IPT

Friday, September 25, 2009

Hardware work

We had some work to do a couple of days ago on smart cards, magnetic stripes and barcodes. We have to find the difference on barcodes and magnetic stripes and research the purpose of smart cards.

Magnetic Stripe
Magnetic stripe can store amounts of data by modifying magnetic particles fixated on the card.

Barcode
Barcode is a numeric representation of data. Data is not stored in the numbers. When the barcode is scanned or identified it matches with the same number in a database, which stores the data for which the barcode represents.

Smart Card
A card with embedded circuits which can process data. smartcards are highly secure in comparison to the magnetic stripe. the data stored on smart codes are encrypted to prevent data from being interpreted or stolen.