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We (NZ) have magstripe as a tertiary backup on credit cards.

  1. Contactless
  2. Chip and Pin
  3. Magistripe

Common for debit cards to have magstripe but normally chip and pin.
I think if Chip and pin fails to read 3 x , it (the payment terminal) defaults to magstripe.

A lot of loyalty cards use either Barcode/QR or magstripe.

Oh sure, many payment terminals here in Europe still sport a magstripe reader - at least in the bits of Europe I’ve been to. It’s just that I never see anybody use it anymore.

Maybe I’ll try to make a payment with it next time I go get the groceries, for old time’s sake :slight_smile:

Really? DAT? A lot of companies do backups for data that needs to stay in cold storage on tape because it is pretty cheap per TB and can easily last up to 30 years in storage (other media is much more volatile). The expensive part is the reader (can cost multiple grand), the tapes themselves go for ~20 USD per TB.

Most tape backup systems these days are LTO with the latest you can get being LTO8 (12TB raw). The tapes themselves range from 80-120USD each. Big companies like Google have massive tape libraries for archiving. We’re talking exabytes in scale here.

Europe as well.

We just don’t experience fail on a daily basis, and most of the time it fails, cashiers tend to assume “the system is down” instead of asking you to swipe.

But whenever that happens I ask to “try something”, swipe it, and they all get astonished at how it “magically works”!

People just assume magstripe is dead… So they don’t even bother!

Gosh, most grocery shop cashiers were born a decade after chip and pin was already in place! :rofl:

I’m just back from the supermarket: I swiped the stripe 3 times. At the third time, the reader threw some Exxx error message. I asked the cashier what I should do. He seemed confused and started reaching for the PA mike to call his supervisor. I told him to can that and I paid with the contactless.

Not successful :slight_smile:

1st, for clarity… Not successfull the contactless as well?

Now, for debugging:

does your card have the stripe enabled as well?
All cards have magstripes, not all accounts have magstripe usage.

Could also be something to do with the system that shop is using.

The contactless worked perfectly. It’s the time-travel experiment with the magstripe that didn’t. Why is of zero interest to me. Past the 10 seconds of nostalgic entertainment it provided, I left the 80’s behind and carried on with my life.

Around where I live, upstate NY, magstripe is still around and well.
Cards that still use magstripe exclusively are few and far between with the notable exception of gift cards.

Contactless is not rare but it’s not the go to or the norm. Id say majority of cards these days have it but half of the owners don’t know they have it or how to use it.

Chip is on pretty much everything but no one ever cleans the readers and rarely the chip itself so they often just fail to read. Some cards (esl) are also just bad and fail half the time.
If it fails 3 times in a row, then it asks you for swipe.

@anon3825968 that might have been your issue, if it has a chip and a stripe, the chip needs to fail 3 times in a row before it’ll let the swipe work

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Well spotted. I only attempted the magstrip few times, and only after it failed.

Ah I didn’t know that. Interesting.

Although it’s rarely an issue: if my card fails, I always carry a large wad of cash on me. That’s an old habit that never let me down :slight_smile:

GEEZ
DID I NEED TO USE CAPITAL LETTERS? :rofl:

The thing that was new to me is if it only allows magstripe after failing 3 times. :wink:

I used to assume you could do the magstripe straight away if you fancied.

Uh… wot?

When i got my first DT order it had that same “security checked” sticker along with a dhl4you request for a complete items list and exact price per item for customs clearing and import taxing. For some reason the Titan package got through without said customs clearing. Would’ve probably been even more difficult to list since the invoice doesn’t have a price I could direct to, not to mention paying customs and taxes for an 1000$ order.

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Yeah, it got to me no problem, thankfully, so customs apparently didn’t care enough to bother with me, but the “oh god they opened and retaped it” feeling was harsh for a few seconds until I confirmed it was JUST the outer box they mucked with.

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Can confirm from the days of soul sucking cashier work

If a card has a chip, that’s encoded somehow on the mag stripe, as a security thing? Even though the stripe is still able to be skimmed either way :roll_eyes:
(I’d guess it has to do with how EMV chips have been incentivized and there are downsides to using mag stripe from a teller / “reader company I can’t remember the word for currently”

If you try such a card, it will fail and tell you to insert chip… only once the chip has failed to read your chip x amount of times, does the reader say it’s sick of your shit and tell you to swipe the mag stripe

I’ll add this, European cards are only 95% compatible sometimes, do to some readers not requiring pins and most of the European cards I came across the customer told me required a pin from the bank side

Which fucks everything up usually

It’s actually the other way around… the magnetic data is stored in “tracks” like a tape… like an 8 track tape from the 70s… or a 2 track tape cassette… technology builds on itself… so the magstripe on the card has tracks like a tape cassette… and track 1 and track 2 contain the payment data… and the chip has “files” on it which just spit out the same goddamn track data… this even applies to contactless… you issue specific commands to access track data files and pull the data off contactlessly… totally ridiculous but that’s how it works. There are some security things bolted on but honestly the chip side is still very simple.

The payment processor and issuers agree on requirements for the security protocols like need to enter a PIN and is the mag stripe data respected… and the terminal decides to accept track data via magstripe data reader or contact chip or contactless… it’s all dependent on what the issuer wants… but for the most part they all tend to go with a basic security template across the board… so it appears that the security options are global or standardized when they aren’t… but anyway… just some notes on the peculiarities of payment systems

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I simply meant,

If you walked up to a random reader and swipe the mag stripe, the reader immediately knows there’s a chip in your card and would prefer you use the EMV chip

I assume “EMV chip? Y/N “is in the mag stripe data somewhere somehow
Not how it’s in there, and the reader uses this to prompt the customer to not use the mag stripe

Otherwise it knows there’s a chip by other means

You are correct. It’s encoded under header Service code in track 2.

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