Global IT outage shows dangers of cashless society, campaigners say

It's up to the customersthat were affected, they could sue for damages, but doubt many will do

> start up a business when they're putting their own house and everything at risk

Every hardware startup founder I've been involved with has used their house and/or their retirement savings to back their operating loan.

I think the advantages of incorporation have been well established by now, and believe that partly removing limited liability would not significantly effect incorporation rates.

Certain people advocate a compromise where a company may be allowed to be limitedly liable until a certain size then it has to transform to unlimited liability.

> It's still objectively a monoculture, as Amex and MasterCard are pretty rare on global scale, while visa is basically everywhere

I can't think of any part of the world I know of where only Visa cards are accepted in 2024 and not MasterCard. AMEX requires a separate contract agreement for the merchant hence why it is not bundled by default, but all acquirers offer Visa/MasterCard as one package. Visa and Mastercard have been a duopoly for far too long to differentiate between the two at the consumer level, and it just doesn't make any financial sense for a financial institution to miss out on interchange and card fees by accepting only one card type and not the other of the two.

It’s pretty hard to track serial numbers , you can easily wash the money” yourself ?

It’s way more private than all of your transaction history rolled up by your card issuer.

Does some central authority have access to and the compute power to correlate all of the data available in those video feeds? No

the lack of privacy at a business isn't a problem baked into cash. cash helps solve that problem because I don't need to go to a place of business to use it. It can be exchanged anywhere in reasonable amounts, and I don't have to deposit it I can just keep it and use it.

my wife and I always keep some cash on hand in case of some sort of problem with the card, or tap device etc. never had my cash declined because a computer thought some other purchases that afternoon looked suspicious.

No, it will not. They are missing the financial and historical perspective here to appreciate it.

Some infrastructure is more fragile than others.

2020s UK electricity infrastructure is more reliable than 1980s UK electricity infrastructure, for example.

The inevitable march of entropy.

> A. Diversify, under the belief nothing is infallible; and even perfect engineering can experience catastrophic failure

Hence keeping cash alive has it’s advantages

I wouldn't say fragile. A bit of Roman stuff is still functional today. The pyramids are holding up too. Cathedrals also have a massive stability streak. The stuff that has been falling over is mostly brick, steel, and concrete. And that's due to lack of required maintenance. I could even use the opposite word to describe them: strong and solid.

I agree with your main point on entropy, but

"an 1870s-style solar flare would send us back to medieval times"

This is not true and it would have no effect on microelectronics.

> All infrastructure is fragile and always will be.

No, and it doesn't need to be. We can build redundancy on every level. We can plan for failure and prepare for contingencies. We alwas need a plan B (and C and D for critical services). Will it be efficient or cheap? Of course not - we'd be building two for the price of two, but being sure that, when one fails, we have a redundant one to catch the fall of civilization.

We can't just optimize away every gram of safety and hope everything goes to plan (as they did in this case). Hope is not a strategy.

"Fragile" isn't the same as "will eventually fail".

You…don’t? I’m not sure I understand what you mean.

You withdraw cash every single time you need it?! The point of cash is that you don't ping the systems on every transaction and you decide how frequently it's withdrawn.

You promise to cut the trees under their power cables on your land

Ten eggs per power, obviously.

To be fair, I’m not sure how many straw men will get you a pint at most public houses these days.

I’m only familiar with egg-to-pint exchange ratios, but then again most of my personal liquidity is tied up in a henhouse currently.

The problem is that gold and crypto are priced in relation to fiat and if fiat ceased to exist, you wouldn't be able to price either. When splitting gold or crypto among fellow citizens (yes, these assets will become shared between everyone), you wouldn't be able to do so without some form of IOU, which effectively would become another form of fiat. It's a catch-22 situation: while fiat exists, gold-bugs and crypto-bros feel smug, when there's no fiat, everyone is suddenly unhappy.

To maintain stable short-term prices, active regulation of currency supply is necessary. Without it, currency value fluctuates with supply and demand, making prices unstable.

In the long term, a small amount of inflation is needed to discourage hoarding. Without it, people might treat currency as an investment, leading to unstable prices like we see with gold and Bitcoin.

Currency should be stable, like standard measures (Kg, Foot) that don't change in the short term. It also functions like a store cart for shopping. If carts become scarce, shopping is difficult. Therefore, there must be an incentive to return the cart for others to use.

Another purpose of currency, albeit controversial, is to manage debt accumulation. Historically, societies faced growing debt and used "debt jubilee" events to reset, which disrupted commerce. Modern societies address this through currency inflation.

If gold or crypto were effective currencies, prices would be advertised in Bitcoin or gold. The fact that they are not suggests they don't serve well in this role.

The spoiling is a feature, it encourages trade and spending. Truly an economic boost you wouldn’t believe.

A round decade after Heartbleed... it just periodically reminds that it needs some attention and love. People just use it paying nothing.

No security vulnerability, even an OpenSSH bug, would result in the internet being taken down overnight. There are organizations and people who apply "security in layers" mindset so that one slip up doesn't result in a complete takeover of systems.

macOS and Linux do not have nearly as much a need for ridiculous endpoint security tools like this to begin with.

The world running on Windows is a monumental waste of resources and a huge security threat. This will happen over and over again.

The fact that even dummy little terminals that are strictly responsible for showing flight arrivals and departures was impacted by this is hysterical. Why was that not an android or chromeos device with an immutable filesystem, A/B blue green update strategies etc.

So the question is why we need CrowdStrike software in the first place? Why our systems are not secure enough that companies feel the need to install additional security software? Obviously demand for secure operating system is there. CrowdStrike company valued at $80B, so lots of money for Microsoft and other operating software vendors to grab.

I do understand that main driver behind CrowdStrike installations is compliance checkbox. It still keeps the question, unless we assume pure corruption. But I've heard opinion from security experts, that this software really improves Windows security.

serious question, does anyone really think Linux antivirals are good or necessary, particularly if they are active measure kernel things and not just passive scanners?

I have only seen people use them when windows it departments suddenly have to pretend to be cloud savvy, or when enterprisey infosec teams are looking for more vendors to bloat up their budgets. If it’s written in contracts, it’s not the customers demanding av on ephemeral cloud servers, it’s the home team bloating costs so they can cut them later for a raise and applause.

Aaaand whenever it goes that way, antivirals affect performance and stability with random problems, always hurting more than they help

It’s actually a problem with the implementor allowing software to update itself blindly like this. I’d never enable “auto-update” in critical infrastructure. Completely laughable minor league move.

Lightning Network?