*global IT outage shows dangers of monopolies.
Why do you hate the “free market”
This is the best summary I could come up with:
Campaigners say the chaos caused by the global IT outage last week underlines the risk of moving towards a cashless society.
Supermarkets, banks, pubs, cafes, train stations and airports were all hit by the failure of Microsoft systems on Friday, leaving many unable to accept electronic payments.
The Payment Choice Alliance (PCA), which campaigns against the move towards a cashless society, lists 23 firms and groups, at least some of whose outlets take only credit or debit cards.
Cash payments increased for the first time in a decade last year, according to UK Finance, which represents banks.
The GMB Union said the outage reinforced what it had been saying for years: that “cash is a vital part of how our communities operate”.
In March, McDonald’s, Tesco, Sainsbury’s and Gregg’s suffered problems with their payment systems.
The original article contains 416 words, the summary contains 135 words. Saved 68%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
No, that is not correct. Global outage shows the dangers of centralized systems would be a better headline. Monero Worked all day throughout the entire outage with no problems.
… And if the systems you actually interact with go down, you can get fucked as well.
If you want to buy food with Monero and the payment processor for the local shop doesn’t work, even if it’s a local machine sitting in the back office, you still can’t buy anything.
A local machine sitting in the back office, acting as a payment processor, is much easier to access and fix than the Visa Network.
Not for you. And certainly not for the staff working in the shop.
Currently, you’re bartering with copious amounts of copium.
Even central currencies can work if you can make offline and peer to peer payments.
Not easy to pull off cryptographically, though.
True, but do you really expect them to let you use a central bank digital currency peer-to-peer and not have some way of revoking your access to it? If so, you’re absolutely nuts, LOL.
Does Taler do this?
Define “worked” in this context. You mean their own infrastructure didn’t crash? You certainly didn’t pop down to the store and buying anything useful with Monero 😂
Not that day I didn’t, but I have bought Domino’s several times this month, and I bought my groceries at the beginning of the month.
So do you use some kind of payment app that does a conversion or do you have to manually convert from Monero to fiat currency?
Most retailers don’t accept crypto at the point of purchase so I’m curious as to how this would be convenient enough to use regularly.
There are businesses that specifically sell gift cards to retailers for Monero and when possible I search out and purchase from retailers who accept Monero. Https://monerica.com and https://xmrbazaar.com help with that.
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My point was more that using Monero as an example is probably not the best way to cryptobrah an illustrative point.
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Because you can’t just go and buy real world goods at will as with cash. If there’s ever a Carrington Event, your Monero is worthless in an emergency.
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Lol. How is your crypto gonna work without global peers and internet, friend?
That is not correct, either. The outage even took out decentralized platforms.
Which decentralized platforms did it take out?
Monero isn’t bad but I don’t think it is great for easily buying things. At the end of the day trying to use two different currencies is hard. Also Monero gets a bad name because it is used primarily for illegal transactions. It is simply two complex and has no accountability
The fact that it’s used for crime means that it actually does what it’s supposed to do and keeping people private. Shoes are also used by bank robbers and we don’t ban shoes. Monero is a tool the same as a hammer or a shoe or a car or a gun.
Can’t remember which one but credit cards were offline for a time with something and places that still had the carbon paper roller things stashed away took them out and used them. They should keep those things around.
Do people still have embossed credit cards? All mine are flat now.
good point. I think embossing went away about when wireless became ubiquitous with it. So they would need to be doing that again.
That’s against the rules for PCI compliance
Under no circumstances should you copy a card
are they not allowed now. The thing im thinking about was definately post 2000 but maybe not 20teens
Shop I worked for in 2005… I think … ran cards when the connection was down and took card impressions, and I think the transactions were all auto submitted when the connection came back up.
did they do something special. most places I have been to when the network is down it just does not work.
Not sure how much good that’ll be… A lot of banks are giving out cards where the numbers are only printed, I haven’t had one with raised numbers in years.
You could just write down the numbers.
Serious privacy issues around copying cards. That means the store has to retain a physical copy of the full embossed card number.
There were boxes full of them in the backroom.
My friends and I used to call those machines ker-chunkers. 😂
I’ve heard it mentioned as a “fly swatter” in my mother’s tongue.
Knuckle-buster was the industry term, and they were already obsolete 20 years ago…
What good is cash gonna do if the networked cash register doesn’t open anymore?
They have paper and pens that they can track their transactions until the system is fixed.
How are you getting change?
Use exact change?
If we’re going cash only, I’m bringing those coins too.
They can do that anyway. It’s called credit.
Simply not allowed for a lot of businesses in my country, either by the government or corporate.
Somebody’s never worked retail. Yeah, there’s no way they’ll do that. Maybe at a small independently-owned store? Otherwise, there’s no way they’re even allowed to do that!
I’m biased. I hate digital money for stalkerware.
Taler is one of the coolest projects I’ve seen
I’m not in favor of a cashless society but looking at how Apple and Google are pushing their wallets (and how practical it is) you guys need to come to piece with the fact that cash might die with the millennial generation. Most Gen X don’t have / want a physical wallet and money needs to be digital.
With that said, I believe this Crowdstrike fiasco just proved that the biggest threat to IT lies inside the companies themselves and on the managers who decide to use this kind malware without properly understanding the risks. Yes, I’ve said it and I’ll say it again Crowdstrike is malware, anything that messes with Windows at that level is malware, there’s no other description and shouldn’t be allowed by Microsoft to exist.
I carry cash and so do many of the younger people I know. It is handy sometimes and happens to be private.
Industry standard solution that protects companies against malware is malware? Any proper AV will have unrestricted access to system. Only other option is for companies to completely lock down your device.
Here’s the thing, malware protection is supposed to deliver protection and one important aspect of that is making sure there’s business continuity… what they did was to completely fuck over their customers in that aspect, they become the problem and I bet that most companies running their solution would never suffer any catastrophic failure this bad if they didn’t run their software at all. No hacker would be able to take down so many systems so fast and so hard.
Yes. It is.
Any system with this level of access to the system should be opensource and tested against actual workloads before shipping updates to prod.
Something like ebpf would make more sense too.
Im the Xer type with no smartphone and prefers the wallet. I remember so many shows or street people with paranoia would have the horror of government trackers but I find the horror of corporate trackers to be much worse and far to real now.
Yeah, those same people totally paranoid about govt tracker are now carrying smartphones around no problem, how ironic isn’t it? :)
One of the biggest rules in IT is always have a backup.
A cashless society has no backup.
The backup with a crypto, such as Monero or Bitcoin, would be to print out a paper wallet and then load the money onto it. LOL.
- take “this”… 2… 3…
- profit
Then don’t get rid of cash. We can do both you know
More like it shows dangers of using only one provider for almost all IT infrastructure.
Not necessarily one provider but one point of failure. In this case it was the update system that allowed one company to push something to production on other companies systems.
This
…why not both?
because cash is disgusting
Agreed. While I agree with the privacy and security arguments against cashless payment methods, I’m still for them for the simple fact that as someone who works as a cashier for a living (or some semblance of one anyway), I’m more aware than the average public of just how DISGUSTING cash actually is.
Is the money really filthy or what?
Oh gods yes.
I get so many bills that are dirty, but also you don’t wanna know all the germs that are on a lot of those bills. Another thing I learned from years of working in retail is that people are also disgusting as all hell. Many people don’t bother washing their hands after going to the bathroom, or they’ll hand you nasty sweaty bills they pulled out of their pocket after walking into a store or up to a fuel kiosk during a >80 °F (26 °C) day, or after working a shift in construction or a factory job or even simply just exercising. Some women will pull cash directly out from under their bra, as if I want to accept sweaty boob money. Yes, they could use a wallet. However, many people don’t. Rather, they just shove the cash directly into their pocket or bra and be done with it. Because fuck cashiers, I guess.
Not to mention that the majority of bills out there have at least some trace amount of cocaine or other drugs covering it, though you may not be able to see it.
So, in short, sorry for the ramble but, yes, people are absolutely disgusting and so is their cash.
Retail. has. fucking. ruined me.
/rant lol
Because if everyone used cash, schedule systems, records systems, communication systems around the world, breakdown still.
If there’s a verity of software vendors used in these systems, and financial systems, you don’t get simultaneous global breakdowns any more.
Basically. Using cash won’t prevent this from happening. Using several interoperable software providers and systems will.
Using cash won’t prevent this from happening.
I mean yeah, that’s why I said both, not just cash. I carry some cash on me because you never know. I’d also like to see less monopolization of just about everything because it makes for single points of failure. Diversifying your payment methods by including the potential for cash also helps.
But cash has nothing to do with this.
It’s an entirely unrelated issue.
It could equally be a warning to floss every day for all they’re related.When the payment processor goes down, I can buy my groceries/gas/weed with cash, not by flossing my teeth. I don’t follow the point you’re making. Going fully cashless is a bad idea, and the recent outage didn’t affect every system used. I don’t see how having multiple methods of payment is possibly a bad thing. I’m not advocating for only cash.
The inventory and POS systems also go down. You still can’t by your groceries/gas/weed.
Going cashless is a bad idea. But not because of this.
That’s not what I witnessed recently. Payment processors went down but local POS was fine. Inventory didn’t matter with the short duration of the outage. This is one of the reasons going cashless is a bad idea. Far from the only one, but it’s a factor, and I experienced it. Going cashless reduces diversity in payment options and makes the system more vulnerable.
Going cashless is a bad idea. But not because of this.
It’s pretty clear this incident has highlighted a myriad of very important issues.
It’s likely more productive to discuss the other issues in their own threads - this thread is clearly focused on the cashless problem.
this wasn’t a problem with cashless infrastructure tho, this was a problem with monoculture. if the globe stopped using microsoft for gov and business, and instead threw their tax money towards open development; as in - the people, not microsoft, these kind of global issues wouldn’t exist.
Choice sounds like something people should not be fighting over :)
Because cash doesn’t solve the problem. If the stores themselves rely on computers, and they do, it doesn’t matter what’s in your wallet. (In other words, you need more than just cash to have a reliable alternative. It’s certainly possible to do so.)
Also, some of the big problems were in airports and hospitals where payment was not the serious concern.
There’s more to it. The mono-culture is one thing, but rolling out the update to millions of computers on the same days sounds like a bad idea.
Fun fact in 2008, with nuclear submarines, the mono-culture was not that bad yet.
It’s interesting to note the UK went with a Windows XP variant and not Windows Vista, which is marketed as the more reliable OS. The USA never made the same calculations: The American Navy runs on Linux.
Navy: “we use Arch btw”
No wonder those Navy touchscreen controls killed people…
I personally have never had good luck with Linux touchscreens…
sounds like they rather spend that RND on pocket lining over contributing to software dev.
A cashless society is so stupid beyond words. In order to create one you must also create a full surveillance society to protect it, and even that would be ineffective to stop it from being hacked.
How many hacks that generated infinite money have you seen?
Get a conservative business-focused person into the government and watch them give infinite money to business in the form of subsidies, bailouts, and tax breaks.
All presidents since at least Reagan and Prolly all of them but FDR has been pro corporate welfare and each one rewarded his oligarchs with generous subsidies…
Call it chips act or aca or covid relief etc… These are transfers from us treasury to the owner class.
This is not a party politics issue, this is the regime policy
Just 1, but it seems to repeat ad infinitum:
Be born rich.
Just to be clear we are a mostly cashless society and the majority of currency is not physically in existence around the world and somehow it manages to be protected by and large.
The difference is that if someone decides to freeze your cashless bank account they can by a mouse click and you’re destitute. Whereas if that happens in a cash-based society they have to come and get it from you.
Good thing jobs pay in cash, oh wait, only shady jobs do that.
well that is sorta my point. I keep some cash on hand but the majority of my money gets auto deposited and debited from there when I pay bills. If someone steals the majority of my money and I have somelike 1 to 10 percent its not a much better situation than them stealing all of my available funds. I mean it is which is how come I do keep a bit of cash on hand.
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I think it is important to have cash as a backup.
A couple of years ago there were some issues with card reading terminals in Germany. Due to a faulty security certificate these card reading terminals were not operational for about a whole month. Many stores were affected, because they almost all use ones from the same manufacturer. The only reason why it wasn’t such a big deal was that people were carrying cash around anyway and were able to switch the method of payment easily. Having cash worked as a backup.
One problem no one has mentioned, is that it also makes life a lot harder for homeless people. I guess they need to open a bank account and start writing their account number on a cardboard.
This actually reminds me of when I went to a restaurant a while ago. I had some physical money to spend, so I figured I’d take it with me and pay with that. At the end of the meal, while my friends paid with a card, I asked if I could pay with cash. Immediately, the waiter’s demeanor changed and he looked almost… disgusted? I don’t even know. Then he asked me in a tone that matched his expression if I didn’t have a card, and I answered something like “Well, I do, but it would be more convenient for me to pay with cash, if that’s okay”. Then he, for some reason, repeated the question, and I answered similarly. He didn’t say anything and just avoided looking at me. While a friend next to me was paying I asked again, “so, can I pay with cash?”, and without looking at me, he just barely shook his head yes. So I paid with cash, and then I awaited my 3€ change back (in my country it’s not usually custom to tip because waiters actually get paid full salaries). Eventually he came back with our receipt, but no change. I just left without saying anything - at this point I wasn’t going to argue about 3€ - but I’m most definitely not coming back to that place.
Still don’t know what the dude’s problem was, but it did leave me wondering how are homeless people expected to pay for anything, if even a person who isn’t homeless can receive such cold treatment just for choosing to pay with cash.
That’s wild
I would of given that person a piece of my mind. I don’t know about different customs but to me that’s very disrespectful. They would’ve gone with no tip or a very small one. I only tip bigger when they pass the baseline of not being rude.
Not sure why you are being downvoted.
I guess depends what you would have said…
Either way, in the US you can just remind them they are legally obligated to take cash. Put down the cash, snap a picture and leave.
If they call police, allow them to explain to a government official how they refused to accept the legal tender in this here country 🐸
I generally don’t advise schooling staff but this one is disrepect of liberty, and I don’t care, they can get fucked for being a bootlicker.
Shit is disgusting, your preference on my payment method is not a thing and you are beyond out of line with such behavior. Freedom ain’t free folks
I would have ripped him a new one right there and then in front of everyone. And I would not have asked more than once, I’d just drop my share in cash on the tavel and be done with it.
That’s right. Little turd is way out of line lol
In Europe it’s so much more common to use cash than card anyway, that guy was a fucking weirdo
Europe is not a single country
Yeah but most of the continent is under a unifying government with a shared currency (with a few exceptions, but paying in euros implies OP is still under EU jurisdiction)
Obviously nothing holds true for an entire region that won’t also hold true for the majority of the world, but I feel like businesses in countries that use the euro are FAR more likely to regularly accept payment in cash or even require cash than counties in any part of the Pacific hemisphere
Then why does my map have a big blob on it that says EUROPE??? Checkmate. King me.
Depends where, but definitely a weirdo.
He was probably Americanized.
One problem no one has mentioned, is that it also makes life a lot harder for homeless people. I guess they need to open a bank account and start writing their account number on a cardboard.
And you need a permanent address for a bank account. Unfortunately, that’s a feature of the cashless movement not a bug. Anything to make the lives of people experiencing homelessness harder.
One problem no one has mentioned, is that it also makes life a lot harder for homeless people.
But to those who organise those systems, they’re not consumers with disposable income or a credit line to spend. They are happy for them to fall through the cracks and people not using cash penalises them further by eradicating charity and widening divisions.
It is functioning as designed.
There are more cashless options than using banks.
In some countries you can use phones (and phone credit, more or less) as your payment option. Doesn’t even have to be a smart phone, though that makes it easier.
Beggers on the street with QR codes printed out. Or their phone number on cardboard.
And in other countries, you can use the local equivalent of the Uber app instead of a bank account.
Cashless is good. Safer for the homeless (harder to rob) and still easy to give money to them.
Congratulations! You’re the winner of today’s most delusional comment award!
and you’ve never left the usa.
I’m European, but sure.
that makes it worse.
A European who acts like they’ve never left the usa.
dude, I’m literally begging you, go have a conversation with a homeless person and talk to them about your idea
To use phones people need to first buy them and regularly recharge them. Homeless people already have hard time to find other necessities.
Also in some countries you don’t have any option to get any sim card and use it without first registering to your name and your address.
For the safety aspect yes, it is harder to rob them of their money but the phones are very easy to steal.
Cashless is only good if you already have some base level of comfort and do not care about your financial privacy. Every cashless transaction you make is recorded, tracked and sold via however many middle man you use.
I am not saying everyone has to use cash but people should have the freedom to choose how they want to pay.
Username checks out.
Let me just pull my phone out, download this money transfer app with an abysmal privacy policy. Now let me register an account and input every personal detail known to man. What’s this? I need my government issued ID? I’ll inform the beggar I’ll just pop to my house to grab it. Got my ID, now I’ll complete a liveness test because god forbid that I might be a robot. I may as well send them an ass swab because they need to “know their customer” so well. I just need to link my bank account and enter an OTP that’ll take 5 more minutes to arrive. Finally, I can donate to the beggar after messing around with a poorly printed QR code on a cardboard sign.
OR I can just pull out my wallet and hand them a $10 note. I’m going to pick the 10 second process with fewer steps over the 30 minute process any day of the week. Having options is important, especially if your phone dies for whatever reason. A cashless society is just a way for card companies and payment processors to continue making a quick buck in the name of convenience. Both card and cash have their uses, and it should be up to the consumer to decide which to use.
It would be fine if not everyone had the same exact setup. Also you can have cashless payments why still supporting cash. They aren’t mutually exclusive
Also you can have cashless payments why still supporting cash. They aren’t mutually exclusive
Yes, but “cashless society” means one devoid of cash payments. Some countries are talking about getting rid of cash entirely. Cash payments and digital payments both being used in concert is what we have now, there would be no need to “transition to a cashless society” from that to that again, the difference is they want to end cash, entirely, all of it, gone, only digital payments. Thus making “cash” and “cashless society” quite mutually exclusive, actually.
I don’t want a cashless society. That’s a European thing for the most part.
I want a debit card alternative that doesn’t have the same draw backs. I want a solution that doesn’t require proprietary banking apps to use.
I agree, the more widely accepted alternatives both physical and digital the better imo. I’m just saying, when people say “cashless society” they’re talking about that not about what we want.
Agreed. I would love to see a law requiring businesses to accept cash where possible. That sort of law already exists at state and local levels in the US, would like to see it adopted in the UK.
There already is a lawyer in the UK that says that.
Interestingly, the EU is moving in the other direction, with many places requiring that you accept card payments, with cash being optional.
One would think that there would be more than just one lawyer who says that… Oh well… :)
