Wow. I had to check every credit card we accepted with a drivers license and match the signature with that on the DL when I worked at a gas station in 90s in the US. Again, no wonder they cost so much now.
My concern over this goes back a long way, perhaps the 90s. I know I was adamantly opposed to voting machines. AH! Yes, it was the 90s: that is when the gas station I worked in college got new registers that Faucied everything up. I remember my manager saying that the company wanted we employees thinking as little as possible. They thought that would reduce errors. Boy were they wrong.
I wrote a long post, possibly multi parted on my substack on Technological Revenge; a concept I learned of while in college but not from class. Doesn’t really fit this issue but may be of interest to you.
It was the later-nineties when I first read the Unibomber manfesto, "Industrial society and its future". It encapsulated what I thought, and time has made me think that man was a visionary. Read it, and his other books. They are short, 100 pages or so.
I have never read anything he wrote. However, if I were single, I would have gone off grid and lived not much different than he years ago. I’ll look his works up, thanks.
Just finished the Atlantic piece. Fascinating. I find that a statement I often make, that our tools should be subservient to us and we NOT subservient to our tools, is very similar to what he and others wrote long before.
I often say I hate computers, did so tonight in class, but what I really mean is that I hate how we use them, how we are dependent upon them whether we want to be or not. This is true of tech as a whole. It seems we adopt new tech for no reason other than to adopt new tech. Just read a headline that Tokyo will get driverless taxis by 2026. Who wants that? Seriously, who really thinks this is a good idea? The numerous human taxi drivers I am sure do not. As a pedestrian and as a motorist, I do not. As a passenger, not at all.
More and more places of business now have touch screen ordering either the table or near the counter or sell check out at grocery stores and retailers. The opportunity to engage with other human beings is getting less and less numerous by the day. Now taxis too? Am I going to kill anyone over it? No. But I do wish I had become a hacker and that I was making everything so buggy (buggier than now) that everyone would just give up on the idea of building a system where all our appliances talk with each other within a single home and through the Internet of Things with those in other homes around the world.
I had a similar issue here in Hong Kong recently whereby all the road tunnels are now installing new technology that requires all vehicles to apply and register for an RF ID tag. This system replaces manned booths which is fine but requires the user to include an e-contact method such as phone or email. A few years ago I would have thought nothing of this and in fact I always complained at the fact that there was an auto toll system for many years but users had to pay a service fee and keep a minimum amount in an account held by the toll company while the rest of us had to join an often very long queue to pay for our toll. Now I have zero trust in the government I see this as one more nail in the coffin of freedom.
I never did like the ETC system even though, in theory it only tracks on the highway and only if you have the car in the reader. Still, it gives them practice they can use for greatly expanded uses. But even I did not expect insurance companies wanting to install their own monitoring devices in cars. At least not yet. My wife has asked for another quote for a policy that does not include this level of intrusion but unless we stop this, it will become a universal requirement.
It probably won’t surprise you to learn the UK also has some kind of black box system mainly targeted at young and inexperienced drivers. Although I believe it is still optional, I think they make the cost of insurance so prohibitively high that most young people have little choice. Once they’ve captured the young market, you can imagine they aren’t going to just stop there. That’s assuming they don’t make driverless cars compulsory before then.
We have JA insurance, that may be a rural thing you can't get (so easily) in Tokyo. No requirement for a drive recorder for either the old car or the new one we're in the process of buying - car is ordered and will be delivered in a month. We got a discount because my wife as primary driver has a gold DL. And assuming I don't get caught speeding or not stopping at stop signs in the next few years I shoud get mine when my current license expires. AIUI that will give us even more discount
You can buy a tin foil shield for your wallet, though the RFID for pay by bonk is not easy to clone even if someone scans your card. On the other hand no one checks the signature on a card in my experience. That's true both in Japan and elsewhere.
The PIN is almost certainly safer and pay by bonk is also in many ways more secure than a regular reader because you can't hide a skimmer in the pay by bonk device the way you can with magnetic card readers.
I have had my ID stolen at least twice in the States. I know that the US government accidentally leaked all my data at least three times. I know because they told me so. And I have had my computer hacked in Japan. That was just before the panic. And someone did get all my credit card info, either through the computer hack of some other way here in Japan. Someone used this info and went shopping with it. My credit card company called and asked about the purchases as they felt they were suspicious. They were not made by myself and the cancelled the card then and there and sent out a new card. BUT, the Dundee heads only changed the last 4 digits, the ones that are displayed each time it is used. I believe that there is a such thing as secure electronic communications to the degree that there is an unsinkable ship.
With my signature, it is different from what appears on my credit card. It is easier to prove that it was not I who used the card if someone fakes my signature. This was done with the acknowledgement of the credit card company. That is now out the window.
No chain is stronger than its weakest link, and despite how great a security chain techies forge, the user will inevitably weaken a link or more to make it easier to use or out of laziness. Then there are the criminal elements that seem to infiltrate every entity, Benesse is one that caught my family.
I don't know if you read Bits About Money by Patrick MacKenzie (another former Tokyo resident who for some strange reason decided to move (back) to Chicago a few months ago) but he goes on quite a bit about how credict cards work
One of the key points he makes is that banks have an acceptable level of fraud which is rhe point at which it costs more to stop the fraud in terms of loss of customers/revenue or cost of detection than the fraud itself costs. As long as frand stays at or below than number the bank is fine with simply repaying disputed charges when a customer complains
Credit cards here need a PIN number or, if the dollar amount is low enough, a tap. I haven't seen signatures used in many years. I try to use cash as much as possible.
That insurance monitoring sounds horrific. I hope that there's a way around that.
Yeah, the walls keep closing in. It's all very depressing, but not nearly as bad as my little niece and nephew being sick all the time. Poor little mites. Their mother keeps allowing them to be jabbed. At this point, no exaggeration, they've had over two dozen jabs and they're not even three years old. What's left of their immune systems must be in tatters.
I know most people use a PIN for their credit cards, but I prefer signature. In college I worked at numerous different places that all accepted credit cards. We had to verify ID, usually with a driver’s license, place the card on the imprinted, place the credit card payment agreement ( three play carbon copy) on top and run the roller over it. Afterwards the customer signed it; the store kept one copy, the customer another and credit card company the 3rd.
The idea of using nothing more than a PIN number unsettles me and just touching the card down right frightens me. Now, all one need do is swipe my wallet and they can run up debt that I can no longer pay off. Madness.
But yes, having a driving point system in the family car recording everything and scoring points that are then used to determine the monthly bill is is is what? How to describe this?
If it puts your mind at ease, signatures haven't been an options for many years in Canada, and I have never had any problems and I check my monthly statement carefully. I wouldn't want an electric vehicle for many reasons, including the fact they can be tracked as well as easily disabled by outside agencies if the owner isn't up-to-date on car payments, etc.
No wonder so few are concerned about this. No wonder credit card rates are so high.
We did not buy an EV but it is a hybrid. The reasons are complex but could be boiled down to that is what the one with the money wants. I am not totally against a hybrid and expect them to be suddenly mandated and all gasoline vehicles outlawed over night. Tokyo did that with privately owned diesel vehicle quite some years ago. A student’s husband was right pissed off. After years of saving he had just bought his dream SUV which was diesel. Then suddenly, he had to sell it because he was no longer allowed to have it in Tokyo. Lost a huge sum of money too as the ban greatly devalued it.
You might want to check what kind of data your car tracks, and whether it can be disabled. This database is for the US, but maybe something similar exists in Japan?
Mind you, given most of us use cell phones, privacy no longer really exists. I guess I'm still sometimes in denial about this.
What mostly scares me about EVs, including hybrids, is that if the batteries go up in flames in an accident, the fire can be next to impossible to put out:
I went to visit a friend in hospital this afternoon. Mandatory masks, and we had to use the ones the hospital issued, no cloth masks allowed. Yet there weren't any hazmat bins at the exits for safely disposing of the masks. We live in a clown world.
The battery worries me too. Ours is not a plug in hybrid, so I need not worry about it over heating as it charges overnight and burning down the neighborhood. But the other risks remain. More I would like to share on this but my train stop is too soon
I do not have a smart phone” but I do have iPads. I know that we are tracked for more than we want to acknowledge.
As far as I know, the factory installed drive recorders here in Japan store the data locally, meaning, aboard the vehicle. This belief is reinforced by the insurance company requiring their own in addition to these. This additional, insurance company mandated recorder scores your driving based upon various parameters including speed and braking. This score is communicated to the insurance company and sets your insurance payment each month. Disabling it would cause coverage to be dropped.
Prior to the panic, masking protocols called for them to be disposed of in biohazard containers. We are living in a clown world. Surreality.
We have long had the ETC (Electronic Toll something or other) system in Japan. Our current car came with it. However, you need an ETC card to use it. It is the same size as a credit card, both mine and my wife’s were issued to us through our different credit card companies, and you do not want to leave the card in your car, especially on a highway rest area as they are highly sought by those who would rather have others pay their tolls.
In theory, the on board system is only active when the card has been inserted into the reader. Not much a fan of these either, but there are a growing number of ETC only exits and on ramps from and to highways here.
Something else I learned as we were negotiating with the dealer, earlier versions of the ETC are not only no longer reliable, but may also now be illegal. So we have a case where an expensive device that the government has been pushing becomes illegal to operate after upgrades to the entire system are made. I would be pissed if that happened to me, but the Japanese just seem to shrug and say, shoganai and fork over the money to have a newer reader installed.
We've had "signless" credit cards for a number of years here in the us.
Wow. I had to check every credit card we accepted with a drivers license and match the signature with that on the DL when I worked at a gas station in 90s in the US. Again, no wonder they cost so much now.
I have worried about this since the 90s. Not only has tech advanced so much but we as a society have become more attached to our personal tech.
My concern over this goes back a long way, perhaps the 90s. I know I was adamantly opposed to voting machines. AH! Yes, it was the 90s: that is when the gas station I worked in college got new registers that Faucied everything up. I remember my manager saying that the company wanted we employees thinking as little as possible. They thought that would reduce errors. Boy were they wrong.
I wrote a long post, possibly multi parted on my substack on Technological Revenge; a concept I learned of while in college but not from class. Doesn’t really fit this issue but may be of interest to you.
It was the later-nineties when I first read the Unibomber manfesto, "Industrial society and its future". It encapsulated what I thought, and time has made me think that man was a visionary. Read it, and his other books. They are short, 100 pages or so.
I have never read anything he wrote. However, if I were single, I would have gone off grid and lived not much different than he years ago. I’ll look his works up, thanks.
Start here:
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2000/06/harvard-and-the-making-of-the-unabomber/378239/
Just finished the Atlantic piece. Fascinating. I find that a statement I often make, that our tools should be subservient to us and we NOT subservient to our tools, is very similar to what he and others wrote long before.
I often say I hate computers, did so tonight in class, but what I really mean is that I hate how we use them, how we are dependent upon them whether we want to be or not. This is true of tech as a whole. It seems we adopt new tech for no reason other than to adopt new tech. Just read a headline that Tokyo will get driverless taxis by 2026. Who wants that? Seriously, who really thinks this is a good idea? The numerous human taxi drivers I am sure do not. As a pedestrian and as a motorist, I do not. As a passenger, not at all.
More and more places of business now have touch screen ordering either the table or near the counter or sell check out at grocery stores and retailers. The opportunity to engage with other human beings is getting less and less numerous by the day. Now taxis too? Am I going to kill anyone over it? No. But I do wish I had become a hacker and that I was making everything so buggy (buggier than now) that everyone would just give up on the idea of building a system where all our appliances talk with each other within a single home and through the Internet of Things with those in other homes around the world.
Thanks.
I had a similar issue here in Hong Kong recently whereby all the road tunnels are now installing new technology that requires all vehicles to apply and register for an RF ID tag. This system replaces manned booths which is fine but requires the user to include an e-contact method such as phone or email. A few years ago I would have thought nothing of this and in fact I always complained at the fact that there was an auto toll system for many years but users had to pay a service fee and keep a minimum amount in an account held by the toll company while the rest of us had to join an often very long queue to pay for our toll. Now I have zero trust in the government I see this as one more nail in the coffin of freedom.
I never did like the ETC system even though, in theory it only tracks on the highway and only if you have the car in the reader. Still, it gives them practice they can use for greatly expanded uses. But even I did not expect insurance companies wanting to install their own monitoring devices in cars. At least not yet. My wife has asked for another quote for a policy that does not include this level of intrusion but unless we stop this, it will become a universal requirement.
It probably won’t surprise you to learn the UK also has some kind of black box system mainly targeted at young and inexperienced drivers. Although I believe it is still optional, I think they make the cost of insurance so prohibitively high that most young people have little choice. Once they’ve captured the young market, you can imagine they aren’t going to just stop there. That’s assuming they don’t make driverless cars compulsory before then.
The UK shocked me years ago with some of their draconian policies, none of which come to mind. But that is how they do this, incrementalism.
We have JA insurance, that may be a rural thing you can't get (so easily) in Tokyo. No requirement for a drive recorder for either the old car or the new one we're in the process of buying - car is ordered and will be delivered in a month. We got a discount because my wife as primary driver has a gold DL. And assuming I don't get caught speeding or not stopping at stop signs in the next few years I shoud get mine when my current license expires. AIUI that will give us even more discount
Also, this device is different from the usual drive recorder as this car has both front view and review drive recorders. This is in addition to these.
Thanks for the JA mention. We have an office just down the road. Did not know they offer insurance. Will let the wife know.
You can buy a tin foil shield for your wallet, though the RFID for pay by bonk is not easy to clone even if someone scans your card. On the other hand no one checks the signature on a card in my experience. That's true both in Japan and elsewhere.
The PIN is almost certainly safer and pay by bonk is also in many ways more secure than a regular reader because you can't hide a skimmer in the pay by bonk device the way you can with magnetic card readers.
I have had my ID stolen at least twice in the States. I know that the US government accidentally leaked all my data at least three times. I know because they told me so. And I have had my computer hacked in Japan. That was just before the panic. And someone did get all my credit card info, either through the computer hack of some other way here in Japan. Someone used this info and went shopping with it. My credit card company called and asked about the purchases as they felt they were suspicious. They were not made by myself and the cancelled the card then and there and sent out a new card. BUT, the Dundee heads only changed the last 4 digits, the ones that are displayed each time it is used. I believe that there is a such thing as secure electronic communications to the degree that there is an unsinkable ship.
With my signature, it is different from what appears on my credit card. It is easier to prove that it was not I who used the card if someone fakes my signature. This was done with the acknowledgement of the credit card company. That is now out the window.
No chain is stronger than its weakest link, and despite how great a security chain techies forge, the user will inevitably weaken a link or more to make it easier to use or out of laziness. Then there are the criminal elements that seem to infiltrate every entity, Benesse is one that caught my family.
I don't know if you read Bits About Money by Patrick MacKenzie (another former Tokyo resident who for some strange reason decided to move (back) to Chicago a few months ago) but he goes on quite a bit about how credict cards work
e.g. https://www.bitsaboutmoney.com/archive/improving-cards-under-the-hood/
One of the key points he makes is that banks have an acceptable level of fraud which is rhe point at which it costs more to stop the fraud in terms of loss of customers/revenue or cost of detection than the fraud itself costs. As long as frand stays at or below than number the bank is fine with simply repaying disputed charges when a customer complains
Credit cards here need a PIN number or, if the dollar amount is low enough, a tap. I haven't seen signatures used in many years. I try to use cash as much as possible.
That insurance monitoring sounds horrific. I hope that there's a way around that.
Yeah, the walls keep closing in. It's all very depressing, but not nearly as bad as my little niece and nephew being sick all the time. Poor little mites. Their mother keeps allowing them to be jabbed. At this point, no exaggeration, they've had over two dozen jabs and they're not even three years old. What's left of their immune systems must be in tatters.
I know most people use a PIN for their credit cards, but I prefer signature. In college I worked at numerous different places that all accepted credit cards. We had to verify ID, usually with a driver’s license, place the card on the imprinted, place the credit card payment agreement ( three play carbon copy) on top and run the roller over it. Afterwards the customer signed it; the store kept one copy, the customer another and credit card company the 3rd.
The idea of using nothing more than a PIN number unsettles me and just touching the card down right frightens me. Now, all one need do is swipe my wallet and they can run up debt that I can no longer pay off. Madness.
But yes, having a driving point system in the family car recording everything and scoring points that are then used to determine the monthly bill is is is what? How to describe this?
If it puts your mind at ease, signatures haven't been an options for many years in Canada, and I have never had any problems and I check my monthly statement carefully. I wouldn't want an electric vehicle for many reasons, including the fact they can be tracked as well as easily disabled by outside agencies if the owner isn't up-to-date on car payments, etc.
No wonder so few are concerned about this. No wonder credit card rates are so high.
We did not buy an EV but it is a hybrid. The reasons are complex but could be boiled down to that is what the one with the money wants. I am not totally against a hybrid and expect them to be suddenly mandated and all gasoline vehicles outlawed over night. Tokyo did that with privately owned diesel vehicle quite some years ago. A student’s husband was right pissed off. After years of saving he had just bought his dream SUV which was diesel. Then suddenly, he had to sell it because he was no longer allowed to have it in Tokyo. Lost a huge sum of money too as the ban greatly devalued it.
You might want to check what kind of data your car tracks, and whether it can be disabled. This database is for the US, but maybe something similar exists in Japan?
https://www.motortrend.com/news/privacy4cars-privacy-data-report-tracking/
Mind you, given most of us use cell phones, privacy no longer really exists. I guess I'm still sometimes in denial about this.
What mostly scares me about EVs, including hybrids, is that if the batteries go up in flames in an accident, the fire can be next to impossible to put out:
https://driving.ca/column/motor-mouth/scary-putting-out-ev-fire-firefighting-battery-electric-vehicle
I went to visit a friend in hospital this afternoon. Mandatory masks, and we had to use the ones the hospital issued, no cloth masks allowed. Yet there weren't any hazmat bins at the exits for safely disposing of the masks. We live in a clown world.
The battery worries me too. Ours is not a plug in hybrid, so I need not worry about it over heating as it charges overnight and burning down the neighborhood. But the other risks remain. More I would like to share on this but my train stop is too soon
I do not have a smart phone” but I do have iPads. I know that we are tracked for more than we want to acknowledge.
As far as I know, the factory installed drive recorders here in Japan store the data locally, meaning, aboard the vehicle. This belief is reinforced by the insurance company requiring their own in addition to these. This additional, insurance company mandated recorder scores your driving based upon various parameters including speed and braking. This score is communicated to the insurance company and sets your insurance payment each month. Disabling it would cause coverage to be dropped.
Prior to the panic, masking protocols called for them to be disposed of in biohazard containers. We are living in a clown world. Surreality.
We have long had the ETC (Electronic Toll something or other) system in Japan. Our current car came with it. However, you need an ETC card to use it. It is the same size as a credit card, both mine and my wife’s were issued to us through our different credit card companies, and you do not want to leave the card in your car, especially on a highway rest area as they are highly sought by those who would rather have others pay their tolls.
In theory, the on board system is only active when the card has been inserted into the reader. Not much a fan of these either, but there are a growing number of ETC only exits and on ramps from and to highways here.
Something else I learned as we were negotiating with the dealer, earlier versions of the ETC are not only no longer reliable, but may also now be illegal. So we have a case where an expensive device that the government has been pushing becomes illegal to operate after upgrades to the entire system are made. I would be pissed if that happened to me, but the Japanese just seem to shrug and say, shoganai and fork over the money to have a newer reader installed.