SUSAN TOMPOR: Stores turn paper into e-checks
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I picked up my 6-year-old son from school last week, and we drove to Wal-Mart to see the future for paper checks. We grabbed a few of life&#39;s staples: some Legos, a pack of 3x5 cards to create
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(InfoWorld) - Requiring print-outs as a back-up to electronic voting machines would not improve security but would increase costs of U.S. voting systems, according to a report released Tuesday. Tech-focused think tank the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation (ITIF) said so-called voter-verified paper trail ballots used in conjunction with e-voting machines would "prevent the use of innovative voting technology that offers voters more security, transparency, and reliability" than paper-only balloting systems. The U.S. House of Representatives has before it a bill that would require paper-trail ballots to be used with direct recording electronic voting machines. But a paper trail would create several problems, said report author Daniel Castro, an ITIF senior analyst. Paper audit trails would create an "even bigger dispute" than past elections with missing electronic votes, Castro said. "People wouldn't know which record was accurate -- the paper or the electronic record," he said. Paper-trail ballots would also increase the cost of elections, Castro said. Printers will fail on election days, and counting machines will malfunction, he said. "When you manually count it, you have problems with the human element," he added. U.S. residents trust computers to run many other "critical applications" in banking, medicine, and aviation, the report said. Supporters of paper-trail audits disputed the report's findings. "The argument that people trust computers in other places is specious -- safety-critical systems have been developed in other contexts using rigorous standards that are not applied to voting machines," said Eugene Spafford, chairman of the Association for Computing Machinery's (ACM's) U.S. policy committee. ACM has not called for e-voting machines to be scrapped, but instead for the machines to go through two levels of audit, paper trails and random machine audits, said Spafford, executive director of the Purdue University Center for Education and Research in Information Assurance and Security. While the report discounts claims that e-voting machines can be hacked and elections reversed, malicious hacking isn't the only problem with e-voting machines, Spafford added. "Errors, bugs and accidents can also result in problems unless there is an independent, durable audit trail," he said. "Under several guises [the authors] trot out the canard that 'if fraud is so possible, how come it hasn't been proven yet?' This is so obviously wrong that I'm not sure it even deserves a response." Pamela Smith, president of VerifiedVoting.org, suggested readers of the report "consider the source." "This is an industry body that has come out with this screed to support the industry," Smith said. Smith disputed the report's suggestion that a "growing technophobic movement believes that no computer can be trusted for electronic voting." Several prominent computer security experts have called for paper-trail audits, she said. "The harshest critics of e-voting -- in particular paperless e-voting -- are computer technologists who are the literal opposite of technophobic," she said. "What they claim is that in order to have secure elections, they must be auditable and recountable." Instead of printouts, lawmakers should look to the next generation of e-voting machines, the report said. One such technology provides a small receipt that voters can take with them and use to check online whether their ballots have been counted. The receipt would give voters more assurance than a typical paper-trail ballot, which they cannot take with them, Castro said. But Spafford said most newer technologies are unproven, and many aren't transparent to typical voters. "It is important that the mechanism is understandable and trusted by the population as well as correct and auditable by experts," he said. "Systems based on ... cryptographic methods are not understandable to the lay person -- and especially not to technophobic ones. Paper is well understood."
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How you pay -- paper vs. plastic -- can put a crimp in your spending power.
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(InfoWorld) - When data breach investigator Bryan Sartin gets a call to check into an incident involving customer records loss at a retailer, he knows that the situation most likely involves information that has been lifted from a company's point-of-sale systems. Just as the now famous attack on discount clothing chain TJX Stores revolved around the interception of data transmitted wirelessly from the company's registers to its databases, almost every call that Sartin receives from a retailer can be traced back to some issue related to point-of-sale information collection, he said. The data theft gumshoe -- whose official title is managing principal in the Investigative Response unit at managed security services provider Cybertrust, which was purchased by Verizon Business in May 2007 -- contends that if companies did a better job of defending their point-of-sale tools, most could dramatically lower their risk of a breach. "As a rule, companies are doing a better job of protecting against external IT systems intrusions, but if you look into most of these consumer breaches at retailers the point-of-sale technology is typically the common denominator," Sartin said. "Many retailers list the types of systems they use on their Web sites, so the smart criminals look for companies using systems they already know how to beat and simply try to find a way in." If retailers could merely stop collecting as much data at their registers, it would seem, the companies would significantly improve their ability to protect against such attacks, but the issue isn't that simple. In order to protect themselves against fraud on the part of customers -- primarily in the form of inappropriate returns -- the companies are forced to store some form of identification data, typically a credit card number -- to prevent the need to write off even more losses to crime. Among the databases of information scooped from TJX were some that carried such returns information. As a result, retail companies find themselves in a tricky situation where they are being forced to consider alternatives that allow them to reduce the level of customer data collected at the point-of-sale, while retaining enough information to protect against fraud. Flashback to the early 1990s, and video game console maker Nintendo was dealing with a challenging business problem. The Kyoto, Japan-based electronics company was selling millions of its NES video game consoles, but it was also being routinely fleeced by customers via fraudulent returns. Typically such transactions would involve people who would buy new gaming systems, place older, broken consoles in the new box, and then simply return the devices for a full refund. The company was losing large amounts of money and dealing with retailers who were shipping back scads of the worn-out machines, and attempts to implement manual guidelines, such as collecting more detailed data about customers, failed to deliver results. Faced with mounting costs, the company decided to employ a technological strategy for warding off fraudulent activity. By capturing the information on each box carrying each one of its consoles and creating an electronic receipt based on its UPC code and serial number at the point-of-sale, the firm discovered, it could build a database of pertinent information that would allow it to track sales without retaining customer data. By recording the information on the box, along with details about the retailer who sold it -- such as their geographic location and store number -- along with the date and time of an item's sale, Nintendo found that it could prevent many attempted returns that involved fraudulent behavior. The system was piloted at Wal-Mart in 1995, and rapidly expanded into other retailers worldwide. The company soon realized it had a hit on its hands when its largest rival at the time, Sega, came calling after hearing how well the system worked from its own retail partners. As a result, Nintendo decided to spin off the technology into its own company, Siras, in 1999. With massive manufacturers including General Electric, Hewlett-Packard, Philips and Sony, and retailers such as Best Buy, CompUSA, Sears and Target using the Siras Electronic Registration system today, the company maintains it provides an easy solution to the point-of-sale data collection nightmare presently facing retailers. By eliminating the need to collect customer data, including credit card numbers, said company officials, Siras feels it can also allow retailers and manufacturers to protect themselves from information exposure incidents and all the related fallout such events may bring. "Once consumer data is collected it's really just a matter of time before it gets exposed or stolen, and you don't need to be a sophisticated hacker to commit such a crime, a lot of times it's a retail employee who finds a way to capture the data and sell it," said Peter Junger, president of Siras, based in Redmond, Wash. "Meanwhile, many point-of-sale systems can be easily hacked, and radio frequency ID tools that aim to help solve these problems are still many years away." By purposefully avoiding the collection of personal data using a system such as Siras', companies can already begin lowering their risk while streamlining the retail shopping and returns process for themselves and their customers, he said. After collecting the UPC and sales information, the data is transmitted to a national database presided over by Siras, allowing the software maker to handle much of the legwork and eliminate related point-of-sale management costs for retailers, according to Junger. Siras is also in the process of developing other iterations of Electronic Registration for use by law enforcement officials tracking the movement of stolen goods, and for pawn shops and online auction sites that are trying to reduce sales of misappropriated or counterfeit goods. "It's a very simple technological approach to a complex problem," Junger said. "And we're hoping that someday its use will stretch far beyond electronics and other high-end items into almost any type of products that carries a serial number." One company already using Siras' tools is the consumer products division of Philips Electronics North America, the New York based manufacturer of everything from desktop computers to flat-screen TVs. Prior to implementing Siras in 2001, Philips dealt with the same sorts of issues that drove Nintendo to create the technology, but since that time, consumer fraud has been cut significantly, said Tony Sciarrotta, director of returns management for Phillips Consumer Electronics. "It's had a huge bottom-line impact, helping us save not just on the cost of fraudulently returned products, but also the need to reimburse retailers who get victimized," Sciarrotta said. "The consumer information is not attached to registration, which is a huge win for consumers who have concerns about privacy, and for retailers afraid of a breach incident, and the technology can be applied to almost anything you want to sell." Sciarrotta said that he would like to see larger numbers of retailers adopt Siras, and that he believes such tools should be required across the industry to lower the risk of consumer data loss. "There are certainly times when we would like to have a lot more consumer information, but that's not in the best interest of everyone involved, so we need to get it in other ways such as encouraging product registration after the sale," he said. "From our side we don't want to be the police or the gatekeeper, we want to allow our retailers to go about their business as easily as possible with the least amount of risk for loss; over all my years in this industry, this is one of the best ideas I've ever seen along those lines."
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With a scan of your index finger, some supermarkets memorize what kind of toilet paper or cereals you buy. They share that information with suppliers who offer coupons so you'll purchase more of their products next time.
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Ever wonder why office-supply stores will offer a ream of paper or $3 for empty inkjet printer cartridges?
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New "Check 21" rules may soon be changing how your bank serves you.
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2003 was the first time plastic and other electronic payment methods beat out checks, according to a survey released yesterday by the Federal Reserve.
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More and more retailers are employing rigorous scientific techniques to improve their bottom line.
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In an effort to curb fraud, many stores require photo ID or other personal information. By Wendy Tanaka. PHILADELPHIA -- With the holiday presents mostly opened, a trip to the merchandise return counter can&#39;t be far behind.
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The rebate check is no longer a reward reserved for penny-pinchers with an abundance of paperwork skills and patience. Paperless, online rebates are finally gaining momentum in retail, an industry that has long offered customers electronic options for virtually every other type of transaction, from simple purchases to coupons.
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The Office of Personnel Management wants to convert its retirement-related documents into electronic form, but it's no small task: There are about 8 million pages to be digitized.
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The Motley Fool - Like many people, you may have been resisting entering the age of online banking, perhaps not wanting to pay your bills electronically. But whether you like it or not, later this month financial institutions and many merchants will be taking a big step closer to a more paperless society. We have the "Check Clearing for the 21st Century Act" (referred to as "Check 21" by those in the know) to thank for this.
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As e-mail becomes part of official business records, companies are looking to install archiving systems to make sure documents are available in case legal or compliance issues arise.
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If you write checks thinking you can beat them to the bank, you might want to rethink your financial strategy by Thursday. A new law that requires all banks to accept electronic images of checks
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A Sarasota recount is complicated by electronic voting systems. One solution: Bring back paper.
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Now there are tools available online to safeguard against the theft of Social Security numbers.