Mobile payments square up with iPhone applications

This is one of these sexy announcements that everybody picked-up on. I had to swim through an avalanche of alerts, e-mails and tweets to be told: "Twitter founder's new venture is shaping up" (Read here). And then one is told how this new invention (called Square) will revolutionise payments forever. You cannot be serious!

See, what Square will do, it will turn your card info (also the track 2 data, that is not visible on the card) into a sound. The Square device is plugged into the ear-phone socket on an iPhone. The invisible information on your card is now audible!

I can just imaging a number of applications that will be so much easier to write, like fraudulent capture of card information at restaurants, or the storage of card information to be re-played later (after a valid transaction had happened.) I am sure that one can think of more applications where the Square could be used to steal money.

A better name for the Square could have been Hole, as it creates a massive hole in the well-defined security dispensation for magnetic stripe cards.