A researcher was found to have fabricated chips, and not in the good sense of the word. The BBC has the story:

China’s Xinhua state news agency said that the Hanxin digital signal processing chips were not based on research carried out by Mr Chen. Nor could the chips carry out the functions, such as reading fingerprints or playing MP3 files, that they were supposed to, it reported.

Ironic, I guess, that a chip for fingerprint en/decoding was faked. Did the researcher think he would never be caught? Often it is the high-profile nature of crime, backed by growing greed, that leads to its undoing. The story also has the potential effect of showing that the Chinese authorities are trying to crack down on copyright infringement, although it seems more likely that they were upset about a poor return on investment.

Well, they’ve always been changing, but a complete new set are due to be released this summer, according to CNET:

Today, the requirement is to make all information unreadable wherever it is stored,” Maxwell [director of e-Business and Emerging Technologies at MasterCard International] said. But this encryption requirement is causing so much trouble for merchants that credit card companies are having trouble dealing with requests for alternative measures, he said.

In response, changes to PCI will let companies replace encryption with other types of security technology, such as additional firewalls and access controls, Maxwell said. “There will be more-acceptable compensating and mitigating controls,” he said.

I’ll trade you encryption for a couple new firewalls. Wait, the whole monitoring thing is pretty hard to do as well. Can we trade logs and monitoring for a couple more firewalls?

Beware the silver bullet fallacy.