Evan Schuman's StorefrontBacktalk

Visa recently sent a confidential memo to selected business partners advising them of a potentially major security threat involving Fujitsu POS software.
We all know this because the memo was leaked to the Wall Street Journal, which prompted tons of media—including eWEEK, of course—to cover the story. The culprit seemed to be a tracer testing utility that Fujitsu provided to some customers, which apparently at least one customer continued to use in a live environment, which is a major security no-no.

With more home deliveries and installations, retailers and restaurants are facing the point-of-sale challenge of verifying payments away from the POS while paying higher credit card fees for card-not-present purchases.

At Todd Pacific Shipyards in Seattle, management knows that accurately tracking employees, including the hours and projects they’ve worked, and assessing daily staffing needs is often the difference between running a tight ship or sinking it.

Wal-Mart isn’t the only major early RFID backer to have cooled its RFID enthusiasm lately. One of the most anticipated RFID trials was at the Department of Homeland Security, which last year made a move to use super-beefed-up RFID devices track all U.S. ports of entry.

One of the more intriguing movies with a technology theme in the last few decades was a 1983 flick called “WarGames,” starring Matthew Broderick in his second movie.
Critics of the movie from the IT community at the time said that the film’s plot—about a sophisticated war game computer that confused its NORAD masters into thinking that a simulated nuclear attack was real—was unrealistic because every computer has more failsafes than the one in the story.

Breakthrough technologies invariably require some IT executive somewhere to have the guts to deploy when no one else is seriously doing so.

That’s a bold and dangerous move, given how many technologies fizzle and die after an impressive beginning.

As assistant director of information systems for the $700 million Piggly Wiggly grocery chain, Rachel Bolt has been one of the most vocal proponents of biometric retail authentication systems. At Piggly Wiggly, that system—like almost every other retail biometric system being tested today—is based on fingerprints.

But although Bolt saw initially strong consumer interest and support for the system, that support has lately seen a serious drop.

The National Security Agency, whose NSA initials are typically preceded by “super secret” or a similar cool-sounding phrase, is known as the home for code-breakers extraordinaire.

After 9/11, the NSA was given even more freedom to do whatever it takes to track terrorists and identify their plots. The New York Times recently reported about their efforts to conduct more domestic surveillance without warrants or any court authorization.

Like a counterintelligence officer or an anti-spyware company, some entities in life have the sole raison d’tre of countering something else.

RFID (radio-frequency identification) today is an unstoppable supply chain force and even the most fervent privacy advocates concede that.

The ease of use of a gift card is making them popular, with e-commerce sites expecting a tidal wave of gift card redemptions during the holidays.

The question is whether they will be met with a similarly enthusiastic number of thieves hoping to use replicas of the cards in brick-and-mortars and the numbers themselves online.

Betting that price comparison sites will play an increasingly prominent role in e-commerce, credit information vendor Experian was spending almost half a billion dollars to take over PriceGrabber.com.

Following on the heels of the June 2005 purchases—just days apart—where E.W. Scripps paid $525 million for Shopzilla and eBay paid $620 million for Shopping.com, Experian’s move seemed to continue a trend.

Trust and credibility—often associated with a brand—are arguably the most powerful assets of any e-commerce site. Without it, the Web is just an electronic version of the Wild West, with the shootouts won by the lowest-price site, until that site is shot down by another low-cost site.

Consumers and B2B shoppers purchase from a branded site because they have faith they will be treated fairly and honestly.

When two major food companies—select H.J. Heinz food operations and Del Monte—merged a few years ago under the Del Monte umbrella, it forced Del Monte CIO Marc Brown to do some radical consolidation.

Almost 100 systems were eliminated and the combined company standardized on ERP, data warehouse and a very different approach to supply chain. Even telecom advanced, with a huge push for voice over IP.

Several Web sites have popped up—like the thermometer timer on a turkey—to announce to the world Black Friday retail specials before the retailers want them to. Is this nature’s way of telling the retailers to grow up?

Old ways die hard, and there’s no industry that is more resistant to change than retail.

As retailers and manufacturers start bridging the gap between passive and active RFID chips, one RFID consortium is cautioning vendors to watch their mouths when talking about sensors.

The self-appointed sensor censor is the nonprofit SAL-C (Smart Active Label Consortium), which has about 20 members from the RFID manufacturing community.

E-mail is a wonderfully flexible and powerful application, but have corporate users bent it so far that it’s about to break? More to the point, have users forced e-mail to do so many things that it’s no longer any good at its core function?

This is not an academic discussion. In 2006, e-commerce sites that use e-mail extensively are going to have to evaluate alternative communication and distribution methods.

The argument that e-commerce allows price and product quality to trump large marketing budgets has been crushed by, well, large marketing budgets.

One of the core beliefs among e-commerce cognoscenti is that the Web serves as the great equalizer, allowing 20-employee retailers to effectively compete with Fortune 100 giants with $100 million ad budgets.

A high roller walks into the casino, ever so mindful of the constant surveillance cameras. Wanting to avoid sales pitches and other unwanted attention, he pays cash at each table and anonymously moves around frequently to discourage people who are trying to track his movements.

After a few hours of losses, he goes to the cashier and asks for a cash advance off of his credit card. The card tells the casino his name, but not much else. As is required by card issuers, the cashier asks for some other identification, such as a driver’s license.

When Office Depot sued Staples over search engine keyword purchases, it touched on more than marketing strategies.

The suit could force the discussion of the ethics of Web advertising tactics, a discussion that many in the industry would rather not have.

Privacy arguments tend to be emotional, often expressed in terms of “security versus privacy.”

A book about the future of RFID goes far beyond that. The authors of Spychips do not hesitate to go for the emotional jugular frequently, using references and examples from the Bible, the Nazis, the Russian government and the George Orwell classic 1984.

With so many retailers and manufacturers embracing RFID tracking throughout the supply chain, there is a strong assumption that an RFID label is still connected to the product it is supposed to be connected with. One vendor—Mikoh—is trying to challenge that assumption.

Like a Java version of the sword of Damocles, the threat of a Web tax has loomed over e-Commerce players since the Web was formed a little more than a decade ago.

But fitting for an October deadline, this sword is more of the tissue-paper and cardboard type, one that looks scary only from a distance. Upon closer examination, e-commerce shops are discovering it’s a twist on the Halloween tradition called Threat Or Treat.

Several indications—from reduced ATM interest, increased use of online bill payments and sharply improved consumer bank perceptions—show that banks are starting to understand their customers.

Given that it’s a business where almost everything comes down to moving numbers from one column to another, one might think that online banking should have been one of the first e-Commerce segments to mature. From that perspective, it’s an Internet natural.

One key part of a CIO’s job is to protect company information. That forces a healthy amount of paranoia, as the exec must anticipate the unlikely and envision the impossible. Maybe we should call CIOs Chief Imagination Officers? Perhaps a Stephen King-like imagination.

With the nation’s worst credit card security disaster on its resume and AmericanExpress and Visa cutting its contract, payment processor CardSystems has few long-term options.

In what might signal the closing chapter in the CardSystem credit-card security breach saga, CyberSource announced its intent to acquire all of CardSystem’s assets for an undisclosed amount.