Thanks for this info! I wouldn’t think of messing around with the fob itself but I’m sure it’s helpful for Amal. I’ll get on getting the account set up and ordering the fob to send over.
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Awesome! I will write to them and as for a 2099 fob to send to Amal. This could be a pretty sweet payment solution if it works, and by the time it needs replacing we’ll all be riding around in flying cars or the aliens would’ve killed us all. Thank you for the info!
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With all these payment installs not available on the states, I’m seriously looking at seeing if I can open up a bank account overseas so I can get one of these in me.
Could you update this if the 2099 thing is something they’ll do, or if it’s just a hypothetical?
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Me too 
naa, it only read as a desfire… it’s a smartcard running a standard javacard payment applet from mastercard. it also has desfire emulation turned on for no particular reason.
So, let’s see if I understand correctly here - because I’m a bit of a thickie when it comes to number of actors and who does what in the craptastic world of electronic payment:
- LAKS Pay physically manufactures the fancy schmancy payment tags - as in, they grab a blank chip and encase it in some support.
- iCards, ABN AMRO, KBC… program the LAKS Pay devices in their super-secret finance villain’s lairs. They decide which expiry date to program in the device.
- Of the lot, only iCards agrees to set the expiry date far enough in the future that it’s as good as non-expiring.
- Amal could very well send a suitable blank implant directly to iCards for programming, but we have to go through the ridiculous rigmarole of ordering a tag from LAKS Pay, send it to Amal for creative deconstruction and repurposing into an implant, then have Amal send it back to us because only LAKS Pay has the finance villains’ seal of approval.
Did I get that right, more or less?
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hard to take a company seriously when their name sounds like both Lacks Pay and Lax Pay
I don’t know, ever since I started patronizing a company called Dangerous Things, I tend to overlook these things.
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I’m lucky that I’m a customer of ABN AMRO then, because according to an employee of my bank, their ‘wearables’ don’t expire. It’s linked to my bank debit card using a token, so when my current bank debit card expires, I guess I just have to link the payment fob again to the new debit card through the mobile banking app.
I’m a Nordea customer, which LAKS supports. Maybe I should ask them if LAKS wearables expire. Logic would dictate that they don’t, as I can’t see a bank forcing their customers to blow money on a new fancy gadget for nothing every 2 years - particularly since the gadget in question might become the object of personal attachment or something. But I wouldn’t bet on it.
EDIT: I’ve shot an email to LAKS. They should know. Nordea is a bit of a bureaucratic behemoth. I’ll never get a straight answer from them.
Ok… so to make this quick I recorded a video…
My question is - if I set up a Patreon and made videos like this, covering various subjects etc. would that be interesting enough to people to set up a Patreon channel for? The goal of having a Patreon channel itself would always be to raise funds for more lab hardware… probably the first goal would be to get a small scale EO gas sterliizer for the lab… for example.
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Thanks Amal. Very informative!
Re Patreon, I’m not keen as you know (not the paying, the setting an account). But I might just be convinced, because your videos are worth it. I’d much rather you set up a donate button in your webshop though 
So, what I take out of this, there is just no way to get a card with a long expiry date anywhere, ever. Therefore iCards basically lied to Vicarious, yes? Or it was a very VERY special one-off offer, as a kind of experiment, with the explicit agreement of Mastercard - which I doubt.
But I have me an idea to solve the conundrum for VK:
So let’s say VK wants to play on the EMV network and not bend the expiry date rule, or have the rules rewritten. Since the cards need to be programmed in a secure environemt, here’s the idea: VK puts out implants with a regular expiry date, and when it’s about to expire, instead of having to scalpel it out and replace it, the implant holder goes to a EMV-approved VK facility, enter a locked booth, puts their arm through a kind of gloryhole, and the EMV-certified boffins on the other side re-provision the implant, or modify the expiry date or whatever it is that can’t be done outside of a secure environment.
No blood, no pain. All VK has to do is 1/ convince EMV that a chip can be reprogrammed instead of throwing it away, and 2/ set up a few secure gloryhole-equiped facilities around the world. Easy, right?
I’m joking of course. But seriously, if a scheme like that existed, and there was, say, only 2 or 3 such facilities for the whole of Europe, I would go to the trouble of flying to one of them to have my implant “refreshed”. If it’s every 4 years, it would be quite acceptable. And if the facility was located in an interesting city, it would even make a nice city trip.
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This could technically be possible, however it costs a lot… a. lot. to create a facility like this and get certification, PCI compliance, etc.
I think whoever responded possibly simply didn’t understand the difference between the lack of technical limitation vs a policy limitation.
Surely with VK’s vast discretionary budget…
Also remember, since the collapse of the peep show industry 20 years ago, I bet there are plenty of readily-equiped premises in many large cities that could be purchased on the cheap
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If they detect tampering, you have violated TOS and forfeit your implant; that is when the guillotine activates
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LAKS’s reply:
Normally all payment chips do have expiry date. For this you have to ask the issuing banks.
Can you say “pass the buck”?
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After having spoken to them and a bunch of back and forth emails, what they have explained to me is the following:
Icard will give me a physical card and a number of virtual cards
The physical card and virtual cards all have an expiration date (of two years if I’m not mistaken)
The wearable is linked to my card that does expire, but when the card expires in two years, or I loose it and have to report it and cancel it, they will send me a new card and I will have to use their app and my phone to link the new card to the wearable.
The wearable itself has no expiration date.
I get the impression that the wearable acts as some sort of a clone of either the physical or the virtual cards in the app so the card gets replaced over and over as it expires but the wearable simply gets paired to the new one via their app.
This is why this solution seems reasonable to me, because the wearable itself that gets implanted would remain, and id just have to switch the credit card associated with it as it expires. Kinda like I don’t have to throw away my phone every time my card expires, I just change the card associated with mobile pay.
I havent flat out explained that my plan is to implant the wearable (seems like a bit much for the customer support peeps) but specifically asked about how they handle the expiration.
Does this make sense? I’m in my new address now so I could get the wearable sent over but it’s hardly worth it if the consensus is that they’re either lying or have no clue about what they are telling me.
I’d love to get your thoughts.
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Looks great i don’t see why it shouldn’t work as stated, I did have a concern that maybe it was a powered token type system but definatly dosnt seem to be on closer inspection.
All in all if it can be disassembled I dont see why it wouldn’t make a great implant.
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Send the wearable and I’ll poke it with apdu commands. If it spits out a card number and expiration date, then the people you’re talking to are confused. If it does not or spits out a token, then they are correct.
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