You can even get blank cards, I have a few from university
| days. And you can get card printer... Can't find exact price
| now, but not extremely priced. In theory you could just do
| whole thing in single location from coding the card to printing
| it, even with custom information.
| Arch-TK wrote:
| Interesting discussions in the comments regarding reuse, waste,
| QR codes, etc.
|
| Worth bearing in mind that in the UK train stations have mixed
| NFC, QR and magnetic readers. The ones which are the least
| reliable are the magnetic readers which operate on paper cards.
| The NFC readers are used for pre-paid ticket cards and
| credit/debit cards. The QR scanners for so called "E-Tickets".
|
| I don't really ever see anyone have problems with the QR tickets
| (they're static and distributed as PDF or pkpass). Likewise with
| NFC. Only the paper magstripe cards commonly cause problems.
|
| Meanwhile in the Shanghai metro they use chip coins. Small,
| reusable and NFC.
|
| I think these paper NFC things are a unique combination of non-
| reusable, prone to damage, prone to jamming.
|
| But they are cool.
| solarized wrote:
| To peoples asking: "Why not just QR codes?" Again it's all about
| latency. QR codes take longer when you tap them at the gate:
| opening the app, waiting for the scanner to adjust, connecting to
| inet. While NFC handle these tasks almost instantly. A big
| difference in super busy places where queues are a nightmare.
|
| Again, this problem wouldn't exist if we can optimize WFH
| methods. We don't need to solving "physical problems" from start
| to finish. Making, distributing, and recycling all those ticket
| papers.
|
| No matter how advanced your transportation tech is, moving people
| long distances is still really costly. Sorry to "steer" this
| conversation into WFH and WFO topics.
| BOOSTERHIDROGEN wrote:
| https://atadistance.net/2024/05/31/jr-east-and-tokyo-private...
| asah wrote:
| 1000s of people leaving a stadium faces the same latency: not a
| WFH/WFO issue
| solarized wrote:
| Haha, absolutely! Just to generalize, those thousands of
| people can also watch the match by streaming, right? It's all
| about remote versus physical activities.
|
| We can't shift everything into remote mode. However, we don't
| need to hustle into physical mode every day either. Yeah, yin
| yang complexity, balancing everything out.
| zuppy wrote:
| i'm not a sports fan, but the feeling of being there can't
| be compared to watching the event from home. this is not
| the part to optimize, in my opinion.
| fennecfoxy wrote:
| Not really a comparable thing versus the morning/evening rush
| every single weekday when forcing people in-office. It's the
| scale that makes it an issue, 1000s of people is nothing and
| more of an occasional spike.
|
| See how London deals with toob stations for pride, for
| example, by closing and controlling some, exit only periods
| close to the event, open ticket gates, etc.
| bluGill wrote:
| That latency is time stolen from the other people who are
| already on transit (or waiting in line to get on) who get
| there later. All this latency is the type of thing that makes
| people want to quit using transit and just get a car. (and
| then build more roads to deal with congestion - though road
| users often have more options to avoid this latency and
| overall generally go faster than transit despite the
| congestion - remember it is end to end trip time that matters
| not time to get through a bottleneck)
| scoot wrote:
| The UK rail network already supports QR codes, with the busiest
| station handling over 80M entries/exits per year.
|
| Meanwhile, the integrated subway/overground/bus network in
| London supports direct payment with NFC smartphones, without
| the need for an intermediate "smart" paper ticket; the
| infrastructure for vending those; or the (not insignificant)
| cost of producing the tickets. Not sure what Montreal was
| thinking!
| PaulRobinson wrote:
| Even better, London doesn't need NFC smartphones: if you have
| a chip bank card with a chip for tap payments, just tap that.
| For those of us with smart watches, they do the metro fast
| pay thing as well, so I literally just tap my watch without
| having to press anything or get anything out of my pocket. If
| my watch battery is dead, I can just a bank card.
|
| The only advantage to having Oyster is if you're travelling
| enough to justify a monthly pass (daily and weekly caps are
| respected on bank card taps), or longer.
|
| I travel a lot across North America and EMEA, always glad to
| get home and deal with London's transport network: it's the
| only one that is really designed around, built for and feels
| invested in the passenger experience.
| scoot wrote:
| Good point, the choices are: smartphone, smart watch,
| physical bank card (credit or debit), and pre-paid "Oyster"
| card (think pre-paid debit card specific to the London
| public transport network), and, yes, legacy paper mag-
| stripe tickets.
| BiteCode_dev wrote:
| I can't see big technical limitations resulting in slow QRCode
| scanning. We manage to detect fast cars going 120mph to fine
| them, we can read fingerprints instantly through a screen. We
| can take pictures of galaxies light years away.
|
| 30 years ago you could kill ducks with the NES guns instantly
| and it worked by detecting pixels.
|
| I'm sure we can figure out how to analyze black squares and
| turn them into a number under 50ms.
| sippeangelo wrote:
| The Stockholm Metro and public transport uses QRs, but on
| phones, and it's awful. The huge variance in people's shitty
| broken, dim phones make it take 3-4 tries sometimes.
| Infuriating! The scanners themselves are brilliant though,
| but nobody wants to stand in line for some printer machine
| and need to carry a flimsy bit of paper around.
| sleepydog wrote:
| When I was there they also had NFC readers you can tap your
| credit card or phone on.
| BiteCode_dev wrote:
| The article talks about tickets with chips in it, which
| means you could provide the same ticket with qr code, only
| cheaper and less polluting.
|
| No variance.
|
| People can then use nfc with their phone, which doesn't
| have the pollution problem.
| fennecfoxy wrote:
| Touch x against y versus line this weird printed shape up at
| just the right angle in good lighting conditions. I feel like
| NFC is much easier to tell older folks how to use as well.
|
| I'm all for the "we have technology why tf don't we use it,
| why aren't we better at it" argument, but the truth is that a
| lot of tech/systems in transport & other areas are retro af
| and new stuff gets shoe-horned in with all the caveats of a
| shoe-horning in.
|
| Stuff doesn't get upgraded often, because it's expensive,
| because all of us vote for politicians that grant
| expensive/overpriced gov contracts putting money into them
| and their mates' back pockets. We'd be able to refresh public
| use tech all the time if it was non or low profit, never
| gonna happen tho.
|
| Look at how much it cost Wales to change 30mph signs to
| 20mph: 34mPS! And that's just for a few small areas, not
| everywhere they wanted to do. How in the f u c k, do you
| spend 34m taking down and putting up some signs? Those are
| ludicrous prices & all of us just completely ignore it bc
| we're too busy arguing about skin colour, which sex the
| person I sleep with is, or trans people being in the bathroom
| they want to be in, etc. Honestly.
| BiteCode_dev wrote:
| > weird printed shape up at just the right angle in good
| lighting conditions
|
| None of that matter. QR code can be read on any angle
| because of the 3 position detection patterns it comes with,
| by design.
|
| Lighting conditions are not a problem on tickets (which is
| what the article is about) because you can illuminate the
| paper from the camera.
|
| QRCode were fast on assembly lines two decades ago. They
| were invented in the nineties, at a time where we had slow
| processors and shitty cameras.
| Piskvorrr wrote:
| Actually, they do matter.
|
| Assembly lines give you GREAT control over where the code
| is located, how it's lit ( _consistently_ ), and what you
| do on read error (can't shunt off the passenger to a read
| error bin, so they don't hold up the line). Rotational
| angle doesn't matter, perspective skew does. And then -
| it's a leaf of paper, so you get folds and obscured parts
| (yes, correctable...up to a point).
| BiteCode_dev wrote:
| Assembly lines are dirty, full of parasites and with
| broken lights all the time.
|
| We can create live deep fakes or detect complex objects
| in live feeds of random webcams.
|
| We certainly can correct a few shadows and distortions on
| a flat piece of paper we formatted, showing a basic
| symbol we designed and printed, pushed against a sensor
| we control, on a device we can light and shape the way we
| want.
|
| NFC fails as well, you can fold the ticket just and it
| will break the antena.
|
| Of course if it's a reusable ticket on a rigid medium, it
| won't happen. But neither for QRCode.
| delfinom wrote:
| Lol, that's the joke.
|
| QR Codes were invented by Denso (automaker own) / Toyota. For
| high speed assembly line processes. Lul.
| BiteCode_dev wrote:
| In 1994, no less.
|
| I don't think people realize how limited the hardware was
| at the time.
|
| They think because their phone is slow at scanning QR
| codes, that's how it must be. But the phone is not a
| dedicated device for QRCode scanning.
|
| It's like someone saying they get blurry pics of cars on
| the highway so clearly speed limits are not possible to
| check automatically.
| altacc wrote:
| In some places, like Oslo's metro, tram & bus systems, the
| solution is that there are no ticket barriers, you're trusted
| to have bought a ticket for your journey. There are occasional
| ticket checks with big fines for non-compliance.
| solarized wrote:
| Interesting! It's a good way to test how successful the city
| is with their education systems. We could try it out one day
| a year at least.
|
| Differentiate nomal daily sales rates within the test day,
| observe the trend year by year. Sounds naive, would be lovely
| if it works.
| Piskvorrr wrote:
| There was a push for a gated system here, some years ago.
| The vendor tried to sell it on massive cost savings...and
| was publicly humiliated by a bunch of geeks with an Excel
| table. Turns out, installing and running the gates would,
| _at best_ , bring parity with random ticket
| inspections+fines - while impeding passenger flow as a
| bonus.
|
| It's not necessarily a matter of education: just the
| _feeling_ of "not worth freeloading (at the price), I'm
| likely to get caught anyway" is sufficient.
| joenot443 wrote:
| Most North American cities sadly don't operate at the level
| of trust required for a system like that to work, as much as
| I agree it would be better for everyone.
| jazzyjackson wrote:
| san francisco operates at the level of IDGAF that allows
| people of all income to ride buses and trams without a
| ticket
| itsoktocry wrote:
| Yes, and they have a nearly-$1 billion budget deficit.
| grishka wrote:
| The way you pay for those buses is also kinda ridiculous.
| You're _supposed to know_ that it costs something like
| $1.75 and you 're supposed to have the exact amount in
| cash, no change given. But maybe it changed since 2016.
| bluGill wrote:
| Many cities in North America do. The key is the fine for
| not having a ticket is high enough that you are on average
| much better off having a ticket. Generally this works out
| to enough random inspections that the average person is
| checked once a month, and the fine for not having a ticket
| works out to the cost of a 3 month pass. The exact numbers
| are of course subject to debate, but the above should give
| any city a good starting place they can play with.
|
| IMHO, if you have fare gates they need to be tied into a
| parent control system so that parents to limit where their
| kids are allowed to go alone. I've never seen the
| implemented and the details are important to get right.
| ikety wrote:
| Now you have to collect those fines. Good luck with that.
| Only true frictionless solution is fully state funded.
| exitb wrote:
| Where I live, I'd be far better off not buying the
| tickets. The fine is less than 2 months with a pass and
| I'm checked 2-3 times a year. Yet most of these checks
| don't find anyone without a ticket. Monthly ticket costs
| about 1.5% of average monthly income for that city, less
| than 4% of minimal wage. I'm quite convinced that
| reasonable pricing is the key.
| tracker1 wrote:
| That's probably a significant part of it. Also
| accessibility of the monthly passes. I used to live near
| a rail stop in Tempe/Phx area, and would use it when I
| had to go to the airport or to Downtown Phx as it was
| easier than dealing with parking. The ticket kiosks were
| a bit of a pain, but easy enough, widely available and
| not overly expensive.
|
| I didn't use it that much, but did see ticket checks on
| one of the trips, nobody was without one.
| sysadmindotfail wrote:
| >There are occasional ticket checks with big fines for non-
| compliance.
|
| I'll likely mangle the explanation but this sort of policy
| does not fair well when there is a large divide between
| have/have-not and little/no social safety net.
|
| If you are poverty level you will be forever stuck in this
| cycle: Ticket/fine, court, loss of income, etc. What might
| work is simply granting free access below a certain income
| threshold.
| TheNewAndy wrote:
| How does putting NFC in the tickets prevent this?
| bluGill wrote:
| There should be a program for the poor for sure.
|
| Also a program for free rides to places like abuse shelters
| (for all genders - battered women is sexist talk!), voting
| booths and others similar locations should be in place - if
| you are going to one of them the checker verifies that are
| on the direct route to such a place and gives you a ticket
| - once you get there they validate your ticket - while if
| you don't arrive they send the police looking for you (in
| the case of abuse not arriving is a sign of urgent trouble,
| in other cases the police can arrest you when they feel
| like it)
| dfadsadsf wrote:
| What many people do not realize is that one function of
| tickets is to prevent access to public transportation to
| people below a certain income threshold. If you do not, you
| have people using public transport as homeless shelter,
| urinate, smell badly, openly doing drugs, etc which leads
| to normal people stopping using public transport and then
| happily defunding it (as nobody reasonable uses it anymore
| - too dangerous and unpleasant).
| mcdonje wrote:
| Then make those activities against policy and have
| transit police.
|
| The solution to bad behavior shouldn't involve cutting
| off poor people from basic services they need to improve
| their condition.
| dfadsadsf wrote:
| Those activities are mostly against policy already but
| current political environment makes it impossible to
| enforce nuisance laws. Ticket price is a reasonable
| alternative even if it hurts a few deserving poor people.
| dghughes wrote:
| I was watching a travel show about France and in Paris it
| seems tourists can get confused as to where their ticket is
| for. They can easily end up on a train in an area their
| ticket isn't for. You get a 100 Euro fine! And that's an
| honest mistake not trying to get away without buying a
| ticket.
| skeeter2020 wrote:
| 100 Euros for a travel story you'll tell years into the
| future, and funding the tourism economy - win-win!
| grugagag wrote:
| 100 Euros per person. A group of 7 would be 700 and that
| is only one mishap, there could be multiple per day..
| dnate wrote:
| yet another reason not to visit Paris, win-win!
| Piskvorrr wrote:
| Pretty sure you wouldn't want to make two of those in
| succession. I mean, last time I had to pay a fine for not
| having The Correct Blessed Type Of Ticket, I did pay a
| lot of attention to the tickets I bought next. (Wasn't as
| expensive as in Paris, but still a palpable mistake.)
| actinium226 wrote:
| "We got fined for getting off the train at the wrong
| stop" is not much of a travel story though.
| KineticLensman wrote:
| > "We got fined for getting off the train at the wrong
| stop" is not much of a travel story though.
|
| I was on a plane recently and two people in the row
| behind me were having a lengthy moan about their
| respective travel experiences / disasters. They stopped
| escalating when one of them said "That's nothing, we were
| just coming in to land when the volcano started to
| erupt."
|
| I was _really_ tempted to stand up and pitch in with a
| line about landing in Tokyo when Godzilla chose that
| precise moment to attack, but the fasten-seatbelts sign
| had just lit up, so I didn 't.
| jasonkester wrote:
| Yeah, that kinda sucks.
|
| Last year I bought a friend a ticket from Avon (just south
| of Paris) to Charles de Gaulle. I rode along and we stopped
| for lunch in Paris.
|
| He carried on to the airport, met mr. Ticket man, and got a
| EUR100 fine for taking the route printed on his ticket, but
| too slowly.
|
| I can't understand what they're trying to incentivise by
| doing this to tourists.
| cryptonym wrote:
| Transport company gets some money and ticket man gets a
| share. There is no incentive for them to be human.
| altacc wrote:
| Like a lot of rules, enforcement needs to be realistic,
| appropriate and not overly harsh. In Oslo at least, the
| obvious tourists tend to get let off with just buying a
| ticket, even though the ticket app makes it easy to buy the
| correct ticket. If you speak Norwegian they often look at
| your travel history to see if you're a regular payer who
| just forgot.
| skeeter2020 wrote:
| Calgary's light rail is like this, at least to-date. I don't
| know if fare compliance is an issue, but security and
| homelessness is and that may add physical fare-only barriers
| in the near future
| itsoktocry wrote:
| > _In some places, like Oslo 's metro, tram & bus systems,
| the solution is that there are no ticket barriers, you're
| trusted to have bought a ticket for your journey._
|
| Yes, in high trust societies, you can do things like this.
|
| Today we have to lock deodorant and toothbrushes behind bars
| in our pharmacies so it's not looted. We are not the same.
| grishka wrote:
| But there still needs to be some sort of validator that you
| need to use, doesn't it? I've been to two cities with a
| similar system where you're trusted, Helsinki and Berlin. In
| Helsinki there are validators that people tap some kind of
| multiple-trip card on. In Berlin there are very analog paper
| tickets that you have to put into a "Drucker" on the
| platform, it stamps it with the date, time, and station name.
| concerned_user wrote:
| It depends if the tickets are trip based or time based, for
| time based system you don't always need validator.
|
| I have visited Prague in 2019 and their subway had no
| barriers, ticket machines were tucked somewhere in the
| corner so that I had to actively look around. Interestingly
| the metal poles where sticking out of the floor up to waist
| height with a spacing like that they used to have
| validators on them before.
|
| Since I had a 3 day ticket and I validated it on the bus
| when going from the airport I didn't need a validator.
| Their trams and buses had validators in usual places, so
| subway probably has them too but not in an obvious place or
| the ticket machines already print ticket with time on it so
| you don't need to validate it.
| divbzero wrote:
| Seattle's light rail also works this way: no ticket barriers
| and occasional ticket checks.
| a-dub wrote:
| NYC OMNY allows for direct payment from a debit/credit card via
| NFC at the turnstile. this has privacy issues but i think
| they're ameliorated if you use a smartphone.
|
| i think you can buy a transit payment card if you need one.
|
| no paper tickets. cool ephemera but pretty wasteful.
|
| would be pretty cool if/when we see a day where provably
| private cryptocurrency microtransactions allow for both real
| privacy and the 7 day fare cap feature.
| delfinom wrote:
| Crypto isn't private as traceability is an inherent
| requirement for crypto to operate.
|
| Anyway with OMNY.
|
| You just buy a OMNY card and load it with cash if you want
| privacy. They are being slow to roll the vending machines for
| these out due to vendor issues but it's growing and they
| can't discontinue the MetroCard until they have all the
| vending machines in place.
| jasonkester wrote:
| I like London's version of this. You can just tap your credit
| card or phone at any station, and it will even stop charging
| you after you rack up PS8 in payments over the course of a
| day. Just pretends you had bought a day pass in the first
| place.
|
| Really leaves a good impression, knowing that they could have
| gouged you but chose not to.
| anamexis wrote:
| New York also does this, except weekly.
| https://omny.info/fares
| KineticLensman wrote:
| Yes, super easy to use. And if you don't want to use a
| bankcard or phone you can buy a dedicated 'oyster' card and
| top it up as required. They all use the same card reader.
| Delk wrote:
| I'm not sure that necessarily explains the need for single-use
| NFC tickets, though. There could be a more durable serial-use
| or permanent card with NFC that regular commuters could buy,
| and if those commuters are the vast majority of rush hour
| passengers, it might not be such a problem if single-use
| tickets had a slightly slower system.
|
| Of course that'd mean having two recognition mechanisms, so the
| operator might opt for NFC and chips for single-use tickets
| anyway to make the system simpler. But somehow having single-
| use tickets with chips on them does seem wasteful to me.
| videogreg93 wrote:
| Can confirm that in Montreal there is a permanent version of
| this card (la carte OPUS) on which you can reload more
| tickets.
|
| There are even semi permanent ones you can buy, which are
| good for say 1 day, 1 weekend, or contain 10 passes.
| xmcqdpt2 wrote:
| We have those, with two recognition systems. The system the
| article describes is for the low count, disposable fares (a
| few tickets or a 3 day pass). Most people in Montreal have a
| chip card (the OPUS) which is reusable (and 5$ to buy).
|
| The OPUS is also super interesting because it's a stored
| value card that holds the tokens on the card as opposed to a
| simple ID. The system was developed when cellular
| connectivity was still spotty, so they needed a card that
| would work on buses without internet access. It's pretty bad
| from a UX point of view though: you can only store a few
| different kind of fares, you can't recharge the card online
| (until recently you had to go to a terminal to do it, now
| there is a NFC phone app), you can't declare a card stolen,
| etc.
| Delk wrote:
| Ok, that makes sense then. I know that systems with non-
| disposable cards exist, and we also have one in the
| Helsinki metro area. I think our present system assumes
| continuous connectivity, though. Now and then you see buses
| with the terminal in a non-functioning state. Ends up being
| a free ride. (You can also buy unlimited travel within a
| given zone for x days at a time, which is what those who
| use public transit daily usually get.)
|
| I think most people nowadays use a phone app rather than
| the card, though. But we also don't have gates at stations,
| and it's more of a trust and ticket inspections system
| similarly to what someone said about Norway.
|
| Japan has the Pasmo system which is weird in that it's
| actually more like a prepaid debit-style card that you can
| use not only on most public transit but also as a payment
| method at some shops etc. You can charge it using teller
| machines at stations. I can't remember the details, though.
| TheRealPomax wrote:
| But _why_ are there disposable tickets at all? Even if you
| 're just visiting, buy a transit card and use it, then get
| your deposit back when you leave (or keep it as a
| keepsake).
|
| The idea that you still need single-use tickets for _any_
| use-case once you have a working transit card is just
| bonkers. You don 't, stop making them.
| Delk wrote:
| Some people are passing through and only stay at a city
| overnight, or are just making a day trip, and getting a
| card and returning it for a deposit might be a hassle.
| You might be visiting multiple cities within a brief
| period, each with a different system and different card,
| and getting and returning a card at each sounds
| cumbersome. More or less the same if you occasionally
| visit different cities in your country or area but not
| often enough that you'd want to keep cards for a bunch of
| cities. A local might forget their card and need to make
| a single trip.
|
| I can see lots of use cases for single-use tickets. All
| of them are technically possible to cover with a non-
| disposable card, of course, but that doesn't mean single-
| use isn't more convenient in some of them.
|
| Nowadays phone apps might also be an option, but that can
| hardly be the only way of paying for public transit.
| codewench wrote:
| Taipei has single use NFC tokens that people can buy, but
| they are non-disposable. Instead, they are coin shaped, and
| are deposited in the ticket machine at the end of the trip so
| they can be re-used.
| solarpunk wrote:
| COOL
| woodruffw wrote:
| Why would a QR code require Internet, or an app? You could just
| print it on paper and track the corresponding balance on the
| server side. To my understanding this is what most transit
| networks do anyways, to prevent an enterprising user from
| modifying their balance on the card itself.
|
| (The optical scanning argument makes sense, however.)
| lucianbr wrote:
| Internet is how you get from the client side to the server
| side. Maybe not _internet_ but some-kind-of-net, and that has
| latency, failures etc.
|
| Maybe that's not clear: the turnstile needs to connect to a
| server to check the QR. Need to only have one server, so some
| turnstiles will be relatively far from it. Latency.
| woodruffw wrote:
| > Maybe that's not clear: the turnstile needs to connect to
| a server to check the QR. Need to only have one server, so
| some turnstiles will be relatively far from it. Latency.
|
| Sure, but is this a serious design pressure? I've been on a
| lot of EU train and trolley networks that have a POS
| terminal on the train for direct sales, which are already
| doing networking both for the card transaction and to issue
| the ticket.
|
| (Again to be clear: I'm not saying a QR is better. But I
| don't think connectivity is a unique problem, since systems
| that use NFC _without_ tying into payment cards are almost
| certainly using connectivity to make up for the lack of
| tamper resistance.)
| grishka wrote:
| Even for single-use tickets, the turnstiles on the entire
| system need to somehow know that you've used your QR code the
| moment you did it. This requires them all to be connected to
| some sort of central server. There's a reason why single-use
| tickets either somehow store the validation mark on the
| ticket itself (NFC, magnetic stripe, paper that you have to
| stamp) or get taken away from you (tokens).
|
| > To my understanding this is what most transit networks do
| anyways, to prevent an enterprising user from modifying their
| balance on the card itself.
|
| On those on which this was attempted that I know of, this
| synchronization is far from instant. I was wrong in my other
| comment, in St Petersburg metro it only takes two hours for a
| dumped and restored card to be blocked, but you can
| apparently do this indefinitely on buses and trams because
| they aren't (weren't?) networked: https://web.archive.org/web
| /20170323213524/https://habrahabr...
| gylterud wrote:
| I would like to point out that there is an implicit assumption
| here that we actually need a ticket system for public
| transport.
|
| The general concept is "the cost of the price". Which is
| something to consider for public goods. If the prices would be
| zero, the cost of a ticket system would also be zero.
| devmor wrote:
| It's kind of silly how contentious this subject is.
|
| The majority opinion is that we all pay for public works
| projects even if they don't benefit us, but for some reason,
| transit must be self-funded. It's odd, to say the least.
| kergonath wrote:
| It makes sense if enough people with influence over
| lawmaking and government have a vested interest in
| benefiting from "free" infrastructure and some level of
| friction to use public transit. Add a pinch of "public
| transit is useless anyway, I have a chauffeur" and here you
| are.
|
| It is completely counter-productive and damaging to the
| economy and the environment, but it is not that odd,
| unfortunately.
| steelbrain wrote:
| FWIW, even in places like Estonia, which has a free public
| transport (bus only?) system, the tickets are still
| sold/used/checked. Reportedly to get usage numbers and to
| cost-optimize the routes.
|
| Each resident/citizen can buy a public transport card, then
| tie it to their Gov ID and then tap it everywhere. You could
| argue that this could be replaced by some vision tech but I
| guess this is simpler and has dual use (visitors can purchase
| the card and pay instead of using for free).
| cavisne wrote:
| I ran into this in France, where the ticket station used QR
| codes & NFC. The QR code readers are scratched up meaning
| printed copies without backlight didn't work. And iPhone opens
| Apple wallet when you bring it near a NFC reader, hiding the QR
| code on your screen.
| elric wrote:
| Free public transport would make all of this stuff unnecessary.
| pluc wrote:
| There is no such thing as free public transport.
| account42 wrote:
| There is also no such thing as public transport fully funded
| by ticket sales. If there are large government subsidies then
| it is a valid question if all the costs associated with
| ticketing are worth it.
| gpm wrote:
| There is. The same way as "non-toll roads", "fire
| departments", "public schools", and so on.
|
| If you want a concrete american privately run and open to the
| public example, see Stanford's buses in Palo Alto...
| reportgunner wrote:
| I was living under the impression that the Oyster card already
| solved this problem years ago.
| vaughnegut wrote:
| iirc (it's been over a decade), the Oyster card is a plastic
| card with an NFC in it. Montreal's Opus card does the exact
| same thing (and is probably modelled off of it and similar
| implementations in other cities). This article is describing
| the disposable, single-use ones.
|
| If you don't want to use disposable ones, the same kiosk that
| dispenses the temporary cards will allow you to buy a permanent
| one which you can load with fares as normal.
| _spduchamp wrote:
| OMG! Last time I went to get on the Subway in Montreal, the line
| up at the station to purchase one of these tickets was crazy long
| that I just gave up. There was no way to enter the subway by
| paying directly. You had to purchase one of these tickets. In
| Toronto, you can just tap your credit card to get on the subway.
|
| Also, you see these Montreal cards laying all over the streets.
| This card system just seems so messed up in Montreal.
| xkcd1963 wrote:
| Yes but this allows silly transit companies to retroactively
| charge your CC like in London
| wiz21c wrote:
| FTA:
|
| > It's remarkable that these NFC chips can be manufactured so
| cheaply that they are disposable
|
| In our times, where we slowly understand that we have problems of
| resources and waste, I find it very disturbing that "disposable"
| is considered a positive achievement by the author.
| indoordin0saur wrote:
| These are so tiny that throwing them away is a drop in the
| bucket in terms of waste. It's less waste than your morning
| coffee produces.
| kens wrote:
| No, I do not consider "disposable" to be a positive
| achievement. I consider it to be surprising and worthy of
| attention that NFC chips are so cheap that they are disposable.
| ck45 wrote:
| The article itself is a very interesting summary of the
| technology used.
|
| As for the comments, there seems to be a big discussion on
| whether NFC or barcodes (includes QR codes) are the better
| technology for public transport ticket I have a completely
| different view: No matter what technology you are using, after
| having used public transport in multiple cities in Germany with
| the same flat rate tickets, I wonder if this could be feasible in
| every city or country. Just not caring about a ticket seems to be
| the most user friendly option. It seems to work well, but such a
| system would need to prove itself in areas where public transport
| is already quite crowded, like London.
| JBiserkov wrote:
| "Not only should municipal transit be zero fare, using it
| should provide tax credits."
|
| "This is a genuine, serious proposal. Cars and car
| infrastructure are so enormously expensive and destructive.
| Paying people to use public transit instead would be a net
| positive, and it's not even close."
|
| From: https://hachyderm.io/@jenniferplusplus/112667806776752372
| bunderbunder wrote:
| I'd actually go the other way around. I see a lot more value in
| getting smaller public transit systems onto a common standard.
|
| Getting set up to use public transit as a visitor to a top tier
| city like New York, Brussels or Montreal (I can't speak to
| London) is easy. Usually they have explanatory signage and
| staffed kiosks at all the major intercity transit stations. And
| good websites that clearly explain what visitors need to know
| to navigate the system.
|
| It's visiting a city with a lower-tier transit system that
| tends to pose a greater challenge. I'm thinking here of cities
| like St. Louis, Milwaukee or Portland. Stations may not have
| attendants, automated kiosks may not be well-maintained,
| websites tend to be ill-designed or be missing key information
| about how to use the system, etc. And, on top of all that, I'm
| not necessarily visiting there often enough to amortize the
| (already relatively high, due to the aforementioned problems)
| cost of getting to know the system across may visits. And I
| _certainly_ don 't want to have 15 different transit apps and
| payment accounts to juggle. Standardizing the fare structures
| and payment systems could be a big boon to visitors.
|
| There's potentially more value to the the smaller transit
| systems themselves in standardizing, too. None of them is
| individually a large enough system to achieve good economies of
| scale w/r/t the technical and administrative costs of
| maintaining their own special snowflake fare system.
| GnarfGnarf wrote:
| In the 60's I hacked the Montreal Metro's transfers, and rode
| free. The punched holes recorded time and date code.
| nayuki wrote:
| While the chip technology is interesting, I found the human
| factors on Montreal's public transit system to be bad. This is
| based on my experiences in 2023.
|
| The reusable OPUS transit card expires after 4 years unless you
| have a photo registered. In almost all cities, adult transit
| cards don't expire and don't require photo/name registration.
| https://www.stm.info/en/info/fares/opus-cards-and-other-fare...
|
| The system does not have a concept of a monetary balance ($). The
| system only has tickets (bought in blocks of 1, 2, or 10 with
| appropriate discounts) and unlimited passes (24 hr, 3 day, week,
| month). Note that I define a "ticket" as an abstract
| authorization to ride transit for one trip, not a physical
| object.
|
| There is no discount for using OPUS. If you buy a block of 10
| tickets, it's the same cost whether you load it onto a disposable
| paper card or on a plastic long-term OPUS card. There is no
| incentive to reduce waste.
|
| The Greater Montreal Area is divided into fare zones, A/B/C/D.
| You can use any supported transport agency and vehicle (bus,
| subway, commuter rail, possibly others) to make your trip.
| Ticket/pass types have cumulative fare zones, i.e. A or AB or ABC
| or ABCD. This isn't wrong per se; this is just setting up a
| definition for what's to come.
|
| An OPUS card is locked to one set of fare zones for the purpose
| of buying tickets. For example, your card might be set to zone A,
| or maybe zones ABC. You can only buy and spend tickets of that
| type. However, you can buy passes for any zones, but they are
| expensive and intended for long-term commuters.
|
| A new paper card can be bought for any set of zones. e.g. If you
| want to travel from somewhere in zone A to somewhere in zone C,
| you buy a zone ABC fare ticket. A paper card cannot be reloaded
| after the initial purchase.
|
| There is only tap-on, no tap-off. So if you board at zone A,
| there is no way for the transport system to electronically know
| if you exited in zone A, B, C, or D. This also means that an open
| payment supporting credit cards cannot deduct the correct fare
| amount. There are random fare inspections from human officers to
| ensure you hold a tapped card with the correct fare type at the
| location of the inspection.
|
| In light of this entire setup, I can understand why an OPUS card
| is locked to one set of zones for tickets (which are counted down
| as you use them). If you tap your OPUS card at a reader in zone A
| but you own tickets of multiple zone types on the card, how does
| the reader know which ticket to deduct? Montreal has brought this
| problem on themselves by not having tap-off and also not using a
| money-based system.
|
| To make matters worse, the fare vending machines at subway
| stations are inadequate. There are not enough of them, the menus
| are slow to navigate through, paying by cash or credit card may
| have additional frictions (e.g. cash rejected, no change, card
| payment failure). Thus there is often a queue to buy tickets,
| making the travel experience that much worse. (Meanwhile, I found
| Japan's ticket-vending machines to be top-notch - very clear
| instructions, fast machine response times, and excellent handling
| of cash.)
|
| By comparison, Toronto has a different strategy and different
| problems on the PRESTO contactless fare card. The TTC has a flat
| fare and 2-hour free transfers within the system. GO transit has
| tap-on and tap-off for buses and trains. For a long time, there
| was no fare integration between transit agencies, so you had to
| pay separately on each system; this changed in Feb 2024 so that
| you pay more or less the maximum of what each agency on your trip
| charges rather than the sum of the components.
|
| Japan's transit systems mostly use tap-on tap-off, even many
| buses, and charge by distance. (There are small exceptions like
| the Kyoto bus being flat fare.) Transit pricing and ticketing is
| almost an entirely solved problem for decades; the rest of the
| world can learn from them. (There are still small exceptions,
| like how travelling between two different IC card regions, like
| from Numazu to Tokyo, requires a paper ticket.)
|
| As you can see, even if you live permanently in Montreal and own
| an OPUS card (e.g. zones AB), as soon as you need to make a trip
| outside (e.g. zones ABCD) your usual area, you need to interact
| with a ticket-vending machine and buy a paper card. Meanwhile, in
| Toronto or Japan, you hold one card and the transit systems
| deduct the correct amount of money based on the trip that you
| take. Heck, Toronto introduced open payments in 2023, so you
| don't even need to buy the transit card.
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