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Comment by ClumsyPilot | Hacker News Reader

> Of course it goes without saying that your phone must be functional in order to scan the thing. So that's a whole tech stack that could go awry and strand you if you don't take precautions

It could go awry if Google fucked up, Samsung/phone manufacturer fucks up, battery or charger fucks up, software developer fucks up, internet, etc, etc.

we are replacing reliable sustems with fragile ones everywhere

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A tangential story from Melbourne - you’re required to replace your Myki every ~7 years because of its shitty implementation, and when you do, it disables auto topup. However, when you get a new card, you also can’t immediately enable auto topup - you have to wait some time until the card is transferred. So a friend of mine had this happen and wasn’t able to touch onto the tram the following morning because they had no balance. Trams don’t have Myki machines, and there was no machine at their stop. Topping up online can take up to 24h. Paper tickets were removed to push Myki. So there was no way for them to pay the fare, but they had to get to work. Of course, ticket inspectors rocked up and fined them. It is genuinely incredible that commuters are expected to either pay a fine or be late to work because of shortcomings in the Myki system.

You cannot take a cab or something else? This seems similar to the digital piracy issue. It is inconvenient, so I decided to do something illegal.

Otoh, I have seen Seattle bus drivers wave off the fare in some cases.

I've never been to Melbourne, but when tube is down in London, the whole city grinds to a halt, you can't get home for hours and people die because ambulance can't get through

In sweden Coop supermarkets were closed for a weekend because they rely on some cloud thingy from USA that had gotten a ransomware.

It was their billing system, you couldn't pay cash, they had no way to record it.

You are halfway there.

https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/coop-supermar...

This issue was that Visma (the MSP COOP uses for the Teller systems) had their Kaseya VSA server open to the internet and thus got affected by this.

An RMM itself is fine, needed to manage systems.

Do you know how many Swedish companies is on Office 365 + some RMM? A lot. lmao

We also have our own shit break all the time like Swish made by our banks.

Oh visma! My job uses that for our salaries. I feel better now! :'(

I don't have swish. I have trust issues. Most people in sweden are very prone to give trust it seems.

My iPhone supports transit passes even when the battery is dead. I don’t think this is an intractable problem and indeed the designers of NFC designed for this problem: the NFC payment system provides the juice required for the SE chip to do it’s thing.

QR code as transit passes aren’t great but eventually the worse designs will fade out. NFC is a way superior piece of tech and way faster too - just tap your phone and go. I was pleasantly surprised that transfers worked seamlessly this way too.

Wow. Where are the API docs for this??

It is a feature in iOS called Express Cards: https://support.apple.com/guide/security/express-cards-with-...

I live in Berlin and use the official BVG app for using the public transport here. it bugs out temporarily fairly regularly and I have to make the decision whether to buy a paper ticket to cover me (incurring extra expense) while the app isn't working or to risk it and hope the ticket inspector doesn't stop me/shows me leniency when I demonstrate the non-functioning app. extremely annoying

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