Be Excellent To Each Other

Everyone's does - this is my point. Without even letting anyone know, all visa and mastercards (and their associated debit cards) now allow this.

True. My fault for not reading the article all the way through whilst on a boring call with a client (I'm very naughty).

However, from that article:



Which isn't quite as bad, but still pretty bad.

And come on, it's only a matter of time before someone works out a way to get the PIN off the chip. You can't seriously think that the only 100% secure storage facility in the world ever is on a credit card?

You do need someone to ener the correct pin for that to work tho

Malc

It's a risk, but a fairly small one (and it the bank's problem). If it was significant, they'd change up (i.e., use encrypted PIN). Just like they changed up from magstripe and signature when cloning became too expensive. Or stop accepting magstripe transactions from foreign ATMs, whatever.




Nobody ever claimed it's 100% secure forever. But it's secure enough to make it too expensive to bother, just like anything else. The encryption will be upgraded, and keylengths increased every time it starts to look easy.

Really? Mine still asked for a PIN yesterday, I think the value was £2 or something. Anyone else noticed it yet?

It's at the discretion of the vendor. Try it at an Itsu.

Or up to £60 (at Tescos in my area) at a Pay-at-the-pump petrol station.

Not so useful if you don't want petrol, or are using your own car.

£60 of course won't cover most cars these days.

I think they need to have case-by-case approval for things like that. On the tesco forecourt, for example, there's probably also video cameras recording number plates. So I guess this mitigates the concerns about fraud.

Itsu? I dunno, what is that?

A sushi restaurant.

More detail needed plskthx.

Mm, hence the "your own car" thing. Not that you'd worry about 'paying' if you were filling up a stolen car on your way to an armed robbery. I, er, imagine.

Also, to whoever it was saying that they won't have loyalty cards because it allows movement and habit tracking; do you use credit and/or debit cards to pay for things?

Loyalty cards just allow them to tie multiple people and cards together, building on what they already do with the payment cards. Even further, in the case of the Tesco Clubcard credit card (and the like), between *shops* (sort of).

So Tesco love my girlfriend and I, with our shared credit card that we use for just about everything. But then, we now have more than a grand to spend on flights, car hire and a villa in October-ish (about £250 of vouchers, times-4'd on Clubcard deals).

Erm. A chain of sushi restaurants?

With all these no-verification systems, like the small payments ones and the Tesco pay-at-pump ones, the retailer is eating the liability. If a stolen card is used, the bank will claw back the payment and the retailer will be left out of pocket. They gamble that this won't happen often enough to cost them more money than the system makes for them in terms of faster customer flow through the facilities etc.

I don't think anyone has yet mentioned the man-in-the-middle Chip and pin hack yet. Admittedly the hack in question is unwieldy, but on the other hand it was knocked up in a couple of months by some computer science postdocs at Cambridge Uni using stuff they bought on Ebay. Clearly there is a risk here. The real danger, though, is that if it is ever genuinely compromised in the field customers will have a very hard time convincing banks that they should get the money back because all the frontline support will believe it is impregnable. This concerns me as a consumer because, as Mr Chris has stated elsewhere, the chip and pin scheme clearly puts the onus of proof onto the consumer, and how in the hell are you supposed to prove what has happend?

It's the same thing with DNA tests, which have quite significant false-positive odds of around 1:10,000 i.e. if you find blood at a murder scene, in a typical city, there could be a dozen people that will match for that blood. Jurys tend to get blinded by the science and just accept DNA evidence as infalliable.

If the banks really wanted to help you combat fraud, they'd let you have a longer PIN - most newer cards can hold a 10 digit number.

There you go: a valid concern. I agree.



Yes, they can do longer PINs, and I'm sure that if the banks thought that would help reduce fraud, they'd increase it. However, it's not at all clear that it would help, because there are no attacks based on guessing the PIN by trying all of them.
The only time it might help is where someone shoulder-surfs you and then mugs you to get the card, then it's easier for them to see and remember the number in that case. But cases like that are extremely rare in the first place.

I am the mother fucking voice of reason, me.

Sheesh. I still come in under £60 filling a land rover to the brim with diesel (that stuff that costs more than petrol). My Fiat takes a little over half that. What is everyone driving these days? Endurance rally/raid landcruisers?

£55 for a full tank for a BMW.

Petrol's at between 107p and 110p around here (Gloucestershire and South Gloucestershire)

It seems like only a few months ago that it was below 95p a litre, and only a year or two ago that it was 70p a litre. I'll have to dig around for a pricing graph to see how much it's gone up, but I'm pretty sure most of the increases have happned in the last couple of years.

Any idea how much of the increase is due to tax and how much is due to the silly Middle East?

The thinking is probably that longer pins are harder to remember and are more likely to be written down or be something obvious ( 1234567890 or something ) than 4 digit ones.

My Omega has a 70 litre tank, and £60 buys you about 55 litres of fuel these days. Pretty much every saloon I've ever driven has a 55-60 litre tank size, I think. Your Landie's tank must be, what, 50 litres or something? Depends how low you run it before you fill it up of course.I started driving when I lived in Gloucester, which was Sept 1996-June 1997. Fuel then was around the 67p/litre mark. Be interesting to see any pricing graphs showing the increases since then.

Wow, I just paid my fuel bill for the year. £152 for about 11,000 miles.

55 litres from empty. Don't ask me how I know.

I read that the price of oil has actually fallen. Of course, the price in US dollars per barrel has increased, but that's because the US dollar is worth the same as Monopoly money.

Another Gloucestrarian! We are legion.

I shall have a look around for pricing graphs and report back. If it could show the split int he increases between profit and tax, that would be perfect, but I'm not holding my breath.

At 111.9 (which it went up to at the Shell near work this week, it's 112.9 at one nearer home), 55 litres of V-Power takes me past £60. My average fill went over £60 a few of months ago, when we hit 109.9.

At the moment I've no idea how many miles that gets me because I'm putting just over 30 litres in at a time to maximise my win on the stupid little toy cars. I started my second lap yesterday.

I once got 60.11 litres into the 60 litre tank; the computer'd been saying 0 miles remaining (flashing '---', rather) for ten minutes by the time I managed to get to a pump. It was pretty cold though, so I'm sure I wasn't really running on what was left in the fuel pump and line.

I find a discrepancy in that graph. Mainly that it thinks 2007-1995 = 10.

Or that six months ago petrol cost 95p a litre!

It did, though. When I started at my new job last June, which involves driving to work, petrol was circa 95p a litre.

Grim... has a point though, but what do you expect from right wing, single issue websites? Someone feel free to find a better graph. Or draw one from memory.

Wuss. I've quite often put 62-63 litres into 60 litre tanks, when they've really been run quite dry first. There's always a bit more room than the spec sheet claims, particularly if you are literally filling it to the brim i.e. right up to the level of the filler capYeah, I've had the Omega stuck on "0 miles left" too. There's a bug actually, whereby if you just put a fiver in when it's down below the "25 miles left" warning, it doesn't reset the range warning so I once drove to Cardiff and back with it saying "0 miles left" the whole way.

I also actually run out of petrol once. That was annoying.

Also, if you divide the tax amount by the pump price, you find that in relative terms (which is how it is calculated of course) tax has fallen. The numbers across the years are 73%, 77%, 77%, 67%, 67%. Required reading.

Yeah, even doing that on a quick guesstimate it looked like tax had dropped, relatively speaking. Which means the petrol companies are just gouging us.

I'm sure that they would say that their costs are going up all the time and they are just passing those costs on to the consumer. And how could we, humble consumers, possibly prove otherwise?

£60 is a little over 50 litres of diesel. My Corsa has a 40 litre tank, I'd be astonished if anything from a 3 series up didn't have more than 50. Petrol owners of course fair slightly better but it's still only 55 litres and if a Corsa has 40, surely most things have >55 otherwise you'd be filling up your stupid 3.0 penismobile every 2 journeys.

It's worth pointing out that's all in refining. Petrol STATIONS do not make money, pretty much literally.

Why is petrol going up? Oil is priced in dollars, so the price of a barrel is going up as the dollar continues its kamikaze dive headlong into the shitter.

But surely at the same time, other currencies (including sterling, for now) can buy more dollars and therefore more (well, the same) oil. Yet the pump price goes up?

In fascist USA, petrol buys YOU.
Er um, or something.

Yeah, point taken. (What follows is my understanding of the economics at play here, apologies if I'm misguided on anything.) The reason many stations struggle to make money (and indeed, the reason stations sell you overpriced milk, on which their margins are much higher than the petrol) is because they are franchises. The petrol distribution arm of Shell or Texaco or BP or whoever makes a fat ton of cash. Consider the previous graph, even coming from Right-Wing-Ville, which shows that 25p or so of the pump price goes to the firm. I understand that the petrol station itself sees vanishling little of that, just a fraction of a penny per litre; the rest is pretty much by definition going to end up in either the distribution firm and the refining firm. And they are the same firm!

Petrol stations make most of their money through the shop, I believe. And as for motorway service stations, if they weren't legally required to have them they wouldn't bother with the petrol station - it'd just be a Holiday Inn and a Welcome Break. Or so I have heard from people in the know.

That seems short-sited, as although you don't get any money from the petrol customers you do get footfall. You could argue that people stop on the motorway for a break as much as to get petrol, I suppose, and hence removing petrol wouldn't change the overall customer numbers coming onto the premises but that doesn't feel likely to me.

Yes, I'd agree that it seems more likely that you wouldn't stop there if there were no petrol - filling the tank up has been the main reason for probably more than 75% of the times I've stopped at service stations. It's really only on very long journeys when you stop just for a coffee or lunch.

*mumbles something about costs of doing business in different markets, hedge funds, hookers and coke...*

Yes this is pretty much all accurate to my knowledge.

I'm sure I read an article recently that was about petrol stations closing all over the place due to everyone filling up at supermarkets nowadays, as the supermarkets sell petrol at BELOW cost price.

I don't think they flat out sell petrol at a loss but they are certainly happy to sell it at cost. Part of it is getting you to visit the store ("I can do my shopping and get petrol at the same time") and part of it is so they can keep the little shop open longer hours than the store and clean up on selling overpriced milk and bread to forgetful people.

The bread is only overpriced because the corner shops threw a hissy fit at the 2p loaves.

Not becasue of the massive floods last year destroying all the wheat then?

No - 2p bread was years ago.

Ah, was it a price war style thing then, like when supermarkets were actually paying YOU to take their baked beans?