"James A. Donald" <jamesd@echeque.com> writes:
Increasingly however, we see smartcard interfaces sold for PCs. What for, I wonder?
Companies buy a few readers for their developers who write software to work with the cards. They may even roll out a few in pilots, and put out a stack of press releases and print brochures advertising how hip they are for using smart cards. Eventually the clients discover how much of a bitch they are to work with (installation problems/buggy drivers/incompatibilities/not having your card when you need it/etc, not helped by the fact that smart card vendor after- sales support is the most client-hostile of any PC hardware type I know of) that users decide to live with software-only crypto until the smart card scene is a bit more mature. Given that n_users >> n_card_vendors, this situation can keep going for quite some time. Peter.