All chip + signature cards in the USA have a stripe too (excepting maybe a tiny fraction of retail cards). They have to, or something like 90% of POS will not accept them. Full rollout is going to take years. As long as there is a stripe and merchants accept the stripe, the stripe can be cloned. Yes, retailers who take the stripe when the issued card has a chip will be on the hook instead of the bank, but thieves don't care if the retailer or the bank pays.
I would agree it is completely stupid to remove and walk off with an ATM skimmer in a foreign country, all before calling the cops. There are so many ways that could end badly. There's nothing informative or educational that couldn't be shown by pictures or videos at the ATM and calling cops right away (the poster is now claiming he did call cops when he was able to get to a phone; this is still not impressive).
However, this is an ATM skimmer + PIN cam. Not credit card fraud. Debit and ATM cards have much less protection. Consumers have 0 liability for CC fraud; when but your card is skimmed and PIN is stolen your checking account can get emptied, and you potentially have the burden of proving that it wasn't you using your card in a card-present, PIN transaction.
1. OP has closed this AMA and will not be replying.
2. OP specifically stated that he would answer questions only on immigration in general and would not comment or provide legal advice of specific cases, which is exactly what you are asking for. No reputable attorney will do this for randoms on the Internet. Not only is it a liability issue, but rules on ethics, attorney-client relationship, and practice out-of-state prevent this.
3. If you are this successful, you should privately consult with an attorney who can answer all your questions and represent you in your application to USCIS.
The key here is chip + signature, which has been removed in countries that have advanced their payment processing. Here in Australia you actually haven't been able to sign for a transaction for the past 2-ish years.
True, but the story is about glitches with Citigroup USA. pokstad is referring to Costco Citi cards in the USA. Some USA issues will allow you to SET a pin on chipcards (rarely by default), but they are not REQUIRED at the POS by any retailers in the USA. None will, because that's not the industry agreement standard and would lock out the majority of consumers. The adoption has been a giant clusterfuck. Most retailers are still taking stripe only. It's the weakest link. Until retailers stop accepting stripes and chip + signature, there's no need to steal the PIN.
Hell, it's 2016 and I'm still encountering retailers who end up having to key in the card, or in a couple of cases still do offline processing with manual carbon-slip imprints.
Our shitty American cards affect the rest of the world too. Traveling to Europe over the past decade+ until 2015 I apologize for my unexpectedly chipless card everywhere I went (never had much trouble using it though); same with Canada up to present. They all have chip+PIN, but our cards go through without and spit out a receipt with a signature line.
Yeah chip + signature is not that much of an improvement, to the point where I'm not sure why they even bothered to support it. Even the FBI recommended stores to switch to supporting chip+PIN.
I don't understand how having to sign when you make a credit card purchase is in any way secure. Most of the touch-screen/stylus setups are so bad that you can just barely get a scribble that vaguely looks like a signature.
It's not really supposed to be secure against fraud by card thieves. It's supposed to deter actual cardholders from falsely repudiating their own purchases. If you chargeback a purchase as unauthorized, the retailer should be able to produce the slip with your signature on it. Then you can be asked under oath or penalty of prosecution, whether or not it is your signature. It also provides protection against errors. If you are erroneously charged multiple times for one for one transaction, the retailer will only be able to produce a single signed slip. If you actually make multiple purchases in the same amount in a row, there would be multiple, signed slips with different timestamps and distinguishably different signaturs.
There's a fiction that the retailer should compare the signature on the card to the slip, reinforced by a few large retailers with policies of checking that the card is in fact signed, but this obviously doesn't happen.
> Card can be duplicated with the strip and without the chip, then used as a regular legacy card (until those become uncommon).
I don't think so. The card reader would demand that the chip be used. If there's no chip, the cashier should then call the police, as that's evidence of fraud.
If there's no chip, do you really think a cashier would call the police? The cashier would assume the reader is broken, stick the card (without a chip) in the chip reader 3 times to force a swipe and apologise for a "broken reader"
True enough, but most of my chip cards will not work with the mag strip if the card reader supports chip. If I slide the card, I get a message on the POS screen telling me to use the chip.
The guy who steals my mag stripe has to find a store without chip readers to make use of the stripe.
> The guy who steals my mag stripe has to find a store without chip readers to make use of the stripe.
Like 90% of stores in USA today? Oh the pain. And what is likely to happen after the clerk apologizes for the reader being broken is that he keys in the card number manually. What, manual entry is going to be blocked too? Good luck with that. As long as lost sales to nonworking transactions >>> fraud, it's happening.
In February, Visa claims all of 17% of retailers have chip-capable terminals. My experience is that only a small fraction of chip-capable terminals are actually integrated with a POS system that enables them. Leading to the ridiculous situation of consumers facing 83% of retail locations with no chip reader, having to swipe, most of the rest having a useless chip slot and icon, and some small percentage <10% of locations actually having a working, functional chip slot (visually indistinguable from nonfunctional ones). Even where they do work, usability is poor. Beeps, lights, multitudinous prompts or even spoken instructions, and processing times in excess of five seconds or more where the stripes are just swipe and sign a second or two later.
On one of my old cards, the chip broke (physically). On every single reader I used, putting the side without a chip in the reader 3 times would allow me to swipe.
The indicator that tells the machine that "This card is a chip card" is a single bit on the mag stripe. Turn that bit off when cloning the card and the machine never knows it should have asked for a chip.
Hmm, I'd assumed it was known by the card's first few numbers, or similar, but you're correct.
I've had chip cards since 2004, and their use here is universal. To swipe without raising suspicion requires an American accent. It's no problem in McDonald's, but any expensive purchase will either be denied by the clerk, require the manager's approval, or a phone call to the card processor. Criminals simply don't do it any more -- it's far easier to send stolen numbers to the USA, or make purchases online.
Oh, nobody saw that coming. Completely unforeseeable.
What other mature, ready-for-primetime autonomous altcoin networks can I dump my savings into for no apparent reason?
Edit: "DAO token holders and ethereum users should sit tight and remain calm. Exchanges should feel safe in resuming trading ETH."
No they shouldn't. They should running screaming for the exit doors. Less than two months after the launch of this mysterious "DAO" with an entirely bogus value proposition, 1/3 of the money put in, worth presently some $39 million USD in real money, has been confirmed stolen.
WTF. There is the equivalent of millions of dollars in this blockchain? How?! Who willingly puts real cash up front for this kind of thing? Just... what?!
Yeah, I know, right? I don't trust actual, qualified fund analysts to pick real investments for me, I stick largely to index funds. Yet a bunch of cryptoweenies have decided to pool their money in cryptoweenie form in some kind of insane, fragile investment club, so a bunch of cryptoweenies stupid enough to think this is a good idea can collectively vote on what to do with each others money by simple majority vote, without restriction? No. Just no.
Right now the proponent of this fraudulent scheme, slock.it, is actually urging people to spam the blockchain to slow down the rate of theft. Yet the true believers are claiming this is a "learning experience" that will make it all better in the long run. It's beyond satire.
Public blockchains have been around since 2008 (Bitcoin). If you don't like it, I'm not going to try to change your mind. But this kind of shocked response from people who have seemingly been living under a rock is really almost a kind of spam in these threads.
If you add CA certificates for the Wifi they probably (I'm not sure if you can tell it manually to not do that) are added to the system-wide trust store. IE and Chrome check that for CAs, Firefox will soon (https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1265113)
(all this for Windows, I believe the same is true for OS X, Linux depends on your specific your setup)
> If you add CA certificates for the Wifi they probably (I'm not sure if you can tell it manually to not do that) are added to the system-wide trust store.
Internet Properties -> Content -> Certificates -> Advanced
> They empower women. Because chickens are small and typically stay close to home, many cultures regard them as a woman’s animal, in contrast to larger livestock like goats or cows. Women who sell chickens are likely to reinvest the profits in their families.
Uh... this is empowering???
EDIT:
> If you read this article, watch the video above, and answer one question below, I will donate—on your behalf via Heifer—a flock of chickens to a family in poverty.
OMG, it's finally happened for real. Anyone remember this?
"Hello everybody,
My name is Bill Gates. I have just written up an e-mail tracing program that traces everyone to whom this message is forwarded to. I am experimenting with this and I need your help. Forward this to everyone you know and if it reaches 1000 people everyone on the list will receive $1000 at my expense. Enjoy.
In cultures where it is "considered woman's animal" the chickens provided by Heifer will most likely be raised by them. These woman will help bring in money for their families. That is what is empowering.
I get what the words say. What I am remarking on is that engaging in domestic, socially-acceptable and conventionally female work around the household for the economic benefit of ones family (as opposed to oneself) is a highly strained interpretation of "empowering."
Yes, if the alternative is wallowing in penury and being completely economically dependent, it is certainly better. But empowering?
Why is it not empowering to give women more economic independence, in way that's sustainable in their societies?
Suffragettes in Europe had to fight for more economic rights for fifty years after getting the right to vote, and it was messy, protracted battle. (Until the 1970s, German husbands could dictate whether their wife were allowed to work or not, and kept control over their earnings for even longer.)
It's "empowering" in that sense for anyone to get more money. It's "empowering women" to give them opportunities, including economic opportunities, which they don't already have or to which there are barriers.
What I'm saying is that chickens are not "empowering women" in societies where it is and always has been acceptable, status quo, and already conventional for women to raise chickens; a "woman's animal," small and "close to home," for domestic purposes. They already have that opportunity!
Empowering would be raising goats and challenging the notion of a "woman's animal." Or maybe, you know, getting some education and having a life beyond subsistence farming.
I imagine they have sales guys. If you have a meaningful amount of money to spend they will talk to you. If not, don't use their LGPL code in a proprietary product.
Qt is not an end-user, boxed product. This may shock you, but B2B software doesn't always have a public, standard price list.
And their rule of thumb is that you aren't worth the sale. Bespoke software is not a bulk commodity. They have a free product. If you're going to be a cheapskate, use it.
The notion of charging by byte, as if software were content farming, shows that you are obviously not a professional.
Or maybe I just want a prototype to prove out a concept and software stack. Rather than just blindly throwing money at a problem.
I have no problem paying Qt. I'm just unwilling to do it until I know its the direction I want to go. The current Qt licensing structure adds friction to my making that decision.
Of course it adds friction. It's supposed to add friction. They wrote the code, they're a going concern, if you're going to pay they want you to commit and pay, not "prove out the concept" for free. Qt will give you a license for prototyping, you're just not willing to pay it.
Most commercial vendors won't give you their entire product for free until your own product is half-built. Qt is different; they offer an entire free product. You want to have your cake and eat it too.
The license for prototyping seems to be the same one for release. And Qt isn't offering me a free product, their terms are pay then develop your software. At least in my context.
In any event the only issue is the weird quirk of the Qt commercial license preventing you from switching to commercial from LGPL. Which I and apparently a few other people in the thread really didn't get at first.
> The license for prototyping seems to be the same one for release. And Qt isn't offering me a free product, their terms are pay then develop your software. At least in my context.
Their standard Qt for Application Development license gives you a free 30 day evaluation period. Also, I don't think any of this encompasses simply examining the free product without use in product development, e.g., reading the APIs, documentation, and source code. That's a lot of freebies, that you don't necessarily get with other commercial products.
> In any event the only issue is the weird quirk of the Qt commercial license preventing you from switching to commercial from LGPL. Which I and apparently a few other people in the thread really didn't get at first.
There's no weird quirk. As they state, "If you have already started the development with an open-source version of Qt, please contact The Qt Company to resolve the issue." If you have money, they will take your money. But if you want to develop a commercial product and use Qt up front then you have to budget for it. If you can't afford it then use something else. No one is holding a gun to your head forcing you to develop a proprietary product with Qt.
> Why do many enterprise software companies offer free (or low cost) trials then?
So does Qt. So much so in fact, they even offer an entire free product; evaluate it all you want. Just don't use it to build a commercial product while paying zero dollars and then come back when it's half-built and expect to dictate pricing terms after the fact.
> Does the company that you work for (or yours if you're a founder) take the same "take it or leave it" attitude towards potential customers?
I'm not going to talk about my work here. I'm writing on my anonymous behalf only. I've worked at places that were more or less liberal with evaluations and more or less tolerant of tiny accounts. I have never worked somewhere that salespeople loved customers who wasted their time asking for freebies and handouts with illusory promises of future money that never seems to materialize.
No, they don't. Not in any meaningful sense. They're offering to let you evaluate a bed, so long as your evaluation doesn't include sleeping on it.
> expect to dictate pricing terms after the fact
Excuse me, but who here has said a single thing about the customer dictating terms? Not a single person.
> I'm not going to talk about my work here.
The question was rhetorical, thanks.
> who wasted their time asking for freebies and handouts
No one is asking for either a hand-out or freebie. Potential Customers are asking to evaluate a product before paying for licenses THAT THEY MIGHT NOT USE. That is not un-reasonable.
