John Markoff reports on a new cracking of smart cards.

Matt Richtel reports on how easily stolen credit card numbers are shared over the Internet.

Mr. Power, from the Computer Security Institute, said: "You don't want to be an alarmist and say, `The sky is falling, and Visa is going to crumble.' But the financial losses involved in this kind of theft are underestimated, underreported and underacknowledged," estimating the worldwide cost is in the "double-digit billions." "There's a lot more hemorrhaging going on than some people believe," he said.

An interesting presentation about electronic payments in China by Spencer Loh, CEO of Shanghai Huateng Software Systems Co., Ltd.

An excellent summary of all the buzzword acronyms related to XML formats, etc.

An interesting interview with insights re: Passport, .NET, etc.

A story about RFID tags and the Auto-ID Center at MIT.

"If banks expose their financial services as Web services, it means the entire chain has to be secure all the way from the client to the registry to the back end," said Ravi Balakrishnan, who represented a Fortune 100 technology company in several organizations dealing with Web service standards organizations. "How can a bank trust a Web service is not creating a weak link into its systems at any point along the way?"

"While Visa is rumored to be considering increasing its interchange rates later this year, its decision not to move in lockstep with MasterCard has led to speculation that it is waiting to gauge merchant reaction to MasterCard‚s new rate sheet."

"An anonymous security researcher announced on a computer security research mailing list Wednesday that several U.S. retailers have made the mistake of installing wireless cash registers and transmitting the traffic in clear text, without encryption. By sitting in the parking lot, the researcher said, he could „listen in‰ on credit card numbers being beamed around the store."

"Why identity now? Because a recession has led to true innovation."

"A bill introduced in the House of Representatives on Wednesday would require states to include biometric features such as retinal scans or fingerprints on encrypted microchips in driver's licenses and state-issued ID cards."

New research from TowerGroup finds that volume figures for person-to-person payments still lag far behind the heady predictions that heralded P2P's birth in the late '90s. While actual transactions between individuals will continue to grow gradually, the greatest opportunity for P2P providers-and most significant threat to the payment franchises of established financial institutions-is the ability of the P2P infrastructure to adapt to other types of markets such as business or government.

Article about Concord EFS' use of .Net and web services.

Folks in Boston are puzzled by a recent surge in bank robberies.

"Nearly every bank in the United States runs its operations on an internal network that connects to the Internet at some point. Although the banking industry claims that its security is virtually foolproof, others say that any technology can be penetrated under the right circumstances."