Tech Talk / By Martha Knight

There was Tim Cook on a PBS interview program, talking for nearly an hour about Apple and its philosophy and methods, and of course the products it had launched.

Okay, it had launched the iPhone6 in two forms, and you can order yours now and at least get in line to get one shipped to you pretty soon, if that is your desire. The Apple Watch you will have to wait for, since it won’t be sold right away.

But the big development may be the mobile payment system. Every new announcement of personal ID being stolen from retail giants, Target and Home Depot being only the latest, makes us cringe. We start trying to think back to our transactions in those stores, or even online. How did we pay? Almost certainly by a credit or debit card, right? Oooohhh.

The problem is that card info was retained, unencrypted, in the terminals where we swiped our cards.

Seems like only yesterday we were being warned to use safe credit card entry, making sure not to hand our card to a cashier, and to use our cards in devices that faced toward us, and to not let anyone watch us enter our PINs.

But those terminals that have become ubiquitous have been retaining the data, and then some of those terminals were becoming infected by malware, enabling cybercriminals to retrieve the data from our cards.

Apple Pay relies on  a touchless payment technology from NFC. There’s a 16-digit proxy stored in a security chip in the phone. It is a “token” that is given to the retailer at the point of purchase, but the retailer does not receive anything identifying you, including data that is on your credit or debit card.

The token is sent to the credit card issuer. which runs it through a “trusted third party” system for verification.

The point where the actual card number is exposed is late in the process, and only to the issuer. The retailer does not receive it, let alone store it locally.

That’s the way things will work if you have an iPhone6, which you will be able to wave over the credit card machine and tap. The tap will authenticate the user, you, with Touch ID biometrics. If somebody had stolen your iPhone 6, he or she didn’t get your thumbprint! And the correct one of those will be needed to use that payment token.

We collectively have relied on credit cards and their magnetic stripes and our unique numbers for about 50 years. Apple Pay and other systems based on the same technology will replace our old style cards and readers as surely as we no longer have our cards placed in those clunky gadgets that used to imprint impressions from them on paper. Everything that appeared on the receipt we received was also retained by the retailer!

“Tap and go,” Tim Cook calls it. I never did like the term “swipe” as associated with credit card transactions.

Some other bits of data are connected to each Apple Pay transaction to keep that token from being used in another transaction, even if stolen.

We will be seeing other no-touch devices replacing the magnetic strip and swiping gesture, as tokenization catches on. Who wouldn’t prefer holding a thumb on a gadget and tapping the gadget on the terminal? Not only is that quicker and more convenient than a session with the terminal and its various input screens and keys, but it offers protection from credit card fraud and identity theft.

Somewhat similar technology is in use at 220,000 places in this country. Google Wallet doesn’t use tokenization and has yet to develop a large user base.  The other tap-on-terminal methods have been slow to catch on.

Cook says that’s because those solutions do not provide the ideal user experience.

Clover Networks, which makes payment terminals, is ready with systems geared to Apple Pay. Other NFC or touchless transaction methods presumably will be allowed for in the new terminals.

The “chip and sign” payment methods offer some additional convenience, but not even having to sign anything is better yet. We are becoming accustomed to using gestures instead of keys, and the thumb-tap is more convenient than scrawling a name with a pen.

Isn’t that what we have come to expect? There should be a motto: Convenience next to godliness.

•    •    •

OMG! Giant solar flares! One of them is even X-Class, the highest classification. What would happen to the grid? Would our beloved electronics be harmed?

These were coronal mass ejections (CMEs) and they hit Thursday night and Friday. There were no drastic problems, in spite of some panic-mongering that took place.

Solar flares are not unusual, and so far as we can tell, even storms of them have not damaged this planet that much. But the planet has not always been host to so much manmade stuff that could be vulnerable to solar storms.

This time the concern was mostly about the fact that two X-Class flares were going to happen back-to-back. Would the storms of flares interact in a way that would amplify their energy?

As it turned out, there were some radio signal problems, and some GPS signals were degraded, and there were minor voltage irregularities. Nothing that couldn’t be adjusted for, though.

Meanwhile, there were some lovely aurora borealis displays!

On to the next scientific puzzle. Okay, it isn’t as dramatic as forces from our star, which can mess with communications and power. But what on earth has caused the plague of fruit flies this summer?

If you know, e me at drymar@gmail.com.