We’ve had the recent joy of getting a bankcard hacked. As much as I hate giving Chase any props, they have “forgiven” (really hate that term in this instance) all fraudulent charges thus far.
How’s your week going?
Coffee Break [6/5/26]
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This week so far has been better than nothing.
…you might be even more right than you know?
…for a given value anyway…since someone did…err…this
…& the return on that investment has been…abundant…but in places better than you’d think?
…nearest I could get…was looking for one that had the same punchline I saw earlier that captioned it with a crack about US rhetoric about iran-related progress…maybe I’m biased because they were the two I first paid any attention to…but…even if the nothing burger thing is kind of a lay-up…&…I’m not sure I could explain my reasoning for how I get to what I think the two-tone grid matrix part signifies…this might be #art?
…they’re a don’t-show-anybody sort but it came from here
…again…I could be wrong about this…but I think that second one is sort of like a puzzle that solves to a punchline…of sorts…which if you’re odd enough to get there…there’s at least a chance you’d think of that way?
Submitted my taxes a week late, but don’t care cause the gubbiment owes me a lot of money.
At least I’m getting a new laptop. As for the job hunt. It’s going. Nearly got sucked into another AI scam because they used the name of a recruiter I had talked to a week earlier. However, who the hell is going to pay me 6500 USD a month to check out reviews? The pay scale was designed for the greedy stupid or unaware.
We also had fraudulent activity on our credit card this week! Heading out tomorrow for our brew clubs collaboration with a major brewery. I’m very excited since I have never brewed on a huge commercial system & the brewer/owner seems very cool.
Ugh what a PITA. Hope it all gets taken care of swiftly!
Three of us were just talking about this at work because one of my co-workers got their card hacked a couple weeks ago. It’s happened to me before, years ago, on a gas card. What’s really bizarre is in all three cases, the hackers used the card in Miami!
…so…I’ve been going back & forth in my head about a thing I’ve never really understood about a bunch of this stuff because there’s been a move…sort of after the one about trying to get people to opt in to multi-factor authentication…to make biometrics replace passwords because they’re “more secure”
…&…maybe…I dunno…there’s ways I can buy that might be true for certain definitions of “more secure”…but…better…not so sure?
…I know a few people who are getting on a bit & the same hoops scammers can not only thread in a “nothing but net” way but actually coax people through unwittingly by getting them to follow a “give this response” instruction set they can’t tell apart from “it’s like clicking yes on the T&C’s”…& some of them don’t have great fine motor skills or a lot of feeling in the tips of their fingers & find elegantly hidden fingerprint readers & such hard to use…or habitually power off the devices apple assumes you never turn off…or otherwise struggle with linkages in these chains
…like…I know someone who wanted to update firmware in a dashcam that was already paired with the appropriate (& up to date) app on their phone…in the end we had to press a tablet with the app into service despite the pairing that originally offered the update being on what the car thinks is the “primary device” it’s the happiest to talk to…the firmware update…which every time the process errors out you have to download anew to the device that isn’t having the issue because the app doesn’t seem to be able to recall doing that a dozen times already…requires the install proceed via a wifi connection where the dashcam is the hotspot the phone is hooked to…the patch notes specify the point of the update is to fix…as irony would have it…an issue with the camera having an issue with wifi discovery initialising the bridge to the app
…leaving aside the part where running the client for the camera on the car system…give or take iCar or AutoDroid or whatever pretty much the only two games in town run the app/dashboard sync routine are called currently…seems like it would be a more convenient way to do pretty much all of that…if there’s a wireless bridge to the car from the phone that can run apps you can interact with on the car display why isn’t that where you do all this stuff…& not on the phone that says the camera won’t connect to it & doesn’t have a refresh button for the discovery function…I don’t know…I do know it worked fine eventually right up to the part where the error on install after finally connecting long enough to say it couldn’t do it because of a VPN connection that has to come from some app that isn’t flagged as running by the system that says no VPN in use…but…many iterations later when that phone is in “flight mode” while the not-a-phone attempt has got the app to connect for long enough to transfer the update & trigger the install before that errors out a few times for luck or in case you somehow weren’t bored of repeating all the steps it took to wait to see if this time it might hold its shit together…the phone gets a notification to say something happened…from the app
…all of which to say…back when paypal seemed kinda like it might be a good idea in a way that crypto never did…it never made sense to me why instead of all this the banks hadn’t all just done a customer-facing paypal front end so nobody ever had to give bank details to anyone or anything online…just the other half of a transaction key that fingerprints all parties in exactly the opposite way to the one people use the blockchain to make crypto anonymous money
…merchant requests payment…your bank asks you if that’s you…you say yes…merchant doesn’t know who you are…you don’t know who the merchant is…the bank knows exactly who everyone is if it comes up later & anyone needs anyone’s money back
…now if you have whole industries of people trying to con the elderly &/or infirm or otherwise vulnerable…or just the not-particularly-tech-literate…out of all their cash…the keeping ahead of them part of the strain isn’t then getting taken by the people currently getting taken?
…&…that’s just a few strands in the ID fraud ball of twine…the thing is bigger than wherever boasts the worlds biggest one of those in the hope people will pull over to take a look?
PayPal But Banks (PPBB) couldn’t “disrupt financial services” and have a valuation of Eleventy Squatrillion Dollarydoos and make Elon Musk and Peter Thiel rich, so obviously, it’s a non-starter.
There would also be a lot of security and privacy issues with that sort of system but unless your idea makes rich people richer, I’m sorry, we can’t be doing that sort of thing. (There’s also a lot of Venn diagram overlap between your idea and “we can’t crack down on scams too hard because if you did that, suddenly a lot of stuff might kinda look like it’s a scam” which is right on top of “we can’t kick Nazis off our social media platform because we can’t really tell the difference between them and Republicans/Reform”)
…yeah…I never sat down & tried to work it up as a business plan to get a loan or anything…just…the general which-bits-of-this-carry-what thing seemed like it could go different back when people were just starting to figure out the transaction stuff & paypal playing the middleman while just about saying it wanted to be just different enough from a credit card to need one of those (or debit, I guess) to use that made me wonder how it was the numbers didn’t make a better case for cutting paypal & any potential successors out of that loop & closing it back in like the normal circle the wagons routine when it comes to banks & banking & the big cashflows?
…there’s always going to be issues relating to security & privacy when the object…despite a desire for it to be seamless & require no “friction” at point of use & integrated into whatever you want it to be when it might be convenient but also not available to anyone else who might find that convenient enough to take for a spin like joyriding but for devices &/or accounts…is to secure the parts that you’d want somewhere secure…like…as a random for instance…a bank…while allowing you the wholesale privacy over your spending that it upsets people to find their reading habits might not have either online or when they check stuff out of the library & all the movies & tv stuff makes it either easy to find you with or elementary to avoid depending on narrative requirements
…weird as hell that basically cash money used to do all that back when people hand-wrote checks & sometimes had the same bank manager their whole career like that one movie people watch around christmas
…maybe it should work like some sorts of code do…shells & wheels of interlocking permissions that break out different requirements for different sorts of transaction…make more sure if it’s for more money or more unusual…if it’s you trying to pay your taxes make it really easy…don’t add steps that slow people down getting on the bus…maybe throw in some hoops if they’re buying a car…that sort of thing
…mainly, though…relying on “once you get used to using this latest Smart™ newfangled way of making sure if it goes wrong that’s still a you-problem not an us-problem” is kinda dumb if loads of the people who bank with you are just more vulnerable pickings as a result…when you…as a bank…can’t prevent fraudulent transactions even when you’re sure enough they were to be willing to eat the loss & not take it out of the victim’s account…just…as an approach in the most general sense I can think of…in a way that is not in any way unique to banking so much as a more acute sort of issue at the sharp end for the “end user” bit of the contraption?
My credit card was compromised for the first time ever last month. Pretty easy process to get it replaced except for one thing. They sent me an email saying I could still use my virtual card numbers online, which, cool.
Except, in order to access my virtual cards I had to enter the three digit security code from the new card that hadn’t arrived yet, because my previous card was compromised.
Think about that.
Credit card companies: “THE SYSTEM WORKS!”