You have probably already seen this South Park drawing thingy; if not, have a play -- it's great fun. (Requires `Flash', obviously. But hey -- it could be worse: it could be `Java'.) Anyway, here I am, South Park style:
Moving swiftly on, regular readers will no doubt appreciate learning that I have finally won a minor victory in the Chip-and-PIN wars: Egg, an `Internet Bank' (meaning: like a normal bank but hiding their surliness and incompetence behind a website rather than behind counters in branches) finally issued me with a PIN-suppressed card. Naturally this required an extended and tedious correspondence and I am ashamed to say that I had to resort to argument-from-authority to finally get them to do what I wanted:
They wrote (after apparently agreeing to my request for a chip-and-signature card but in fact sending me another bloody chip-and-PIN one):
In line with the changes that have been made within all financial product providers and the launch of the Chip and PIN facility I regret to inform you that all future cards dispatched will be Chip and Pin enabled, it's no longer possible to be issued with a Chip and signature card.
This explains why you were asked for your Pin when making a recent purchase.
Thanks for your message, I trust this has clarified the matter.
No, it doesn't really clarify it, I'm afraid.
Could you explain why? Further, when I asked for a chip-and-signature card, I was told that one would be issued. Clearly this previous statement was not correct -- or yours was not. How did that happen?
I am not satisfied with the security of the `Chip and PIN' system. Rather than rehearse them here I refer you to the comments made on this by Prof. Ross Anderson a few weeks ago. As he has pointed out, for the customer, `chip and signature' cards are more secure. So I would like one.
Firstly, I'd like to apologise for my colleague who interpreted your message as a request for a replacement Chip and PIN card.
As all financial institutions are converting to the new Chip and PIN system, all cards we issue will be Chip and PIN enabled, as the last message you received clearly stated.
However, in certain circumstances, we can issue Chip and Signature cards. I have ordered one for you and it will be with you within 4-5 working days.
I've read the comments on the BBC Website made by Prof. Ross Anderson and can appreciate your concerns. However, I would ask you to please follow the below link detailing the benefits of the new Chip and PIN system.
[link to some tedious propaganda from Egg]
Once you receive your new Chip and Signature card, you can decide which card you would like to continue to use. Please make sure the card you won't be using is destroyed.
A couple of other comments on the Internet Banking experience. Firstly, Egg don't let you communicate with them by email, but you can send messages to them by filling out a stupid little form on their website. And they won't email you their responses, but they can send you an email which tells you that they've responded. Their website is the normal commercial cack, though in an improvement on normal banking practice it does seem to work on about 90% of the occasions I've tried to use it.
(As an aside, in a fantastic act of security, they even have a page somewhere which purports to show you your credit-card's PIN. I have no idea whether this works, since obviously I'm not going to click on it -- I don't want to know my PIN, and I certainly don't want Egg to have any grounds for claiming that I do -- but I do hope the genius responsible for this innovation has been promoted to yet greater things.)
Egg promise to answer such messages within one day of their being sent, which makes it sound pretty feeble as a way to get any customer service. But actually it's a hell of a lot better than the normal telephone `service' banks provide. Instead of having a stressful battle with some stupid phone menu and incalcitrant operators, you can sit down in comfort, quaff a couple of glasses of wine, jot down a quick email to the bank, and relax to await an answer.
Of course, this `business at the speed of thought' does make it a bit slow to get them to do anything, and coupled with the fact that they only had about a two-thirds success rate in actually sending me cards it took about three months from when I applied for a card until I finally had a usable one. I remain slightly baffled at this performance but frankly I can't be bothered to complain about it.
Elsewhere, much discussion of Who should you vote for?, a small and fun quiz which suggests a party for you to support in the coming General Election. (You may be heartily sick of the election by now, but I'm not, yet -- give it another week.) My name's on the acknowledgements for the quiz (because I helped make a couple of optimisations for the thing before it became really popular) but otherwise it's nothing to do with me, so I'm a bit annoyed that (inter alia) Chris Bertram on Crooked Timber decided that I'd written it, despite a prominent denial on John Band's site, where he found the link. Ho-hum.
Anyway... there are a number of legitimate criticisms of the particular method they use; in particular they only ask about issues on which the main parties have differed and which are prominent in the coming election campaign. So the recommendations come out looking a little bit silly; for instance, they suggested that I vote Green (disqualified because they're unilateralists, among other reasons) or UKIP (disqualified because they're swivel-eyed loons, and also because of their policies -- see a previous note for more on this.).
This being the internet, there were also quite a few of the other sort of criticisms; specifically a number of people have claimed that the site is a Liberal Democrat plot. Now, to be honest, I'm not certain that Liberal Democrats do plot, but I can't say for sure. Frankly I can't be arsed to compile a list of these people, but this rant by `Recess Monkey', who previously worked for a Labour MP gives roughly the flavour. Amusingly the extent of the evidence for this theory is that people who vote Labour tribally object to the suggestion that perhaps they should vote for another party on the basis of its policies. I suppose this sort of optimisation must save a lot of effort in the polling booth.
(Actually I was going to write something more interesting about this but having had a brief Google for further evidence has just left me despairing at the idiocy and political tribalism of the people advancing this theory. I'll leave you with this USENET thread in which one of our glorious Lib Dem councillors reveals that he came out Tory on the test. The singular of `evidence' is, of course, `anecdote'....)
Comments
Posted by Andrew Chapman, Monday, 18 April 2005 20:46 (link):
I'm glad you describe Who Should You Vote For? as 'small and fun', to be honest, as the simplicity and entertainment aspects have been lost at times with everyone arguing about whether we're a LibDem/UKIP/Tory/Labour/Green plot. Sorry for any hassle that's come your way from the credit - I've removed it now (with thanks for your practical consultancy hopefully duly acknowledged) to relieve both you and us, given that people also seem to think we're your pawns somehow. I'd urge people to look at your political survey if they want a deeper experience; and I'd continue to urge people to look at ours, especially if they find detail wearisome; and in either case I'd say there's a lot more to think about than any survey can tell you. We concluded there's no perfect system, and we can't please everyone - but we can at least give them something to think about, and indeed a bit of fun to boot. And finally, once more our refrain, all of you out there: we're not a damned plot for anyone!
Posted by Chris Lightfoot, Monday, 18 April 2005 22:58 (link):
Oh, not your fault at all! Everything popular on the internet is eventually put down to some kind of bloody plot. At least you don't have to try to explain principal components analysis to every muppet who complains about being told their opinions don't match their chosen newspaper....
Posted by Matthew, Monday, 18 April 2005 21:18 (link):
Chris,
I've got a pin-disabled card. It's quite easy. Go to a restaurant with one of those table-top pin machines. Let it reject your pin number, then let it block you. It did this to me for no apparent reason, but I presume you could do it deliberately. Hey presto. You now have a pin-disabled card. It works in all machines -- they say 'Pin rejected', you say 'oh dear I've got another card' and the operator goes 'don't worry you can just sign for it'.
Matt
Posted by Chris Lightfoot, Monday, 18 April 2005 22:54 (link):
hmm. That works pretty well now, I understand, but eventually people will presumably start to interpret `PIN has previously been rejected three times' as evidence of fraud rather than evidence of unfamiliarity with the technology.
On a similar topic, my chip-and-signature card seems to take much longer to authenticate than do the chip-and-PIN ones which less paranoid people have. This is a bit embarrassing in the supermarket queue, but I suppose that's just the penalty one pays for membership of the banking tinfoil-hat brigade....
Posted by Daniel Davies, Monday, 18 April 2005 23:23 (link):
speaking of tinfoil hats, I personally believe that you run the entire internet, including any quizzes or surveys placed on it. Why did you shut down Napster? That was cool.
Posted by Chris Lightfoot, Monday, 18 April 2005 23:24 (link):
I could tell you, but I'd have to kill you, and that isn't in this week's schedule.
Posted by Roy Badami, Tuesday, 19 April 2005 00:28 (link):
I had this yesterday... One of my cards is an old (not chip-and-pin) card that happens to have a chip on it.
The proprietor of the shop assumed it was chip-and-pin, but I said it wasn't. Then he said: "Yes, you're right, it's dialing the bank so it's not chip-and-pin".
Posted by Liz Upton, Thursday, 21 April 2005 12:53 (link):
When living in France a couple of years ago (back in the days where UK cards *had* chips, but those chips were not activated for all French banking systems; the cards also had a strip), we had endless trouble paying for goods in supermarkets. Typically, the checkout assistant would simply refuse to believe that the chip wouldn't work. She (it was never a he. The men all worked on the fish counter) would ram it into the machine a good five times or so while I, in flawless but increasingly angry French, protested that it was a chip-and-signature card without a compliant pin. This always resulted in the assistant either begrudgingly calling a supervisor or pointing us to the back of the queue via a cashpoint.
Lots of transactions sparked off hushed phone calls to the bank, and furious queues of French housewives (dangerous if riled) muttering into their trolley-loads of whelks. (It was a popular fish counter.) The insult was compounded when our card (yay magnets) got skimmed somewhere, and was used in an over-the-counter transaction in Belgium while we were enjoying whelks of our own in Paris.
I'm not convinced there is an ideal solution to this. I am thinking of buying a fireproof safe, filling it with all my money and huddling next to it, bottling my own wee.
Posted by Nick, Monday, 18 April 2005 22:01 (link):
I'm not certain that Liberal Democrats do plot
We do, but it's just that, being liberals, we insist on gaining the full consent of anyone being plotted against before going ahead with anything.
Posted by Nick Vale, Tuesday, 19 April 2005 08:36 (link):
I've just got my new chip 'n' pin card, and I'm not happy with the security either. However, it strikes me that an easy way to improve it is to carefully wipe a magnet down the mag stripe - this should stop it being cloned and used to withdraw cash from an ATM (which I never do - withdraw cash, that is) and which is my main security concern. Obviously I'll still need to remember yet another number, but probably less hassle than an extended correspondance with HSBC. Thoughts?
Posted by Phil Rodgers, Tuesday, 19 April 2005 09:25 (link):
To be fair to the Liberal Democrat councillor you refer to in your last para, he didn't say that "he came out Tory on the test", merely that his Tory score was larger (or at least less negative) than his Labour score. I got a similar result, and I was the aforementioned councillor's election agent.
Posted by Chris Lightfoot, Tuesday, 19 April 2005 11:33 (link):
Quite right -- I'd misread that. Oops.
Posted by Chris Bertram, Tuesday, 19 April 2005 09:53 (link):
Sorry about that. Probably I just read the original post by John B and not the associated comments.
Posted by Simstim, Tuesday, 19 April 2005 15:04 (link):
How about a version of your estimation quiz that asks about the facts underlying various political hot potatoes, e.g. the percentage of UKians who belong to a ethnic minority?
Posted by Chris Lightfoot, Tuesday, 19 April 2005 16:37 (link):
Thank you. That is an excellent idea!
Posted by Katie Melville, Thursday, 28 April 2005 18:26 (link):
I am sure you already read boing boing, but they've had a flurry of biometric jibber jabber over the last few days. Here's the latest
Also, my favourite chip and pin moment came when the Labour chap who was pimping the new development on Richard and Judy, or whatever, said "this puts Britain at forefront of something something technology blah blah unique innovators" and the interviewer responded said "But hasn't France had chip and pin for twenty years?" and the Labour chappy didn't even blush when he replied something along the lines of "Oh yes. Except France." Very paraphrased, but you get the gist.
Posted by Luke, Friday, 28 October 2005 12:44 (link):
I'm only about six months after the rest of this thread, but if anyone is still unsure about handing back their C&P cards and wants some moral support, sign my pledge to send back C&P cards at http://www.pledgebank.com/nochipandpin
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