MySpace Credit Card Introduced

MySpace has stamped its name on a new Citi Credit Card, in which users can earn rewards redeemable through MySpace such as free music downloads, concerts, movie premiere screenings, etc.

The announcement has not been met with a tremendous amount of enthusiasm however. For example, Marshall Kirkpatrick at ReadWriteWeb says, "MySpace is a lot of things, and despite Facebook's formidable attack it remains wildly popular, but an institution of trust and responsibility MySpace is not!"

From the purely financial standpoint as well, the card has had some shortcomings pointed out already. "Noticeably absent from the manifesto is a call to pay off your balance every month, which you'd better do since the card has a starting APR of 14.24% which is high even for a student with limited credit history," explains Josh Smith at Walletpop. "As a comparison, the same Citi FORWARD card without a MySpace logo carries an APR of 12.24% which is still high but a full 2% less than that of the MySpace card."

To be fair, the move isn't being poorly received by everyone. "This is a no-brainer for MySpace, as all they really need to do is supply their brand and collect referral fees from Citi," says Mashable's Adam Ostrow who notes that MySpace continues to "run laps" around its competitors in terms of monetization.

Furthermore, the rewards program might provide a little extra spark to MySpace Music, which the social network launched in the later part of last year.

Citi spins the MySpace branding of the card as highlighting social responsibility since you can earn points for "completing socially responsible acts" like donating to food drives, going paperless, switching to energy efficient light bulbs, etc. More details can be found at the card's official site and its MySpace profile.

Making Credit-Card Payments More Secure By Making Breaches More Expensive

It seems that hardly a month goes by without news of yet another credit-card data breach. Based on this, it seems fairly clear that the industry largely sees these breaches and the fallout from them as a cost of doing business, and one that's preferable to the cost of securing and monitoring their systems effectively. The industry has come up with a security compliance framework, but such rules have a history of being ignored. Even if they aren't ignored, though, they're so full of loopholes that they're fairly worthless. As the original poster, Andrew Conry-Murray, puts it, "It's not about security. It's about an industry covering its ass." Basically, the compliance system exists not to truly protect data, but rather to ward off government intervention.

Conry-Murray's contention is that the compliance system is far too easy to game, particularly because it only checks companies' systems once per year. His suggestion is to force all merchants and processors to comply, and check their systems regularly. Companies could opt out, but by doing so, they would be agreeing to significantly higher fees and penalties in the case of a breach. As he notes, these fees would have to be high enough to where they would make devoting more resources to security a more desirable option. This idea, and indeed any that dramatically increases the cost of breaches, is worth mulling over as a way to encourage companies to increase their security. As long as the fallout from data breaches isn't enough to make companies sit up and take notice -- and change their behavior -- there won't be any real change.

Is it advisable to have no Credit Card

It’s true, without having credit cards life can be really difficult sometimes. Just try to carry out some tasks that people accomplish everyday with the help of credit cards and you will be surprised. In many cases cash doesn’t go very far and in certain situations it definitely falls short. Even though hard cash works well in a shopping mall, you might discover that it doesn’t work pretty well in some other situations.

Have you ever purchased anything online? Having no credit card, in Germany also known as Kreditkarte ohne Schufa, you aren’t able to purchase something. Even you may have all the cash in the world, but if you don’t own that little plastic card, you might as well be failed to participate on online shopping. Most of the online shops will not even accept cash-on-delivery because there is simply too much risk. Without having a credit card it is impossible to purchase something online.

People who have ever tried to book a room know that the only thing you need to get a reservation is a credit card. You can even try to go to a hotel early ahead of time to put a deposit in cash on the room and you still come out with no reservation. without having that little plastic card, you’ll only have a very little chance to reserve a hotel room, especially one that is far away from your home. Hotels use credit cards to check that payment will be made in any way. It also helps to make check-out a snap.

Another example is car rentals. I had a car accident when I moved into my own apartment first time. At this time I had no credit card and didn’t knew anyone in the city very well. I visited the car rental business and told the representative about my situation. Unfortunately, they didn’t rent me a car because I wasn’t able to present a card. No credit card stood for no car rental. They wouldn’t even accept a cash deposit because it wouldn’t be enough to cover the cost of the automobile.

This can be very worrying to many people who often prefer to do things the old fashioned way. If you don’t own any credit card, oftentimes you are very limited in what you want to do, what you can purchase and definitely what you are able to rent. All of the time it is a good idea to go with one of those little plastic cards, because you never know when you’ll need one.