I had one professor who did this but in the opposite way. On the first day he told everyone about the main book that would be used, one that he published. He sold it for the lowest price the bookstore allowed and encouraged anyone who couldn't afford it to copy someone else's or talk to him and he'd find a way to give it to them.
Why would a bank require someone to go to a branch to change their phone number? I can change my contact info on the website for all the financial institutions I use.
The branch is the last place where a real person meets another real person. Even that person looks up everything on their terminal, and the whole thing is probably security theater, but I think having at least one physical backstop is a good idea.
My banks require physical presence for stuff like changing phone numbers and nominees. We get OTPs on our phones, so that makes perfect sense.
My mom works at a credit union and the staff are constantly saving people from scams just because the customer came in and the staff had a chance to notice something fishy happening.
I can too, but the difference is that I'm also not the Pope. Someone supplanting the identity of some rando is a negligible risk for the bank compared to supplanting the Pope.
Also in adjacent countries like Vietnam etc., where even ragtag street food vendors have a QR code sticker on their stall/cart.
It's so common that people pay without even talking or confirming; I've seen customers just take their phone out, point at the QR, and walk away, and the shopkeeper says nothing. I'm assuming the shopkeeper gets a notification on their phone and trusts regular customers,
but how easy would it be to secretly place your own bank account's QR code on top of a shop's QR? People who wait for a confirmation notification will catch it immediately, but by then the customer has already paid the attacker and the transaction can't be just reversed. Repeat it in several places, and a thief to snatch quite a few payments before the parasite stickers are all taken down.
I think partly because Google and Apple controlled the contactless bits of the phones for many years, the non-OS-makers like WeChat and AliPay made use of the open technology of QR codes. I think theoretically you could build equivalent things as they have with NFC today on those platforms but on the other hand being able to set up a “POS” with nothing more than a printer does have an appeal to it, even if writable nfc stickers cost 5 cents you still have to go buy some.
I think there is also something about how easy it is for a business to adopt a QR code by just needing to print one out instead of having to go out and buy a whole payment terminal.
QR payments in china was already prevasive before contactless payments became prevasive in the west. And as others say: not all phones supported nfc at the time. Remember iBeacons on iP5? Wechat and Alipay was already everywhere by then
Having been there recently, it's about as annoying as taking out your phone to pay for something. Some systems also support NFC now, though the most common is still QR. Also helps that their QR scanning tech/transaction processing is really fast, many transactions were as fast or even faster than me scanning with a card from my experience.
(Also if you want to talk annoying payments don't get me started on how insane it is that the US still requires me to hand over a physical card at most restaurants to take over to their register... sorry I just can't help but get annoyed by this lol)
That is an incredibly long bow to draw from someone that obviously doesn’t know what they’re talking about and is willing to make massive jumps to conclusions. Do you know how ecommerce works? I agree that it is a bit absurd, but not nearly as absurd as your claim of “the only reason”.
A few millennia too late for that: the “mark of the beast” is just money — “so that no one could buy or sell unless he had the mark”. How does one buy or sell without money? Otherwise we would call it bartering.
For better or worse there's no such thing as "Europe" despite the wish of many on HN.
Such a system exists in, for example, Switzerland. Actually there are two such systems that aren't compatible. There are QR code invoices for domestic payments, where the code includes the target bank account details, amount to pay, transaction details etc. That's scanned by your bank app, direct p2p payment. And there is Twint, which is a domestic consumer payments app. The QR codes often contain short one time use codes that are looked up server side.
Why do people use them: because it's easy and the fees are low. Banks give you QR code invoices even for small businesses for free. Twint is a bit like Venmo, you can send to numbers in your address book for free, and for businesses they can do website integrations easily and even print out static QR codes to stick on market stalls etc.
Twint isn't as fast, convenient or reliable as NFC card payments so the card/tech companies still have an advantage. But it's been getting better. Maybe at some point the NFC elements in the card tech will become flexible enough to allow arbitrary mobile apps to be as good as tap-to-pay.
QR codes are used in direct account-to-account transactions. They encode all the data like the IBAN-based account number, bank code, requested sum etc. that you may find on invoices in a way that’s much more convenient than typing over by hand.
Apple Pay meanwhile uses your credit/debit card to perform the transaction, the other party needs a terminal or payment gateway and is required to pay fees to Visa or MasterCard.
It is far from being universal. And the more annoying part of that is that there are at least 4 incompatible "standards" as to the format of the QRcode.
Or if you want to play a bit, have a browser with some extension that breaks websites and show them "it doesn't work on my phone". Pranks apart, in my experience, I always got a paper menu when I asked for it.
reply