News and notes from around the interweb:
- British Airways promo for more value redeeming Avios as cash towards travel for bookings of itineraries originating in London made by July 12 (HT: Head for Points)
- Musician kicked off flight for trying to stow her violin under the seats on a flight from Washington Dulles to Detroit. (HT: Alex M.)
While I was doing that (and my violin case fit perfectly there, see picture), the aforementioned flight attendant came to me and said, “You are being a disturbance, I don’t want you on my flight anymore” and kicked me off the flight.’
- The first US credit card intended to work in Cuba (HT: S.)
- Citibank has a very bizarre video showing their ‘advanced chip technology’ credit cards not working in a chip and pin kiosk in France. And here’s one about a confused clerk at a story who can’t understand why you don’t use a PIN. I’m always especially struck by multiple layers of corporate review approving these sorts of things as though they’re a good idea. (HT: Cliqbait)
- Inside Larry Page’s Secret Flying-Car Factories
- Used Airbus A380s available for rent at a steep discount. We learn that the first Singapore A380 cost “$US197.3 million for the plane in 2007 – versus a list price of $US304 million to $US314 million — as part of a 10-year sale-and-leaseback deal involving Singapore Air, which rented the jet for $US1.71 million a month”
Whoa, those Citi videos are WEIRD, dude!
I bet those were videos were for a focus group.
Those videos are odd but necessary – Citi are have to train their customers because they have made the bizarre decision to enable only chip and sign for their EMV cards, not chip and PIN. They issue a product which is not compliant with the way the rest of the world expects to do business and customers reap the consequences in the form of confused sales assistants and customers that can’t buy petrol and train tickets from automated vending machines.
Citi: This is how our products do not work.
“Even though we finally got EMV chips, which have been around since the 90s*, we decided to ignore the incredibly important security improvements of going to Chip+PIN because US retailers are whiny and cheap, so now our cards have to be treated like special snowflakes in other countries and we’re trying to strongarm the rest of the world into lowering security to accommodate us.”
Thanks Citi!
*(I had a credit union debit card with EMV in 1998, but there was no where to use it so they stopped issuing chips until last year. At least now it works as a Chip+PIN backup if none of my CCs work.)
Gary, does it hurt when you think?
The Citi videos were filmed exactly as intended. They were produced to show possible issues that could arise and how to, contrary to the Chicken Littles of the world such as you, solution them.
If anything, we need to ask Citi to dumb it down for you.
I’d agree with others – while the videos show how silly it is that US companies decided to skip chip/pin for chip/sign, the video itself is actually spot-on accurate and helpful.
(I live in Paris)
The yellow SNCF machines they used generally don’t work with chip/sign cards. Though ironically they could have just used the blue machines (RATP) and those do work with chip/sign cards. Or, as the video helpfully pointed out – the attendant ones always work with signature.
Given we have family/friends from the states that often comes over, this specific problem is common – so the video is actually helpful. Even more so since this video encapsulates the most common transaction a visitor to Paris will likely get stumped on: Taking the RER-C train to Versailles (since you could find either blue or yellow machines, versus a the standard Metro is blue only machines – which will work. Also, the vast majority of machines at CDG (and all at ORY) are blue, so again, will work fine there.