Whatever they come up with, I hope it doesn't tie you to a Google or Apple smartphone. Can't we have cards for this? In Spain, for example, to use Bizum, you need either an Android/iOS smartphone (and for the Android case, as you use it from your bank's app, it would typically require some Google security assurances - so no Huawei phones allowed, for example) or logging into your bank's website and use Bizum from the…
If the interfaces are simple, straight to the point, able to do a good enough job, all that in a modular fashion. It should be rather ok.
But 99.99% of the time won't be the implementation of such interfaces, but monitoring and security.
Whatever they come up with, I hope it doesn't tie you to a Google or Apple smartphone. Can't we have cards for this? In Spain, for example, to use Bizum, you need either an Android/iOS smartphone (and for the Android case, as you use it from your bank's app, it would typically require some Google security assurances - so no Huawei phones allowed, for example) or logging into your bank's website and use Bizum from the…
Real independence requires thinking about the full stack
Whatever they come up with, I hope it doesn't tie you to a Google or Apple smartphone. Can't we have cards for this? In Spain, for example, to use Bizum, you need either an Android/iOS smartphone (and for the Android case, as you use it from your bank's app, it would typically require some Google security assurances - so no Huawei phones allowed, for example) or logging into your bank's website and use Bizum from the…
This is really a human right issue. No one should be required to carry an attacker-controlled tracking device, especially not for interacting with the government. It's funny that the EU uses all this mobile attestation BS more than the US does. So much for sovereignty and consumer protection. No monopoly Google can build is as good as the government forcing you to accept their terms.
The real human-rights issue, in my view, is optionality. If interacting with government or the financial system requires a specific proprietary device tied to a specific ecosystem, that's a problem
Bitcoin. Swish (Sweden) sees quite a lot of downtime. Why not settle for something that doesn't have these inherent issues that closed, proprietary systems have?
Because then you have the inherent issues that come from open, federated systems. ;-)
> It always boggles my mind that most Europeans are absolutely convinced that nothing like that could ever happen again. It’s not that it cannot happen again. It’s that the EU is explicitly built against that and if it happens it will come from the national governments (see Hungary), not the EU.
> It’s that the EU is explicitly built against that and if it happens it will come from the national governments (see Hungary) So to prevent individual EU nations ever becoming authoritarian, like Hungary, we have to cede sovereignty and authority to the EU & EC unelected bureaucrats like Ursula VDL who take over as the main executive leaders, ensuring we'll no longer have the danger of national-level authoritarianis…
US Supreme Court Judges are not elected. Although I hesitate to use this as an example currently, given how well the US separation of powers is (not) working, the point stands that all democratic systems need some kind of "damping" influence to survive. If successive national governments were hostile to EU bureaucrats there are options open to them to restore sovereignty — e.g. exit the EU, or force change in appointments by coordinating with other EU governments. The fact that senior positions in the EU are unelected does not in itself make the system un or anti democratic.
I always find it entertaining to hear people try to argue that what these companies do is soooooo difficult and that's why they're valuable. It's just multiple computers keeping a balance. It's not complicated. No, these companies keep themselves in power not because they've solved such a difficult problem that nobody else can, but because they have a moat which they protect. Time to do away with these foreign entiti…
If Europe wants its own rails, that's a policy and economic decision not a technical impossibility
> It always boggles my mind that most Europeans are absolutely convinced that nothing like that could ever happen again. It’s not that it cannot happen again. It’s that the EU is explicitly built against that and if it happens it will come from the national governments (see Hungary), not the EU.
How is the EU built against that and how does it matter?
The EU is built on rules that uphold liberal democratic principles, agreed to by national governments in a flush of post-WW2 clarity, and which tie successors to the same principles. There are exit mechanisms, but they impose large costs (i.e. Brexit).
I'm surprised that Canada doesn't seem to be talking about doing this. We've already got a strong payment processing brand with Interac, it's used daily for millions of debit transactions, and supports all the features you'd expect (in Canada) from a payment card (tap, chip&pin). There's also the MasterCard Debit and Visa Debit branding which seem to bridge debit transactions to the MasterCard and Visa networks. And…
The real leverage isn't elimination it's optionality
> chat control The Danish proposal for indiscriminate chat control did not receive enough support and was retracted last autumn. Similar proposals have been put forward regularly over the past 30 years and have so far come to nothing just as regularly.
The problem is they will keep trying just like before, and they only need to get lucky once to succeed, while we need to be lucky very single time.
This is a truism, but not that helpful. I have to be lucky every time I leave the house not to be murdered, but it doesn't substantially change my behaviour. Rather than freaking out or catastrophising we just need to focus on asserting and celebrating and educating citizens in our shared values (murdering is bad, privacy is important).