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Friction is Good: Let's add it to our digital experiences

theregister.com

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Re: Friction is Good: Let's add it to our digital experiences

#11

Post by bluGill »

This article is light in details, but I'm going to guess that the money stolen was crypto of some sort. It is unlikely you could pull this off with regular banks as banks log everything. Sure if I gave you my checking account number you could take all the money I have in there - but the banks all know who got that money and so when I go to the police there is a trail to trace and much higher odds I get it back. This is one reason why crime goes through Swiss banks (traditionally) or Cayman islands (more likely) - the banks there are much less likely to cooperate with any police I go to and so it is much harder to reverse charges.

I still won't post my checking account number publicly though. Bank logs are not fool proof, but they are a lot better than crypto.

Re: Friction is Good: Let's add it to our digital experiences

#13

Post by skybrian »

jerf wrote: post #6

I've pondered on this before, but it's another place where the counterintuitive spanning of so many orders of magnitude effectively trashes any effort to do this. Any simple solution fails, and not just by a little, but utterly. "Hey, maybe we should slow down our bandwidth so an attacker can't exfiltrate our entire petabyte database." Yup, sure, that's great, but the attacker only cares about the most valuable few m…

Well, yes, the headline is way too broad and think about this in terms of undifferentiated data is way too abstract.

But the example in the article was a financial transaction and the relevant measurement is transaction size in dollars, not bytes. Think about it like a bank with limits on ATM withdrawals, or a store with a safe that doesn’t open at night. There’s no reason large transactions for consumers need to be fast - how often do you buy a house?

Re: Friction is Good: Let's add it to our digital experiences

#14

Post by smallmancontrov »

klabb3 wrote: post #4

It’s not terribly difficult in case of financial transactions. Just separate into queueing and executing, with an auto-timer, notifications (email, push etc) and an option to cancel directly from the notification channel (without requiring 2FA etc to prevent hijacking issues). This could be applied to other things, like updating an auth factor (change email for instance). Just notify the old email and queue the opera…

> in case of financial transactions

The friction is already there.

Every single goddamn time I want to transfer more than a few thousand dollars between any of my accounts, it turns into a complete shitshow of bouncing transactions, hunting down reasons, navigating bureaucracy that doesn't want to be navigated, sometimes to the point of looping in authorities (!), and generally burning many hours of my life to get the financial institutions to do their most basic job.

It's not great. If the purpose is security, we can do better, but I'm not convinced. If the purpose is because financial institutions know that they can prevent customer outflow by shitting up the outgoing transfer mechanism, we should make them do better. If this drop in friction makes security worse, then we should go back and make security better again using a type of friction that isn't such a fucking migrane to deal with.

Re: Friction is Good: Let's add it to our digital experiences

#15

Post by marcosdumay »

pram wrote: post #12

TurboTax has this kind of “performative slowness” to convince you it’s doing more than it actually is. It has pointless loading bars and spinning wheel pages as you navigate through every section. I definitely wouldn’t be an advocate of replicating it.

The article is asking for functional slowness, not performative.

And it's a quite popular opinion, because almost every channel has some form of it, and he had to go way out of his way into cryptocoins to enable the problem to happen at all.

Re: Friction is Good: Let's add it to our digital experiences

#16

Post by tempodox »

slowmovintarget wrote: post #10

Lots of words and salesmanship to say "maybe put humans back in the workflow for things that require security and safety."

Too late for that. Using crappy “AI” would be cheaper, plus you can pretend that humans aren't responsible for failures any more.

Re: Friction is Good: Let's add it to our digital experiences

#17

Post by al_borland »

pram wrote: post #12

TurboTax has this kind of “performative slowness” to convince you it’s doing more than it actually is. It has pointless loading bars and spinning wheel pages as you navigate through every section. I definitely wouldn’t be an advocate of replicating it.

I wonder if some of that was added to try and nudge people to pay attention. With no cost to jumping around and going back, people will likely be more careless. If a user knows going back and redoing something is slow and annoying, they may pay more attention and double check their work before clicking Next.

Re: Friction is Good: Let's add it to our digital experiences

#18

Post by rglullis »

bluGill wrote: post #11

This article is light in details, but I'm going to guess that the money stolen was crypto of some sort. It is unlikely you could pull this off with regular banks as banks log everything. Sure if I gave you my checking account number you could take all the money I have in there - but the banks all know who got that money and so when I go to the police there is a trail to trace and much higher odds I get it back. This…

It says right in the first paragraph it was crypto.

Still, if you think the problem doesn't apply to "real money": there was this story in Brazil some years ago of thieves going around to Carnival parties with NFC-enabled payment machines. They got away with hundreds of thousands of BRL just by walking in the middle of the crowd with the machine set to collect a small payment.

IOW, people were getting robbed because we've become too lazy to type a PIN code.

Re: Friction is Good: Let's add it to our digital experiences

#19

Post by ChrisMarshallNY »

> Thinking fast has left us vulnerable.

It also affords really big mistakes. There's a famous photo, from the original version of The Design of Everyday Things, by Don Norman, that shows reactor control rod controls, topped by beer tap handles, to ensure that the operators can differentiate, because the original design had the same knob, which could make it easy to mix them up.

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