Evan Schuman's StorefrontBacktalk

Can an RFID chip be made uncloneable? No, but one Palo Alto vendor is arguing that it’s gotten quite close.

The vendor’s position, according to this well-done NetworkWorld story, is to “create multiple PKI-like key pairs based on integrated circuit impurities so that a given chip will always respond to a particular stimulus in a predictable way. And, because it’s the impurities in the silicon that cause this effect, it’s impossible to create a chip that will respond to a specific stimulus.” For one possible future of RFID, it’s worth a read.…

If you’re going to be at the NRF show in Manhattan next week, please drop by our Monday (Jan. 12) panel on security, featuring security execs from Reitmans, Beall’s and Big Lots, along with the former head of the U.S. Justice Department’s computer crime and StorefrontBacktalk’s own David Taylor. Evan Schuman will moderate.

The panel discussion, scheduled to start at 4:30 PM in Hall A, Room 1A, will open with a question about whether retailers, in this bad a recession, will need to rethink how to fund—and possibly whether to fund—PCI efforts. But the conversation will also cover non-IT security issues, such as crowd control, looking at very different Black Friday disasters involving Wal-Mart and Best Buy, plus loss prevention strategies.…

But questions quickly surfaced. For example, retailers have specific systems designed to catch multiple identical transactions from the same account. Why, then, didn't the Macy's system catch anything until some accounts were charged two and even three times? One Macy's manager familiar with the incident said it involved a Macy's payment processor and that the connection with the processor "was experiencing a slowdown that day due to traffic or systems issues. When that slowdown occurred, that's when the double charges occurred." Read more...

The culprit is the apparent success of many scan-packing/EANway rollouts, which has made it difficult to justify paying for the transition. Sound familiar?Read more...

There's no question the global data sync effort, in which manufacturers share product information with sellers through GDSN-certified "data pools," is gaining ground. But not all industry observers are sold on GDSN. For example, Retail Systems Research Managing Partner Paula Rosenblum said she remains skeptical about the true ROI of the practice.Read more...

The science and technology of it is really not that far-fetched. The fact that so many consumers—especially younger consumers—today share so many of their thoughts and private moments in so many public settings alone would allow even a casual observer to learn quite a bit about someone. But it gets far worse.Read more...

But—you just knew there was going to be a but—a new Gartner report predicts that it may not be all happy news. As IT spending is slightly insolated and spending in other departments gets gutted, "IT spend as a percentage of retail revenue will go up," said Gartner Research VP Hung LeHong. "In some ways, that will backfire on the IT group" as they'll then become a bigger target for cost-cutters. Read more...

Office Max topped IHL's list of consumer electronics retailers in terms of lost sales due to out-of-stocks, locked cases (with no help in sight) or staffer inability to find stuff supposedly in inventory. But Office Max certainly wasn't alone in the research company's hall of shame, with Office Depot and Circuit City keeping it company.Read more...

In publishing the results of its 10th annual survey of E-Commerce fraud, the California company said E-tailers continue to lose 1.4 percent of their online revenue to fraud (the same rate of loss CyberSource has seen since 2006) and they compound those losses by failing to sufficiently trust fraud-detection technology.Read more...

To keep him off the streets, we're letting him make more predictions. If you're looking for comfort, you don't want toRead more...

"Obviously, this is one of the busiest times of the year for us and for our customers," one Postal official said. "Volume definitely played a part, but there was also a technical glitch in the system." Read more...

But as is Amazon's tendency, its experiment is a little bolder and more daring.The concept is interesting, but we're having a difficult time coming up with a viable ROI for it. If it's intended to actually generate revenue for Amazon above and beyond revenue that they would have likely already received, it's much more problematic. Read more...

Dollar General, the $10 billion discount retail chain, on Wednesday (Dec. 10) agreed to install specially-designed POS units intended to safeguard the privacy of visually-impaired consumers in all of its 8,300 stores in the U.S. “in less than eighteen months.” The intent is to give those shoppers an alternative to touchscreen interfaces by offering tactile keys.

The chain, which has already installed the units in “several stores in Texas,” according to a Dollar General statement, follows similar actions by other national chains including Rite Aid, 7-Eleven, RadioShack, Safeway, Trader Joe’s and Wal-Mart. The most visible chain to oppose such efforts has been Target, which settled its efforts with a $6 million payment in September. …

It's an odd position for Macy's to take. They're hardly at the cutting edge of this movement (Borders would have a better argument there) and, indeed, their spokesperson on the issue couldn't name a single merged channel feature they offer that isn't already offered by multiple rivals.Read more...

Best Buy Chief Technologist Bob Anderson has been talking lately about the value of lending an ear to young innovators in the company. “You don’t need a big, honking server and lots of funding or 50 people to start something innovative. It can be just two guys or two women with just an idea. Nothing makes me happier than when someone says, ‘Hey, Bob, I have an idea.’ I never say, ‘Send me an E-mail.’ I say, ‘What have you got?'”

Arizona State University’s W.P. Carey School of Business ran an interesting Web site story about a speech Anderson gave. Although it doesn’t reveal anything new about Best Buy’s technology vision, it’s worth a read.…

One of the most challenging aspects of apparel E-Commerce is that sizing can be so, well, psychotic. A specific size can vary from manufacturer to manufacturer, if not with different garments from the same manufacturer. Read more...

That headline comes courtesy of the This Is True newsletter by Randy Cassingham, a constant source of interesting commentary. It was the only worthy commentary about the Black Friday tragedy at the brick-and-mortar Wal-Mart in New York where a store associate was killed by a frantic rush of holiday shoppers when he opened the doors at 5 AM.

Cassingham quoted a police official as describing the shoppers as “like a stampede” and that “hundreds of people walked past him, over him or around him” while officers tried to do CPR. “No doubt,” he wrote, “they were the same shoppers who complained bitterly about the ‘appalling lack of help’ in the store.” Indeed. This remarkably callous act in the midst of what is presumably holiday shopping is perhaps the most graphic and sickening sign of how far society has gone from what is supposed to be the intent of these holidays, regardless of which holiday is being celebrated.…

"We saw where they suddenly shifted all of their, presumably, image content over to Akamai on the morning of Black Friday," Evans said. "Now that's a really odd thing to do, you know? Hey, it's a really big day. Let's make a major change to our infrastructure without testing it. What if that had gone wrong? As it happens, they were OK once it came onstream, but they had no idea whether that was going to benefit them or be detrimental. They turned it on at 7 o'clock in the morning." Read more...

Despite those incidents—in part fueled by record-breaking traffic, which decided to not be influenced by the recession—this year's Cyber Monday was relatively uneventful, with most of the major retailers faring quite well. But for those who didn't fare so well—including Costco, Bloomingdale's, Borders UK, Gap, Home Depot, Victoria's Secret, Williams-Sonoma, Tiger Direct, Wegmans and H-E-B—it was a memorable day.Read more...

In a trial of new holographic magnetic stripes for its payment cards, Visa found the cards “emitted an electrostatic discharge that caused POS terminals to shut down,” according to a report in The Nilson Report, a respected credit card industry newsletter.

The report, which said the problems happened “on very few occasions,” is why Visa is not using the same kind holographic mag stripes as MasterCard and American Express, the newsletter said. The issue came up because Discover Card is now using the new technology on its cards, according to Discover rules that went into effect Oct. 16.…

In a trial initially limited to the United Kingdom, Switzerland, Israel and Italy, Visa Europe is starting a trial this month of a card with an 8-digit alphanumeric display, 12-button keyboard and a long-life battery, according to a report in The Nilson Report, a respected credit card industry newsletter.

The card has the ability to offer reciprocal authentication, which is designed to allow consumers “making transactions via phone or the Web a way to identify the party on the other end before transmitting identifying credentials,” the report said. Such a card could be extremely useful to E-Commerce efforts to thwart phishing sites set up to harvest credit card data from unsuspecting consumers visiting look-alike fraudulent Web sites.…

According to a probable cause document, the defendants' lack of discretion may have done them in. Best Buy regional loss prevention officer Steve Castillo "noticed a strange pattern of purchase activity," according to the federal filing. How strange? The reward card was linked to 77 different credit card accounts between April 2007 and June 2008. And it was used to make 125 separate credit card purchases totaling $252,000, the filing said. Read more...

It's almost unfair to even label it E-Commerce, because the site is equally focused on helping in-store sales. The in-store features—such as tracking in-store inventory on the site and allowing in-store POS units to access online-only products—aren't new to the space, but JCPenney has added some nice touches. Read more...

Wal-Mart has agreed to pay $1.4 million to settle complaints that it overcharged customers in California. The Nov. 24 deal involved the mispricing of some 1,043 items over four years, according to this BusinessWeek story. This announcement comes on the heels of Target agreeing to pay $1.7 million in penalties for overcharging customers in five northern California counties in October.

One of the prosecutors on the case said some of the problems happened because associates would make pricing changes to items in the store’s register database but not in the aisle.…