On my way to a friend’s birthday I noticed the new opal machine at my local train station was finally uncovered.
I took a quick look so I know what it’s good for, amongst useful things such as finally being able to add money with cash/coins, and contactless payment support, it also had an option for a”single use opal”.
This one got my attention pretty quickly, I was curious if the machine would print a regular paper ticket, if it would dispense a plastic opal card, or a hybrid.
I percussed a child ticket for $2.70 to see what it was like, and to my delight it’s a cheap paper NFC tag!
Branded opal card and everything, but the good thing is, it’s going to be discarded by people.
How is this good might you ask?
I love finding NFC tags discarded in public, there’s always ways to reuse them!
I did a scan of the tag and it output the following data:
From this we can see it’s a Mifare Ultralite C tag.
I am curious to find out if there is any success in other countries in terms of breaking the ultralite tags, I do know they’re used in a few places with electronic ticketing systems.
I’ll do some more research on these and report back!