London Underground's OysterCard is Shucked

Oh, dear.

RFID is proven unsafe: a great way to make one's purchase/ID information public, but not too useful for much else.No matter how many times RFID variations get hacked, people still cling to the notion that it's somehow useful form a security standpoint.

As for the Tube, sliding those little tickets through the turnstile slots worked fine- if Transport London wanted to save trees, they could just move to rechargeable plastic tickets for anything other than single-fare sales. The money is there, but it's getting spent on self-defeating security instead of true development.

Here's a related article: One billion RFID cards vulnerable to hacks