Chinaview.com reports on the growth in China's bank card business.

 "Since 1985 when China started to issue bank cards, the country has become the second-largest holder, following the United States which has about 850 million cards issued," said Lin Caiyi, deputy director of the Strategy & Development Department of China UnionPay - the sole national payment network for Chinese banks.

The credit card sector has also enjoyed rapid development, with the number issued jumping from 1.55 million at the end of 2002 to the current level of over 10 million, according to figures made public by Lin at the 2005 China Credit Card Business Forum held in Shanghai over the weekend.

"However, these cards are used very infrequently and the transaction volume generated from their use is very small, especially in terms of personal consumption," she said.

Dibya Sarkar reports for FCW.com on plans by the Departments of Homeland Security and Justice to survey 36,000 businesses this spring to examine the type and frequency of computer security incidents.

Rantala said the full-scale survey will help determine what types of attacks are most common nationally. She said people tend to think that if you have one computer attack, you shore up everything and that prevents anything else from happening. But they fail to consider that hackers develop methods of attack quicker than businesses can respond to them. "In other words, they can open the door faster than we can relock it," she said.

PayPal has announced the launch of local service in Italy.

Texas Instruments has announced plans to deliver ISO/IEC 14443 compliant RFID chips that meet MasterCard's PayPass security requirements.

First Data Corp. has announced that it has entered into an agreement for GE Consumer Finance to acquire FDC's First Data Loan Company Canada small business MasterCard portfolio in Canada. FDC will provide card processing services for the accounts.

Erica Sagon writes in the Arizona Republic about no signature card transactions.

The no-signature method has raised concerns about fraud, but Gracia said, "It's as secure as any transaction that is signed for."

If that makes you wonder why people have been signing receipts for years, McKinley said it was more of a psychological exercise than a defense against fraud. "I don't think anyone pays a whole lot of attention to signatures anyway," McKinley said.