Just today I found a malicious version of Ledger on the macOS app store. It's been there for five weeks, and there are already some anecdotes out there of people losing their coins.
I guess that's somehow the developer's fault for not "staking their claim" to their name, as Apple seems to only monitor for malicious duplicate submissions if the original is in the App Store to begin with...
I guess a ~2% fee would cover those costs.
30% of 0 is also 0. They are already cross-subsidizing it.
> I don't think Apple should be coerced to host content for free and cross-subsidize it from other paid content.
Nobody said they should be.
If they don't want that burden, which is very understandable, then maybe they shouldn't be the sole God gatekeeper of content? That's a choice, after all, and one they willingly made.
Tldr - you open the app on your phone and it gives you a 6 digit BLIK code, you give that code to the seller, then a notification comes up on the app saying "seller X is trying to debit your account by amount Y, agree?". It's brilliant because then the seller gets nothing identifiable about you. Even if someone overhears the code, it's only valid 60 second so it's useless. Unlike with regular cards there is no risk of losing one or using a fake terminal that scans your card instead. And any transaction has to be explicitly rather than implicitly approved. Love it.
The best credit and debit cards can do is PIN verification or biometrics (for Apple/Google Pay), but even there you still trust the terminal to not show you a different amount than you'll be charged (assuming the screen is even pointing towards you; I've often been asked to tap without seeing what I'm even consenting to).
Online, there's 3DS, but that's not required everywhere and for every transaction.
There once was a vision to extend both positive cardholder approval and cardholder authentication for each card transaction, but it turns out the friction of that is higher on average than just letting everything but the most egregiously suspicious fraud go through by default and handle the rest via the disputes process.
Out of curiosity:
> you open the app on your phone and it gives you a 6 digit BLIK code, you give that code to the seller
Is this the flow for online payments as well, or only for in-person payments?
works for both
- The TTL of the code is variable; on some days I've noticed it to be as low as 60 seconds, on others around 3+ minutes. Not sure if it depends on the type of transaction or time of day.
- After entering the code in charging widget/terminal, or giving it to a merchant, you still get a screen on which you need to explicitly confirm the transaction; it displays the amount and name of charging entity, so this would presumably reduce the impact of possible collision.
- Sometimes the codes generate instantly, sometimes it takes a few seconds; I always assumed it's network connection lag and/or usual webshit performance issues, but it would also be consistent with an anti-collision measure - if you run out of 6-digit codes, wait a second or two, some will free up.
- Not once I've heard any report or rumor about a collision.
On-line, too. Or should I say, first, because AFAIK on-line came first. I've been using it for years as my default on-line payment method where available, before noticing it becoming an option on POS terminals.
Any chance folks in the US can use these, in the US?
This is a genuine question, although I don't have my hopes up. It would be nice to have some actual competition / choices
Say what you will about EU inefficiency and regulations, but in my view, at least their financial ones have been largely on point.
Sure, great if you don't trust your government or whoever issues your local currency, but if you can, there are better alternatives. Trust is an asset, not just a liability.
People trusted institutions for thousands of years prior to the scientific revolution. Europe had plenty of trust in religious institutions between the collapse of the Roman empire and the scientific revolution, and you know what it got them? Superstition, witch hunts, barbarism in the name of proselytizing, failed pandemic responses, and a near complete stall in technological and scientific breakthroughs for a millennium.
What the scientific revolution brought us was the decision to not trust, but to reason, to measure, to hypothesize, to verify. Facts matter. Humans are stupid and it is human nature to place trust exactly where trust is least warranted.
Fossil fuels...most of the growth from 1800-1970 was due to fossil fuels. Not sure why this is such a mystery to so many. Makes sense when you think about it from a physics POV. You use energy to move things, to make things, to travel to buy things, etc. Heck, the middle class wasn't a concept until the industrial revolution which was caused by...say it with me...fossil fuels.
But yes, energy was absolutely one of those prerequisites. Fun fact (you're probably already aware, but for other readers): there is a strong positive correlation between national energy consumption and national economic output.
Is that bitcoin you're paying for your USD with on-chain, or is it just sparkling PayPal Account Balance?
For more significant things, you can still use cash. I'd go down to my landlord's bank every three months to pay the rent.
I don't see that landownership is really relevant. Mostly it's done on the basis of notional 70-year leases from the government. Since the government dates to 1949, the first round of those recently expired. There was a lot of curiosity beforehand as to what would happen, but it doesn't seem to have made enough of a splash that anyone commented about it (where I could see) afterwards. So I don't know how it turned out.
I understand that rural peasants may sometimes own their land outright. In this case, I was renting one apartment in a building with 5-6 floors and I think 4 apartments per floor.
Hope the EU or another progressive regulatory body allows users to fully control what they can/can't download and from where on to the phones they purcahsed.
The EU's DMA has been a step in the right direction, even if it's yet been fairly toothless with Apple and Google flouting it.
The concern was serious enough that Valve took a defensive posture and started investing into Linux support. Which, at first, largely failed - but eventually resulted in Steam Deck.
Windows S Mode shows that Microsoft still thinks this is a good idea, too.
No Steam on Xbox Series X/S, last I heard.
> Apple
Steam still works on macOS, last I checked.
However that is not the point (or points) I was refuting.
Source: I use Windows and Windows VMs sometimes and install whatever I want without hassle.
Microsoft is not as bad as Google and Apple, yet, but they absolutely have the power to be as bad and are flirting with how to accomplish greater and greater control of their platform without triggering too much backlash.
Because I did a fresh Windows 11 install last month on new hardware and this does not happen on it.
And when this kind of power it's consolidated with a handful of companies, you leave people with nowhere to go for any kind of real success. So you're forced to compromise your vision in order to get any shelf space.
Money money money money money money money money money.
Money.
This game is available on Steam, Epic Games, itch.io, MacOS, Xbox, Switch, Playstation, iOS, and probably some more. Play Store is just one platform, a big one, sure, but it's not like there is a coordinated attack on banning this game from the internet.