so probably not right away but it may screw with it over time… welp, good thing its easy to have a new one printed in like 5 minutes. it should be fine as long as its not every other day
thanks for the info!
2 Likes
You would have to be literally touching the magstripe directly with your titan finger. It wouldn’t do anything from a few cm away.
Wow… What the hell school is that? Hogwarts? I don’t remember swiping a magstripe card since at least the late 90’s. The only application I can think of that still uses magnetic stripes are transport tickets: last I went to Paris, I’m pretty sure the metro tickets were magnetic things for instance. Other than that… That’s well and truly dead technology.
On the other hand, if you go to a technology college, it would be pretty ironic 
For some reason all of the hotels in my area still use magstripes instead of RFID. That’s the only place I’ve seen it, though.
My college ID has magstripe as well, but it’s just a backup in case the contactless fails in our cards (weirdly common occurrence, likely due to bending).
I go to RIT, Rochester institute of technology… Yup, irony…
I bet it’s the cost of replacing all of the readers across our massive campus
Hmm yes you’re right, many hotels do have magnetic stripe key cards.
I guess it’s not so dead after all then. I was thinking mostly swiping a credit card. That is what I haven’t done since the last ice age.
Well I guess if they feel it’s secure enough, why not.
My company does high tech stuff yet still backs up things on DAT tapes, because it works and there’s no need to change. When I got hired, it was the first time in many, many years that the administrator asked me to break up big files into smaller ones whenever possible to make incremental tape backups faster. I told him the 80’s called and wanted their IT technology back, but he didn’t laugh
We (NZ) have magstripe as a tertiary backup on credit cards.
- Contactless
- Chip and Pin
- 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
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! 
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
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
2 Likes
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
GEEZ
DID I NEED TO USE CAPITAL LETTERS?
The thing that was new to me is if it only allows magstripe after failing 3 times. 
I used to assume you could do the magstripe straight away if you fancied.