Countries should in-house their critical technology, jobs, and infrastructure true as much as possible. Sure, you can save a few bucks by using that huawei router or Russian developed secure message app. And maybe it’s cheaper to pay people in China to handle all of your advanced fabrication. And foreign investment money seems to flow a lot more freely than domestic. But I think we’ve seen over and over again how countries that control investments and supply chain are more than willing to use their influence as a political lever when it suits them.
Hypothesis yet plausible scenario: Signal is actually a NSA/CIA-run honeypot.
As far as I know, nobody knows (for sure) what software runs on the official Signal servers. Only the official client app can be used to communicate with ONLY the Signal server.
US law (as far as I know) forces ALL US-based organizations (including non-profits) to cooperate with any and all government agencies, without being legally allowed to publicly admit or disclose that they're doing so. Thanks to Snowden we know that this has happened A LOT in the past. After Snowden, when exactly did the NSA stop illegally spying on everybody? ... Exactly...
With the above in mind it is possible that all Signal traffic is not actually e2e encrypted and is instead decrypted and re-encrypted at the server.
A less "far fetched" version of the above would be that there are simply known vulnerabilities in the Signal client app (and/or Android and/or iOS and/or other apps) that governments are exploiting to see all decrypted Signal communications.
IMO it would be extremely dumb for an EU country to voluntarily use software made in the US or in any other country if it isn't FULLY open source and FULLY audited (and compiled from source) by the EU country itself.
Just like it is extremely dumb that EU-based companies are PAYING to upload their own trade secrets to their direct competitors in the US through OneDrive.
Signal claims to only have the phone number and, IIRC, last connection time. But being American they seem at least somewhat vulnerable to pressure by the US government.
I don’t think that most people care about using Google or quality of search results at all.
I’d agree that the average HN user and certain professions like developers do care. I tried them all, kept switching back to Google and recently stuck with Kagi.
If I look at average not-so-technical users, they just enter words into their browser’s navigation/search bar and are happy to get useful results.
It’s worth to remember that Google is the default search engine in most common browsers (Chrome, Safari, Firefox).
Recently my wife, a typical Mac and Chrome user, got a new Windows computer from work. She didn’t notice that she was using Edge and Bing as browser and search engine until I once looked at her screen and commented on it. She shrugged it off as unimportant and keeps on using it, even though she could change the browser as well as the search engine.
I had a similar experience with trying to switch a few times during the last few years and only within the last few months I've actually managed to keep using another search engine for more than a week, and it happened to be kagi.
If this is because Google has gotten worse or Kagi is better I can't tell, but either way I think we are at a point where Googles dominance is threatened for the first time, at last from my sample of one.
But there are other signals like how many of these "google isn't good anymore" posts we see on HN nowadays and the above example of a user not even noticing they aren't using Google.
While I'm doing the same on a small scale for fun, I think it's important to mention that this is not some magic feature of Bitcoin, but just a speculative effect that works with any kind of asset, as long as its value grows disproportionally to the value of the currency you bought it in.
This only works as long as the price of Bitcoin (and other crypto currencies) "goes up". If it stagnates or drops, you can lose money, even more than the current inflation.
E.g. Calculating the Dollar Cost Average for the last year would show that you probably would have lost money, with a negative ROI of -11%.
> Apple will work closely with leading payment platforms and app developers across the payments and commerce industry to offer Tap to Pay on iPhone to millions of merchants in the US.
Is it just me feeling that Apple is again playing gatekeeper to iPhone APIs and hindering true competition by "working with leading platforms" aka. the big players, like Stripe or PayPal, essentially leaving startups and smaller players disadvantaged.
They do that when they're concerned about bad actors or want to prove out the API first with a controlled set of people who are willing to experience breakage
They do that when they're concerned about bad actors or want to prove out the API first with a controlled set of people who are willing to experience breakage
Not only must you be reviewed by the App Store, but your app will require security entitlements to act as a payment processor. And you'll have to be a registered Apple developer in good standing.
If a malicious actor went through all this trouble to grab some transactions, they'd be shutdown within hours of the scam and Apple would refund the money.
Also, who's going to trust or want to use "Bob's rando payment processor"? No merchant is going to do that.
App store review can only catch so much, and isn't able to analyze the actual code. It's one way for them to gate malicious code.
And providing extra approval process for the NFC API is exactly what they're doing here.
AirTags actually have a lot of design in them to thwart bad actors so your comment there is incorrect or ignoring all the anti stalker measures in there.
We are currently looking at Segment, Jitsu and others. While we generally liked Jitsu, this was kind of a big deal for us and made us lean towards Segment.
Mixpanel employee here, I actually just emailed Jitsu this morning to ask about adding Mixpanel as a destination. We're willing to work with them (or any of you!) to get the PR open. Feel free to reach out directly to josh@mixpanel.com!
Now I'm wondering how this actually plays with legislation such as CCPA or GDPR, as it is quite revealing even without the more delicate sites mentioned here.
Myos is a collateral-based financing solution for (e-)commerce. Our FinTech solution provides merchants with tailored, nearly risk-free working capital.
It’s French!
The French government is picking up a French solution built by a French company.
I doubt that the decision was as much technological as it is obviously political.
Unfortunately this is a common pattern in Europe, especially the bigger states like France and Germany.