Gadgetory

it wasn't too long ago that we were mostly paying for things by swiping our credit cards as furiously as you'd swipe toilet paper after eating that spicy burrito special yeah but the venerable magnetic stripe is being phased out in favor of EMV chips which have become quite common in most of the world over the past few years but are just now catching on with our friends in the United States but why are we ditch the mag stripe in the first place unsurprisingly one reason is security mag stripes store data like card numbers and expiration dates in an unsecure manner meaning bad guys can steal the information quite easily in a variety of ways for example if you're somewhere like an ATM or gas station that only accepts mag stripe cards visually inspect the card reading equipment and give it a little jiggle to see if it's loose if something seems not quite right it's possible that someone has installed an inexpensive card skimmer which reads your card as you insert it into the slot and transmits the information to a nearby criminal who can then use your card number two at best waste your money and at worst make super suspicious purchases that could land you on some kind of FBI watch list and more skilled hackers can even sneak malware onto retail systems that's a lot more difficult to detect this is what happened in the u.s. recently when tens of millions of customers had their data stolen when cyber criminals planted malware in the payment systems of the retail giant target so how then do chip cards prevent these types of breaches well they use a form of public key cryptography you can learn more about that in general in this video but here's what happens specifically each time you insert your chip card into a reader the car generates a random code that's good for that transaction only depending on how exactly the encryption is implemented the terminal can use encryption keys to decrypt your account information and authorize this transaction even if it can't communicate with your credit card company unlike mag strip cards which always had to do this to process a transaction since each code is one time used only it's totally useless to an attacker that intercepts it and if your car gets stolen it's extremely difficult for someone to clone the chip as opposed to mag stripe cards which spit out your information as readily as a participant in a watermelon eating contest spits out seeds that visual aside many systems also now require the use of a pin or personal identification number so even if a thief tries to use your original card instead of cloning it the transaction won't be authorized unless they know your PIN a better solution than the old authentication method that only involved signing a receipt of course the EMV chip cards are not foolproof aside from the constant arms race between financial institutions and black hats who try to crack their security there's also the backwards compatibility purposes of your card I mean many chip cards still have a mag stripe which are just as vulnerable as ever and the chip doesn't do much to stop fraud in situations where someone can just enter a card number such as pretty much all online stores that have online shopping that being said it's still better than what we used to have but until we have James bond-style biometric scanning at every gas station and 7-eleven in the freaking world keep your card close and think twice before using it at a shady merchant you don't want to have your credit card limit maxed out by some dude who promises you an official - action figure with hot swappable sandals and a little version of the LTTE sweater after he says all you have to do is put your credit card information into the message box like I did I'm still waiting Jacob where's my action figure anyways here's the sponsor spot but unlike Jacob scammy website you could make a beautiful wonderful well-respected website using Squarespace it's 12 bucks a month and you could have domain included if you buy it for a year and they have 24/7 live chat and email support they also have responsive design so if someone views it on a phone or a tablet or a desktop or a different phone or an even more different phone or a console or an even more different phone it will work on all of them and they have stuff like cover pages so you can have one of those single pages that you just scroll through the entire thing instead of having multiple pages which is Linus's favorite thing he absolutely loves those and there's also Apple pay if you're running a Squarespace store so if you want to have a secure way for people to be able to buy your stuff you could enable Apple pay which is fantastic start a trial with no credit card required and start building your website today and when you do decide to sign up for Squarespace make sure you use offer code to tech quickie to get 10% off your first purchase you guys like this video like it if you just like to dislike it leaving us a comment down below letting us know if you have any video suggestions for future tech quickie episodes also check out channel super-fun I have no idea what's happening over there I think I've been in one episode and the last like half a year so it's hilarious though I still watch it every Wednesday like clockwork I just want more episodes over there hopefully we can figure that out eventually anyways bye