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.