It's a nice idea (inserting the card widthways), but it's completely over-engineered. It's never going to be used as a retro-fit - it looks too much like a skimmer. In fact, if they became commonplace, it would make fitting skimmers that look like this device so much easier than trying to hide a skimmer in a discrete housing.<p>Instead, allowing the card to be inserted widthways, and pulling it into the ATM as normal, then within the ATM read the card either by moving it sideways into a normal card reader (so that the card moves left, rather than forward), or more likely, a reader where the head moves across the magstripe as the card is held in place.<p>Anyway, as has been pointed out by another poster, chip-and-pin makes magstripes effectively obsolete, I imagine the magstripe is only included for backwards compatibility.
Nice innovation. Being a convicted hacker myself and serving time in a federal camp, I give him credit for wanting to make amends, that is definitely an awesome motivation...not buying the part about being happy about being caught (forced intervention), since I know from experience and people I've met.<p>I understand being liberated, starting your consequence (the nickel sentence), and feeling hope of change when your out....but to simply put it...."happy," is a strong word. I know this may come off as semantics, but when you talk about 5yrs of someone's life, happiness does not come to mind.
Clever. Won't survive in the field though, sorry.<p>ATMs have metallic keypads and as few moving parts as possible for one simple reason, which is vandalism. People will hit and break ATM display in anger, because it didn't register their touch selection made with a hotdog. They will break, bend, twist and pull apart anything that as much as hints that it's possible. Something that swings 90 degrees and requires reasonably precise alignment of moving parts to work - that's just asking for it.
I'm sorry, but don't smart cards completely obviate the skimmer issue? Aren't they widely used in Canada and Europe?<p>I'm not terribly knowledgeable in this area, but I thought this was a solved problem being held up by corporate interest in the US.
Why are ATMs not 100% flat with 3 holes - for a keypad, note delivery and a hole for the bank card to go in. A skimming device can then not be added without making it very obvious the ATM has been altered.<p>An ATM could also have a video camera installed that monitors the area where the card is entered - if something changes the ATM does not work and a warning message is displayed.
Like other readers have said, the real step forward in this area would be chip and pin. That raises a potentially more interesting question though, how do you transfer a country the size of the US from swiping to the chip and pin?<p>Even here in the UK, where absolutely everywhere that uses a card is using the chip, a bank can't ditch the magnetic strip because then suddenly they're the only bank where you can't use your credit card abroad.<p>Would ATMs that read the chip without actually taking the card in the whole way work to obsolete these skimmers? (The chip is always at one end of it, so why does the rest of the card need to enter the machine?)
I don't know much about the mechanical implications of this, but why not move the sensor instead of the card? Put the card in longways first, halfway in. Motorized sensor moves across card to scan it. There wouldn't be enough room left over for a skimmer that would still allow the ATM to read it and even if there was a skimmer, it makes the skimmer that much more expensive, since it would have to have a motor too.<p>I assume it would just be prohibitively expensive.
But chip cards already sidestep the problem of skimming.<p>You only insert half of the card into the chip reader slot and, for what I remember or could imagine, let the ATM exercise some challenge-response protocol with the on-card chip so that there's no way to and there would be no point in actually trying to copy the chip because all you see from the chip is an interface to it.<p>I haven't had the magnetic stripe on any of my cards swiped for at least a couple of years. Last time I did was probably because of dirt or grease on the chip's contacts prevented reading it. The magnetic stripes still exist for now but everywhere I go there are chip readers, from pizza restaurants to little shoppes.
I came up with a similar idea years ago but I'm not interested in creating hardware. This needs to be built into the machine, not a bolt-on. The machine itself needs to only accept cards in horizontally.
I agree with a comment in the story - we need a better framework that actually supports non-replayable (ie, one-time) codes being transferred.<p>If Blizzard can give keyfobs to gamers for auth, why cant banks include that in tech for ATMs?<p>More and more I think corruption and fraud are the likely reasons - those are features the establishment wants to support, not prevent... they can profit from all of it.
I remember reading about a solution where the ATM would move the card back and forth while pulling it in (maybe even reading it at the same time, but it's not even necessary), preventing the skimmer from successfully reading it. Sounds like a better solution to me. (The problem with chips are, at the moment, is that the magnetic stripe is still used. So if they can read it then the card is stolen.)
Here we have this simple solution: <a href="http://y.delfi.lv/norm/11865/2112354_9nb3eA.jpeg" rel="nofollow">http://y.delfi.lv/norm/11865/2112354_9nb3eA.jpeg</a><p>Fitting skimmer over this seems impossible.
This seems pretty obvious. I can't imagine folks whose job it is to build these machines to not have hopped onto this idea. This raises the question what's the downside of these?
looks like modern day Frank Abagnale Jr. to me. Only thing is it has a lot of moving parts. I think more maintenance and power issues. Hope they work out the case when the machine fails in middle of operation. People will break this add on in that case.