As a european I again find it crazy what kinds of insecure stuff the banking industry in the US does. Chip+PIN arrived long after they did here, SMS Tan is still a thing while EU Payment Services Directive 2 (PSD2) forbid this in 2018, 7 years ago.
Many transactions are still authenticated via signatures on paper cheques, you can use your credit card without a second factor (also regulated by PSD2).
I just can't understand why they continue doing this, when I'd assume fixing this would cost less than what fraud must be costing them today.
In the case of credit card payments this is true, but for checks and other P2P payments, there is no merchant to pass on costs to.
For these, it's usually the banks absorbing the losses themselves (or their customers, if they aren't legally required to, but in many cases they are).
Check fraud is a relatively small percentage of all fraud.
It's also pretty much a solved problem, it's expensive to cash a check anywhere but into a checking account in your name. If you write too many bad checks or try to deposit them you'll get banned from... the entire banking sector.
Yeah – because the US, until recently, didn't have push P2P payments via banks. The only thing you used to be able to do in your online banking was checking your account balance or maybe initiating wires (which are so expensive that manual review is probably not an issue).
Zelle is changing that and is, expectedly, running into a wall of fraud since banks don't have the authentication infrastructure/know-how to actually support it.
This works very well here. Just visit the website of thing you want canceled, scroll to the footer, click vertrag kündigen and you get a form to cancel, I have done it a few times now and it's 1000x better than searching in some customer portal or even worse calling. Good for the US.
Yes. The court voided privacy shield in a ruling known as Schrems-II. The commission then created the Data Privacy Framework which is esentially the same as privacy shield against the will of the parliament, re-enabling transatlantic data transfer.
As always with laws this is very location specific. In germany there is a very clear clause about patents not applying to "Actions carried out in the private sphere for non-commercial purposes" (§11 PatG, own translation)
"I'm in Europe so I don't have to care because software patents are not enforceable here" isn't the solution. Yes, patent law doesn't apply - but copyright law does, and they very much can take down content that references the spec just based on copyright law alone.
(Also I'd think copyright in EU doesn't normally apply to implementing protocols as it's supposed to grant monopolies of creative expression? but IANAL)
I don't think it will. Discovery in Archives has been a problem forever and with more content made today than ever before it is becoming ever more difficult.
I don't know where you live or what experiences you've made but I just had a look into my municipalities online appointment system and there are 5 slots free to book just for tommorow.
The Germany federal government’s procurement process is kafkaesque at best (especially the armed forces); Germany spends as much on defence as France, yet France has a nuclear deterrent, nuclear subs, a nuclear aircraft carrier, and a sizable fighter jet fleet - all domestically designed and built. Germany’s government barely maintains its kit.
The railways are late a third of the time. The Swiss want to ban Deutsche Bahn trains because they’re causing so many problems.
The German telecom operators are terrible. Domestic internet is slow and the cell phone networks are the same.
The country just doesn’t invest in itself and when it does it can’t effectively execute.
I’m not saying Germany is a shithole, but its government bureaucracy is generally terrible and business administration lackluster (and yes, there are exceptions to the rule).
I’ll add that I’ll tear the shit out of my home country (Canada) similarly. We have similar issues with government procurement.
> The railways are late a third of the time. The Swiss want to ban Deutsche Bahn trains because they’re causing so many problems.
That's not quite correct. What the SBB (Swiss Federal Railways) started to do is to not allow German trains onto the network if they're massively delayed (I think massively being more than 15 minutes), which, of course happens a lot.
My take is that it's partially educational (as in get your shit together if you want to use our network) and partially it really is a logistical problem and messes up the network.
The train network in Switzerland is used so densely that allowing too many delayed trains onto it has a serious impact and would incur knock on effects.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sveriges_riksbanks_pris_i_ekon...