snapped? (rua)

So we can con­firm that yes, the new Snap­per cards do work pret­ty well in the bus­es (based on the small sam­ple of one attempt ear­li­er today using our tri­al USB snap­per pic­tured). One would expect so, giv­en that the tech­nol­o­gy comes from the giant T‑Money install in Seoul, where their mega-city sized pub­lic trans­port oper­a­tion will have smoothed all the rough-edges out of it long ago.

But WTF is hap­pen­ing with Snap­per?

First, the Dom Post reports that the roll­out, due for Mon­day 14th, has been delayed again (orig­i­nal­ly the roll­out was sup­posed to be in June). Then we find that at least some bus­es are run­ning with live, lit-up and use­able Snap­per read­ers any­way — such was the one we caught this morn­ing. And to con­fuse the mat­ter fur­ther, no retail­ers appear able to sell com­muters the cards until the end of the month… well, those retail­ers that actu­al­ly have agreed to sell the things in the first place, that is.

But… we wants it!

So what might have caused this Clay­ton’s delay? In the absence of any­thing use­ful from Snap­per them­selves we can, of course, indulge in wild spec­u­la­tion (after the jump):

• Poneke has men­tioned some prob­lems using their card; so much so that they have returned to using their Gold Card. Per­haps there’s still some tech­ni­cal issues out­stand­ing with the Snap­per imple­men­ta­tion.
• It appears that there’s a dif­fer­ent change till on the Snap­per enabled bus­es; and while most bus­es have the card read­ers, one may observe that most of these bus­es don’t have the fan­cy new tills. Per­haps they’re behind sched­ule on installing these.
• Per­haps Snap­per are putting the squeeze on those retail­ers that have cho­sen not to sell the card because of the pro­nounced lack of ping in it (like at least some or all of the Star­Marts). Two weeks of pun­ters enquir­ing if they can buy a Snap­per card could force the retail­er to think again about not par­tic­i­pat­ing. Although after a strange lit­tle episode that played out in the media last month the hold­out bus tick­et sell­ers may not fall for it.
• And then there’s the talk about the Mifare Chip Crack in Europe, and the pos­si­bil­i­ty that secu­ri­ty con­sid­er­a­tions have caused the delay.

Who knows. All we can prob­a­bly dis­count is the lat­ter: despite a resur­gence in media reports con­cern­ing secu­ri­ty issues with the MiFare microchip that is most like­ly to be used by Snap­per, the work by some Dutch researchers that lead to the break first hit the head­lines in March. Clear­ly if the Snap­per peo­ple thought it was a prob­lem they’d have delayed the sys­tem back then, right?

In any case the attack, as it stands right now, might not appear to be over­ly pro­duc­tive when tar­get­ed at Snap­per — there’s a lot of very spe­cialised com­put­er equip­ment and faffing about required for a pay­off of a max­i­mum of $300 (being the card’s max­i­mum val­ue) at a time, which can only be spent at retail­ers sup­port­ing Snap­per.

We could of course spec­u­late that Snap­per are plan­ning on upgrad­ing their secu­ri­ty and have exten­sive fraud detec­tion and response sys­tems, just as we have spec­u­lat­ed above as to the caus­es of the roll­out delay. But Snap­per aren’t say­ing a sin­gle thing.

It would be nice to know though, would­n’t it.