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Comment by tene80i | Hacker News Reader

Why is it strange? Millions of people use banking apps daily to make transactions essential to their lives and businesses.

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It's also a favourite stat of the UK space industry that a large percentage of UK GDP is vaguely linked to space in some way, and "some of your financial transactions touch a satellite uplink or require location data" is one of the more tangible non-obvious ones.

Those apps can all be replaced by a website, and most banks already have those websites, which means if all the banking apps on earth stopped working right now the solution wouldn't involve anything more complicated than stabbing your finger at different icon on your phone and typing the name of your bank into a search engine.

That’s beyond about 90% of the population.

not being funny - if the internet goes out how does a website make this better?

> not being funny - if the internet goes out how does a website make this better?

The internet for most people doesn't depend on banking apps, or satellites. Wifi would still work great. If the internet actually did go out everywhere, how would an app help you?

The UK is an island nation that's reliant on undersea cables. If those cables are cut (which is something that Russia seems to threaten) your only fallback is satellite connectivity - so protecting that connectivity is pretty key to ensuring e.g people can access their money.

I would guess that was how Wes Streeting was briefed (and then completely bungled in public comms).

ideally British banks would have their infrastructure located in Britain and therefore would not rely on undersea cables

Monzo (a major UK bank) use AWS and GCP. Hopefully their DCs don't fail in some way when losing access to the outside world but I would hazard a guess something goes wrong.

https://monzo.com/blog/tolerating-full-cloud-outages-with-mo...

Thats the point, the reasons the apps dont work would be the same reason the websites dont work. They are not work around, I think apps is just mentioned because 90% of people use them over the website

Banking apps don't depend on satellites, either.

There are very few things that would cause banking apps to stop working while their websites continue to function.

Presumably it'd be the loss of mobile service and/or GPS that would cause every banking app in the UK to fail, but I'm a bit skeptical that either one of those is a strict requirement.

I think this comment is the tech equivalent of "if they can't eat bread, let them eat cake"

That would imply that somehow a bank's website was a less accessible option than the app is, when the app is dependent on a mobile device as opposed to the website which is avilable on virtually any device with a browser including the same mobile device the app is installed on.

It's not and it's also not uniquely a British thing either. Most of my friends and myself use our phones as wallets, in the US. The only time I use my physical cards is to pull cash from the ATM, ha.

In my household, we refer to coins as “parking tokens”.

I should start calling my jar of quarters the "laundry tokens" haha.

Trolley tokens for me. I just keep a couple of quid in my car for supermarkets that need a coin for the trolley

Why does a banking app require GPS?

GPS relies on very very accurate timing. I would wager that the timing side of GPS is used more than the positioning side - but I have no way of confirming that.

Accurate timing is needed for banks accepting/sending payments (not just £5 for the window cleaner - more billions flowing every day).

That makes the issue worse as the actual app/device likely just relies on querying some NTP pool for accurate time. Then that would mean the actual stratum 1 servers are not working right.

I wouldn't be surprised if financial institutions use GPS for time keeping.

It's more accurate than getting it from a NTP pool.

It doesn't. They're making shit up.

To track you

Data collection and targeted advertising

- The UK is an island nation

- In event of all undersea cables being cut (which is a serious threat from Russia), satellite internet is your only option to have traffic leave the UK

- Unfortunately most major banks in the UK have very fragile infra that relies on foreign cloud hosts e.g AWS or Azure, which could well fall over in unexpected ways if the UK was cut off from the world

To be clear I disagree with Wes Streeting on a lot of this but the UK is in a uniquely precarious spot when it comes to how much is reliant on internet access.

Those cloud hosts like AWS have infrastructure in the UK and a UK bank's data should already be there for performance reasons (see https://docs.aws.amazon.com/global-infrastructure/latest/reg...).

I can't promise that amazon has taken into account the possibility of not being able to phone home to the US, but I would hope an undersea cable cut is something they'd have already given serious consideration to. Cuts do happen every so often. Scandinavia in particular has seen several disruptions because of cable cuts.

Either way, it's a bit of leap to go from "We need to jam other countries satellites to protect your banking app" to "but what if the UK lost every satellite, and every undersea cable was cut, and all the local data centers and internet infrastructure in the UK stopped working!"

Pretty sure there's no way current satellites can even get close to the bandwidth of satellite links.

Also isn't GPS always wireless ?

Security - checking your not accessing it in UK one minute and australia the next minute

Some bank apps can block this access or request more validation

> Why does a banking app require GPS?

The networks (including physical IP networking) that underpin banking require a very accurate source of time to function. This is frequently farmed out to GPS, rather than use local atomic clocks. This makes GPS (or rather GNSS) a single point of failure.

I'm surprised so few people on HN appear to be aware of this.

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