asciilifeform: the clever fellows who presently escape surveillance by eschewing mobile phones, will be collared at last
asciilifeform: at first you might be able to sheathe the card in faraday wallet, but then you start to need it to do just about anything - and the sheaths quietly go away
asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: i don't like this entire in person shopping thing anyway << dragging one's arse to a shop remains a pain. rfid arches might ease the pain, but at what cost.
asciilifeform: thestringpuller: 'reddit' is infamous for pestilential beggars
asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: that bank pic looks like... athletic tourney chart. should we expect a 'amerikanskiy narodniy bank' to show up at the pointy end of the tourney bracket shortly?
asciilifeform: other thing, folks will answer 'i've an electromagnetically-shielded wallet! haha' - but see who laughs last. eventually, you won't even be able to walk into a shop unless the door can read your CC
asciilifeform: this is not simply poor engineering, or penny-pinching. there is a purpose.
asciilifeform: so don't be surprised at the NFC radio eschewing any form of challenge-response authentication - or crypto of whatsoever kind
asciilifeform: then go and prove that 'you are not a camel'
asciilifeform: he just needs your name, and a few commonly-available biographical stats about you, and can borrow $1M in your name.
asciilifeform: the way it works now, a thief doesn't even need to steal your account #s, etc
asciilifeform: (to steal theodosius dobzhansky's quip about evolution)
asciilifeform: at present, nothing whatsoever about the u.s. consumer banking / credit system makes sense, except in light of the above hypothesis.
asciilifeform: bounce: if it were their arse, rather than yours on the line - absolutely.
asciilifeform: as for anything remaining, it is charged to the infinite 'bad debt' credit card issued to the bank by the crown.
asciilifeform: if you're robbed, and have the presence of mind to walk the bureaucracy and get (some of) the debt cancelled, the merchants who the thief patronized get drafted to become substitute victims in your place
asciilifeform: hence the deliberate theft-enabling features of the fiat infrastructure.
asciilifeform: if you refuse to blow your savings / go into debt buying idiot trinkets - well, why not let somebody else do it... for you.
asciilifeform: you, from the standpoint of mr. bezzlemeister, are a problem in need of solution
asciilifeform: the short version: say you live in the u.s., work a decently-paid sort of work (e.g. engineer), have few or no expensive vices, etc.
asciilifeform: you will have to actually do your homework
asciilifeform: fluffypony: afaik there is no 'canonical' summary of the subject 'under one roof'
asciilifeform: in more than just the usually-discussed way (chargebacks fleecing merchants)
asciilifeform: re: NFC credit card crapola: anyone who finds this puzzling (mandatory remote orifice for radio pick-pockets) should read about how u.s. banks profit from petty CC theft
asciilifeform: there wasn'ty going to be stone left upon stone << mircea_popescu is optimist! thinks there'll be a stone left standing over here...
asciilifeform: imagine if 'la serenissima', old venice, had... a computer. what part of what we put up with, would they tolerate.
asciilifeform: (because if it cannot be understood, it cannot be maintained)
asciilifeform: and whether the machine can be understood
asciilifeform: perhaps after 'mad max', when a computer is no longer a cheap widget - but a _place_ - like the old church organs - people will give a fuck whether they work correctly
asciilifeform: except when you stop and think about the fact that virtually every 'linux box' is also running a number of embedded turds
asciilifeform: linux sorta takes us almost to the point we were in 1972.
asciilifeform: decimation: the mere thinkability of this kind of thing, re: a given system, is a sure test for braindamage
asciilifeform: decimation: and cpu archs re-implement pdp-11 poorly, and again and again...
asciilifeform: the familiar science fiction staple, of savages running across a cache of 'technology of the ancients' which still works, and going wild - that's reality.
asciilifeform: tales abound, of janitors pulling on a mess of cable to reveal 'pdp-8' drywalled into a broom close oubliette, still running a radar set, etc.
asciilifeform: (the famous 'u2' airplane - still flies. etc)
asciilifeform: most of the widgets that actually sail, fly, explode, presently in the field - are '80s designs at the core - at the very latest.
asciilifeform: if you notice that the pay keeps coming regardless - why work.
asciilifeform: re: DoD standards, vdhl - at one point, vendors were required to provide full design - and - guarantee production to a certain date, far in the future
asciilifeform: re: wireless card firmware - i suspect that when someone bothers to audit the blobs - with an eye to searching for creepy crawlies, rather than the customary functionality reverse-eng. - plenty will turn up.
asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: i suppose it depends on the books. my backlog contains junk like 'intro to Lie algebras,' etc
