Ever since creating this weblog, I haven’t been satisfied with the name POS Blog. The name does say what the site is about, but lacks creativity and inspiration. Topday I present the new name of this blog, inspired by an article in Business 2.0 Magazine: The Wizard of POS.
From now on, you will be reading The Wizard of POS!
Visa confirmed Monday it has issued an alert warning that some point-of-sale software may be storing PINs in violation of industry rules, leading to suspicions that the root of the recent debit card debacle may have been out-of-date or misconfigured software.
“…we provided a confidential alert to a limited number of financial institutions advising them that a particular configuration of certain software could cause it to store cardholder data,” Visa said in a statement e-mailed to TechWeb. “We further advised them of the existence of a software upgrade designed to address the problem.”
When purchasing a Point Of Sale system it is very important that the software complies with all formal regulations and industry standards such as in this case the PCI data security standard. Furthermore, most countries require strict certification of all software communicating with the PIN terminals.
Researchers at the Vrije Universiteit in Amsterdam gave a live demonstration of an RFID virus at the Fourth Annual IEEE Conference on Pervasive Computing and Communications (IEEE PerCom) in Pisa, Italy. The attacks exploit the same software weaknesses that PC viruses and worms do and can have the same devastating consequences.
Melanie Rieback, a Ph.D. student supervised by Andrew Tanenbaum, showed that an infected RFID label can infect a middleware database, which could potentially trigger the middleware to produce more infected RFID tags. The group set up an informational web site about RFID Viruses and Worms to give information about their work on RFID malware.
The Italian firm Labware presented their latest POS products on the CeBIT show in Hannover.
Their new products stand out for their beautiful design and clever ergonomics. Pictured above is the Genio Giga dual 15″ screen POS system, with a 1GHz fanless processor. At the moment further specifications are not available, but we can conclude that this POS system is underpowered for a new product.
Today, Microsoft released version 1.1 of its Windows Embedded for Point of Service, including support for both new and legacy retail peripherals. Launched in May 2005, WEPOS has found its way to the retailers through numerous hardware partners and system integrators, who prefer to use the cheaper embedded operating system over Windows XP.
According to eWeek‘s analysts, Microsoft mainly targets WEPOS at MS-DOS replacements and migrations from the Linux platform, which both suffer from a lack of support for common EPOS peripherals.