Smartcard: Roland Moreno's Ubiquitous Invention

Came here for this. Also, wtf? The video is from the INA, the French Institut National de l'Audiovisuel. It's a government-funded institution dedicated to film preservation. Their mission is to make archival footage available to the public. But no, they had to geolock it.

The article also just throws the title out there as a curiosity without mention of the content. Leaving me wondering if perhaps the content is less relevant than the "racy" title.

Calling the Eduard Rhein prize the "German equivalent of the Nobel Prize" is also a bit of a stretch. Though I guess technically it's a prize awarded by a foundation named after a person.

Presumably the article was written by an AI?

Fails Turing Test.

Theremin's hack worked at a large enough distance, while smart cards work within a centimeter or so.

It's more like the seminal experiments of magnetic induction which Faraday demonstrated back in 1830s on closely positioned coils.

Interesting. The page mentions Michel Ugon (who died in December 2021) as the "true inventor of the smart card". Where Moreno patented the memory card, Ugon invented the microprocessor card and then the SPOM, Self-Programmable One chip Memory). Chips on modern smart cards are essentially the same as the one Ugon created.

There was a lot of animosity between him and Moreno, and there were lengthy trials to invalidate Moreno's claim to the paternity of the smart card idea (allegedly stolen from Bull, Ugon's employer). Regardless of this controversy, it's sad that Michel Ugon didn't get the same recognition as Moreno, since he was the one who miniaturised the microprocessor and memory into one chip. Basically putting a computer in people's pockets decades before the iPhone. Moreno certainly worked hard to make it look as the invention of a lone (self-made) inventor, but the smart card was anything but that.

[0] https://fr.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michel_Ugon