<story><title>Square responds to Verifone&apos;s allegations</title><url>https://squareup.com/letters/security</url><text></text></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>rriepe</author><text>PR-wise, very well done on Square&apos;s part:&lt;p&gt;-Didn&apos;t mention the competitor by name, and stuck to addressing the arguments, without any messy ad hominem stuff.&lt;p&gt;-Set up a separate page to address this issue. They could have easily lost by simply shifting the focus of the discussion to questioning Square&apos;s security. Posting a message on their home page or their blog, for example, makes it an issue to people who had no previous exposure to the issue.&lt;p&gt;-Stuck to a basic analogy that everyone has experience with, and everyone can understand.&lt;p&gt;-Used the opportunity to discuss other aspects of Square without throwing it in the reader&apos;s face. I had no idea they had a partner bank.&lt;p&gt;Good on them. I feel Dorsey has a mind for this, but I also find myself wondering if they had any PR consultation.</text></comment>
<story><title>Square responds to Verifone&apos;s allegations</title><url>https://squareup.com/letters/security</url><text></text></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>jakewalker</author><text>I used to develop kiosks that accepted credit cards for a company I started.  We purchased some $20-$30 USB card swipers in order to capture credit card numbers and process orders.  When you swiped the card, it would return an ASCII text string with the credit card number, name, and some additional codes (CVV1 and CVV2, I believe).  If I recall correctly, the magnetic strip has a number of tracks, and you could program the reader to read one or all of these tracks.  If you submitted the full string from the swipe to your merchant, you got a much better rate on the transaction.&lt;p&gt;The device was something like this:
&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.google.com/products/catalog?q=usb+card+swipe+reader&amp;#38;hl=en&amp;#38;client=safari&amp;#38;rls=en&amp;#38;prmd=ivns&amp;#38;resnum=3&amp;#38;biw=1214&amp;#38;bih=688&amp;#38;bav=on.2,or.&amp;#38;um=1&amp;#38;ie=UTF-8&amp;#38;cid=9253952205062488166&amp;#38;sa=X&amp;#38;ei=BoB4Tb7pJ5CWsgP4uqSDAw&amp;#38;ved=0CF0Q8wIwAA#ps-sellers&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://www.google.com/products/catalog?q=usb+card+swipe+read...&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;Anyway, seems to me there&apos;s nothing new here...  just the fact that people can now get a device capable of decoding the tracks on a magnetic strip for $0 instead of $30.</text></comment>