Google suggest Online Payment with Single Sign On

Google has suggested a micropayment System to the Newspaper Association of America. How is this asecurity issue? They suggest to combine it with a Single Sign On System also operated by Google.
I welcome paid-for Internet content because I believe that advertising As the only Business model for online content endangers the journalistic quality of the articles. The dependency on the advertisers leads to articles written for the advertisers, not for the readers. Also, I hope that flash and popups will become less intrusive if publishers get an additional revenue stream.
The bad news is that Google would know even more about their users, in particular if they operate the micropayment system.
I really would prefer having a small micropayment token connected to my computer that performs Single Sign On and micropayment operations under my control.

Dumb Smart Cards fail as e-Cash

An e-Cash (well, sort of) system used for parking payments in San Francisco and other US cities has been analysed and broken. It uses chip cards, but the chip cards do not authenticate themselves and therefore are pretty useless. This particular attack would have been impossible if the chip cards were authenticated properly.

It is a nice example for a scalable attack: If the security has been broken for one parking meter it is broken for all of them. This is a design error in a security application.

On a sidenote, in Germany and many other countries there is an e-Cash system which does not have these problems, it is called 'Geldkarte' (moneycard).

E-Cash Coming Back?

The European Commission has started an new attempt at introducing electronic money. The organsiatational requirements , in particular initial capital, are reduced "with the objective of removing barriers to market entry". Not much on technology.

Will there be innovative implementations of E-cash? New busines models? Pay-per-view websites? Hmmm....