41–50 of 80 posts
I'm probably ambivalent about a "public" banking system, but this comment seems to ignore that we quite literally do pay for using streets in the form of taxes (indirect) and tolls (direct).
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I love how we say this with a straight face and ignore the fact that the best hackers _anywhere_ are mostly currently or formerly employed/trained by the government: NSA, FBI, same with Israeli hackers trained by the IDF, Russian and Chinese hackers, pretty much everyone is a current or former state actor. So yeah I'd trust NSA lending its talent to securing our payments infrastructure over some of the people that we…
I somehow doubt the NSA would be the ones building it. It would probably be farmed out by the govt like the ACA website. I agree it would be terrible if the govt ran it, but would make sense is for the govt to actually plan it and put regulations around it. Provide a framework for private companies to work off of.
Actually they'd do it regardless of whether it was built by the public or private sector.
I'm in the DC area – so I know exactly how bloated and utterly incompetent most defense contractors are (I worked for a couple). So I have nearly zero faith in them doing a better job.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
No it's the opposite. A lot of people getting $500k were trained by Uncle Sam and left. My point was that you can't say the government would mess it up when the government (really, many governments as I outlined above) has done a phenomenal job of training many of our best private sector hackers.
> My point was that you can't say the government would mess it up when the government (really, many governments as I outlined above) has done a phenomenal job of training many of our best private sector hackers. That's very different from saying that the government's core competencies include developing and operating secure consumer-facing web services that are also convenient to use. There's a very big difference be…
I live in the DC area. If you think that your average government contractor would do a much better job, you'd be shocked.
Generally seems like a good idea, minus the part about it being state owned and operated. If it's operated by the state, it will probably be a disaster. Many governments can barely keep their Windows machines up to date, leading to ransomware attacks. It would be a shame if people's money were held hostage for ransom.
> If it's operated by the state, it will probably be a disaster. This is a common trope propagated by big-business interests, but it's not borne out by evidence. Giant corporations have proven remarkably apt at being hacked and leaking private data.
Big business is bad but big government is bad too.
Canada's interbank network Interac has allowed for "Interac eTransfers". It's run as a for-profit, but since it's a consortium backed by banks in Canada, most banks don't charge for eTransfers. Among my friends, it's the way to pay for e.g. your share of the take-out, or pooled office gifts.
Generally seems like a good idea, minus the part about it being state owned and operated. If it's operated by the state, it will probably be a disaster. Many governments can barely keep their Windows machines up to date, leading to ransomware attacks. It would be a shame if people's money were held hostage for ransom.
I love how we say this with a straight face and ignore the fact that the best hackers _anywhere_ are mostly currently or formerly employed/trained by the government: NSA, FBI, same with Israeli hackers trained by the IDF, Russian and Chinese hackers, pretty much everyone is a current or former state actor. So yeah I'd trust NSA lending its talent to securing our payments infrastructure over some of the people that we…
the defensive NSA guys would probably be blamed post-facto in some sort of delicious intra-organizational bull-bleep.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The largest private companies in the world (e.g., Yahoo, Facebook, Equifax, Target) can barely keep user data private, leading to massive data breaches. It would be a shame if people's private information were to be compromised with essentially zero recourse.
Ideally there would be regulation that drastically limits the blast radius of such incidents. In a perfect world, these companies would not be allowed to hold on to private information and would simply operate as zero-knowledge networks in the same way that Internet carriers do (in theory at least).
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> If it's operated by the state, it will probably be a disaster. This is a common trope propagated by big-business interests, but it's not borne out by evidence. Giant corporations have proven remarkably apt at being hacked and leaking private data.
Yes but have you seen the costs of infrastructure in the US? Big business is bad but big government is bad too.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I love how we say this with a straight face and ignore the fact that the best hackers _anywhere_ are mostly currently or formerly employed/trained by the government: NSA, FBI, same with Israeli hackers trained by the IDF, Russian and Chinese hackers, pretty much everyone is a current or former state actor. So yeah I'd trust NSA lending its talent to securing our payments infrastructure over some of the people that we…
i would wager a fair amount of US dollars that, given past behavior/track record, the offensive mission of NSA would almost certainly result in some sort of backdoor that would eventually be used by opposing actors to pull down the data directly. the defensive NSA guys would probably be blamed post-facto in some sort of delicious intra-organizational bull-bleep.