Buying things on physical stores is certainly safer, huh?

This article today on ComputerWorld made me "laugh":

Hackers open new front in payment card data thefts

This time they've intercepted payments to local stores as they were being sent to credit card companies for charging. Great job for those hackers! Just shows that there is no way of having safe money transactions. Maybe we should just build walls around our houses, grow our own food and build our own tools. No more dealing with other people, as somebody in the middle of it might use you or steal your goods from under your nose! :-)

So that's how the world is right now. Am I scared? Actually not at all. People stealing things from other people is part of reality. If we are careful and pay attention to where our money is going, everything eventually gets to a good steady state. If credit card companies feel they are paying too much money due to fraud, they will invest on replacing those cards with way more secure technologies. These mostly include "active" cards, like smart cards, which perform the encryption through the card and allow for credit card numbers never to be sent out in the wild. Things have to change, but there needs to be way more financial incentive for it.