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Showing posts from December, 2009

Amazon PayPhrase, a secure way to pay

I've been hearing about Amazon PayPhrase for a while, and finally received official news letter in last month. Here I'll skip the part about what is PayPhrase and how does it work, I'm sure the official website describes it with words thousands times more accurate and understandable than what I can do. Rest of this article talks about why I think PayPhrase is a secure way to pay. "Secure" is a very mirky word. This morning I went to a website of my favourite croissant store, picked a yummy cranberry cream cheese croissant and checked out. A little PHP page pops up, "select credit card XXXX-XXXX-XXXX-8841 or input a new card". This small page made me nervous for the rest of the day. To improve customer experience of buying a 2$ croissant, this shaky little home-made PHP website decided to keep my credit card information in their tiny MySQL database, probably running on a windows machine in store owner's house, a machine where an 9-year-old boy plays