Nifty use of Avantix?

[AndyNLondon]

Maybe we just have a really ar5ey bank.

Could be - my only real-world experience of card processing is in a small business, where the checks seem to amount to a fairly pointless PCI compliance questionaire. (That said, the rules do allow for use of WiFi, although they look like they'd be a bit of a pain to follow properly.)

 

[jon0844]

Royal Mail's target is that 93% of first class post should arrive the next working day. I've never seen 3–5 days mentioned anywhere (as an experienced personal user of Royal Mail's services too) although I can see how that could be perhaps the ‘outside’ target within which all first class mail should be delivered.

It's actually quite frustrating when something can't be considered lost for an extraordinarily long time. I am not sure what it is for first class post, but if a company sent me something and it didn't turn up after a few days, it's fair to say it's probably lost.

But in accordance with what the Royal Mail says defines lost mail, the company would most likely force me to wait a couple of weeks before I could claim it lost, and they'd make a claim and hopefully send a replacement.

 

[krus_aragon]

That I can't answer. All I know is that for our PDQ terminals at work our bank wanted evidence that they were hardwired to an Internet connection, and didn't bridge any gaps over the air between the device and going out of the building.

The Bluetooth and GSM interfaces are handled inside the devices themselves - between the handset and the supplied base unit in the case of the former. I can only presume it's because the manufacturers know what traffic is going across it, but because they can't tell what's going across a wifi link, it adds an extra level of perceived risk?

My take on this is that with the bluetooth link, both ends of the radio link are operated by the manufacturer's devices, and that the manufacturer has been able to get their equipment accredited by the bank/card issuers. With a Wi-fi internet connection, they don't control the wireless access point you use, so they can't issue any guarantees for it.

Both technologies operate in the same part of the radio spectrum (2.4GHz), can encrypt their data, but can also be monitored and eavesdropped. (A wi-fi network is likely to have other devices sharing the network by design, but both networks are broadcasting their data to anyone nearby.) The only real difference I see is who manufactured the devices at each end of the link.