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Ask HN: Why did smartphones become a single point of failure?

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Re: Ask HN: Why did smartphones become a single point of failure?

#171

Post by throwaway14356 »

guywithahat wrote: post #153
Dr_ReD wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There's also something to be said for how modern financial capitalism has > squeezed redundancy out of everything. Supply chains are just-in-time, Hence the automotive/chips and other recent shortages...

Are you implying we should have wasted billions manufacturing extra chips just in case there was a shortage and consumers didn't want to wait a year before buying a new car/truck?

supply could just end permanently. some kind of plan would have bern reasonable in the old days but today?

in de 90's i had a business fail because the phone company never connected my land line (and kept lying about it) it would have failed a lot faster if there wasn't a pay phone in front of the building.

Shops could still fail back on cash a few years ago but now many have a card or a phone to pay and nothing else.

3-4 decades ago regular customers often got credit at their local store, bar or lunchroom.

We seem to increasingly do stuff without a plan B

Re: Ask HN: Why did smartphones become a single point of failure?

#172

Post by hundchenkatze »

megraf wrote: post #108
NohatCoder wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, blame the user, that is the mature response whenever someone is pointing out that modern ID security is a topple tower. Whatever technical solutions can be made don't really matter unless normal people can and do use them correctly. In any case, simply setting up another non-phone computer to do the job of the smartphone doesn't change the fundamental issue, it can still break, or get stolen, or some account ca…

>"Sure, blame the user, that is the mature response..." We're all here to make our own decisions. We're all here to seek enlightenment. I've made it very clear that the decisions that I have made have placed me where I don't have the same issues as OP. I'm enlightening OP, and everyone who reads these comments, I'm not "blaming" anyone.

"in my mind you have created a single point of failure for _yourself_."

You are blaming them in your first sentence. You're both blaming and informing, your message would come off much more friendly without the first sentence.

Re: Ask HN: Why did smartphones become a single point of failure?

#173

Post by activitat »

Dr_ReD wrote: post #116
coffee33go wrote: post #67

Then change the bank you deal with. At least in EU, this 2FA was due to PSD. Please also note that any changes will impact some people. How often do you lose your smartphone? If every month then it is sad. You need to find a bank that still uses cheques etc. No point in whinging. If something works for 90 % people then get used to it. For example, I did not like joining facebook for my children's school nor whatsapp…

Yeah, and it's this kind of sheepish behaviour, all the "for me it works", and the blame-the-user attitude, that lets things like this go down hill all the time.

Any system will affect some one. Do you my grandpa liked remembering passwords or compute or even pin? One could even lose passport or money. Dont you have backup? Like keeping some cash in backpack and some inside underpants. Get another phone.

I don't even like using word documents but every govt document like tax in my country is Microsoft based.

If developers reading hn do not care why would others care.

BTW, if so many people lose smartphones then banks would be flooded by support calls and they would own up other non-smartphone 2Fa.

Re: Ask HN: Why did smartphones become a single point of failure?

#174

Post by falcolas »

pif wrote: post #132
canucklady wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not that people don't know it's a SPOF. The issue is that if you fail in a way that is common, nobody blames you. Cell phone 2FA is so ubiquitous that when it doesn't work clients wonder if they're the one fucking up. We had a massive internet outage in Canada recently and nobody blamed individual shops for not being able to take credit cards, they blamed the phone company. If you roll your own thing, even if it…

> modern financial capitalism has squeezed redundancy out of everything If by "modern financial capitalism" you mean "customers who prefer cheaper to superior quality of product and/or service", then I agree with you.

How often are customers really given that choice, as opposed to companies making the decision on their behalf because customers are stupid (they just want a better horse after all).

We can't buy what doesn't exist after all.

Re: Ask HN: Why did smartphones become a single point of failure?

#175

Post by activitat »

pipeline_peak wrote: post #69
coffee33go wrote: post #67

Then change the bank you deal with. At least in EU, this 2FA was due to PSD. Please also note that any changes will impact some people. How often do you lose your smartphone? If every month then it is sad. You need to find a bank that still uses cheques etc. No point in whinging. If something works for 90 % people then get used to it. For example, I did not like joining facebook for my children's school nor whatsapp…

Part of the point he's trying to make is that eventually there probably won't be a bank that isn't like this.

Did not world survive the ATM, pin, card revolution? Yes. Did 100% population like them. No. Did people lose cards ? Yes.

Yet we are here.

Re: Ask HN: Why did smartphones become a single point of failure?

#176

Post by didip »

theonemind wrote: post #151

I didn't have a cell phone until work issued me one around 2018 or so. (I never really liked the idea.) Generally, I don't have many single points of failure tied to the phone not tied to work...certainly nothing related to my banking. You can still live in 2022 without one, although the assumption that you have one gets more annoyingly entrenched year-by-year. I don't quite know what these single points of failure a…

How is this possible? Are you from an older generation? Do you live so far away from the city?

Re: Ask HN: Why did smartphones become a single point of failure?

#177

Post by mindslight »

pessimizer wrote: post #157
mindslight wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The lack of political will you speak of is better seen as a reaction to the deeper problem that there is no political will for protections that would go against commercial desires. Social security numbers were created solely to facilitate social security but had no legal protections enforcing this, and thus are now being widely abused by private companies. The same with driver's license numbers. Without a US GDPR tha…

Or vulnerablities for fully accountable governments to exploit, either. Governments may be accountable to their supporters, but they're not necessarily accountable to me. They could decide tomorrow that it's illegal to be Jewish or to have been descended from Jews, and they have before.

That's a much stronger argument, that I'm indeed sympathetic to. But I don't think it will ever win in the courts of public opinion or practicality. In general, governments are always going to demand some way to identify and enumerate their citizens, and so making that a deliberate thing rather than an emergent thing allows it to be better constrained. If involuntary storage of personal information were limited to bona fide government purposes then, for instance, we could politically complain when the government wanted to catalog everyone's ethnicity/religion in their databases. As it stands currently, the government itself doesn't need to abuse the vulnerabilities like in your example, because at any time they can get that information from companies who have done so for them.

Re: Ask HN: Why did smartphones become a single point of failure?

#178

Post by boring_twenties »

theonemind wrote: post #151

I didn't have a cell phone until work issued me one around 2018 or so. (I never really liked the idea.) Generally, I don't have many single points of failure tied to the phone not tied to work...certainly nothing related to my banking. You can still live in 2022 without one, although the assumption that you have one gets more annoyingly entrenched year-by-year. I don't quite know what these single points of failure a…

Recently I had the displeasure of traveling through Newark Airport and at least at Terminal C, you cannot order anything from any bar or restaurant without a phone. You must scan the QR code and order that way. If you talk to a worker or even manager and tell them you don't have a phone, they will tell you they can't help you.

Re: Ask HN: Why did smartphones become a single point of failure?

#179

Post by pipeline_peak »

activitat wrote: post #175
pipeline_peak wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Part of the point he's trying to make is that eventually there probably won't be a bank that isn't like this.

Did not world survive the ATM, pin, card revolution? Yes. Did 100% population like them. No. Did people lose cards ? Yes. Yet we are here.

A phone is a lot more than an ATM or a plastic card. Some people don't want an expensive device that tracks you, potentially sucks you into distractions, and just flat out has a lot of undesired complexity. You shouldn't need one to do basic finances.

Also ATM's and credit cards didn't replace traditional methods, they're modern alternatives.

Re: Ask HN: Why did smartphones become a single point of failure?

#180

Post by falcolas »

_jal wrote: post #168
guywithahat wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you implying we should have wasted billions manufacturing extra chips just in case there was a shortage and consumers didn't want to wait a year before buying a new car/truck?

I don't see anyone demanding a planned economy. I see people recognizing reality - JIT is efficient but fragile in the face of disruption. Seems to me the sensible thing to do would be to recognize that for what it is and try to strike the right balance in an uncertain world. Even if your concerns are strictly commercial, a couple points margin in good times is unlikely to balance a year of massively screwed up suppl…

Even the progenitors of JIT did not advocate for zero warehousing - they advocated for not warehousing components which could be manufactured on demand.

Chips do not fall into this category.

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