In the UK today it is D-Day for Chip & Pin.

Basically, all UK credit and charge cards should now be fitted with a chip and when you pay for goods with your chip and pin card, you have to enter a pin number, rather than provide a signature.

All of the bugs in the process have yet to be ironed out - many of us, for example, still don't have chip and pin cards, even for our most regularly used cards. We can still sign, but the secondary problem here is that some stores are refusing to accept non chip & pin cards for transactions. There is no reason for this - except badly trained staff and a campaign by APACS that gives the impression that everything is OK.