.. new narrative: Those evil retailers hate Apple and the credit card companies.
I always found it amusing that articles used to say that Google didn't know what it is doing with NFC or that NFC is lame. Some articles stated that NFC isn't good enough for Apple, but if Apple did NFC they'd win. The problem is that those articles focused on the technology and not the true gatekeepers. The gatekeepers are the credit card companies and the retailers. A person can't use NFC if there are no NFC terminals. There are few NFC terminals because there is not reason to have them. Some companies that issued NFC plastic stopped doing so because there just wasn't demand.
Now we have a liability shift deadline fast approaching. Terminals must support EMV. It's not surprising that many EMV terminals also support NFC. But who made that happen? The liability shift. Not Apple. Not Google.
So now we have a perfect storm. We have a company that is great at marketing their new NFC tech. People finally become aware of NFC around the time that banks are reissuing their cards with chips in them. We have a way for phones to easily participate in EMV transactions wirelessly. We also have a consortium of companies about to launch a mobile payment system. Who has the most power in this? They are going to shut that interface door and be the gatekeepers for mobile payments. Then they can focus on the real war. Not a war between Apple and Google, but a war between retailers and the credit card companies.
There are still ways to get around this and have "mobile payments" tied to your phone that will work anywhere. Someone needs to make EMV adapters for phones. Or maybe "Plastc" will go big. But either one of those things is too high a bar for most people. They'd rather just pull the plastic out of their pocket.
Even assuming this is true, how many averted robberies are worth the loss of a human life? One? a hundred? a thousand? How many averted crimes are worth the 100 children that are accidentally killed by guns each year?
Clearly cars should be banned. What about swimming pools? I sure there are a ton of things that have value even if somehow people loose their life because those things exist
In the case of firearms, the police have no legal obligation to protect you. This has been upheld in court. This goes back to common law (aka "God given" right) for the right to protect yourself. Not a civil right, that can be taken away. We have a natural right to protect ourselves. That includes the use of firearms.
Citation needed, I think.
PRIORITIES FOR RESEARCH TO REDUCE THE THREAT OF FIREARM-RELATED VIOLENCE
Snarky article about the findings: http://www.gunsandammo.com/politics/cdc-gun-research-backfires-on-obama/
Wow... someone that knows what they are talking about! Thanks for the post!
Yeah, because peering sucks. It will be the ruin of the Internet! Nevermind that peering saved the Internet when people were predicting the Internet would crash in the late 90's early 2000's.
Peering cuts both ways. A company like Netflix wants to reduce their cost of transit by peering. But then they have to make sure all those peering points are up to snuff. The mistake Netflix made was to let some other company handle peering for them. A company that had existing settlement free agreements with the target networks.
I suppose Netflix could have backed off and gone pure transit, but it would have created other problems.
You may be right, but I wonder if the author of the article is aware that one of the leading cloud friendly distros, CoreOS, uses systemd. If fact, systemd is an integral part of fleet:
With fleet, you can treat your CoreOS cluster as if it shared a single init system. It encourages users to write applications as small, ephemeral units that can easily migrate around a cluster of self-updating CoreOS machines.
RedHat's geard, which is part of OpenShift, also uses systemd.
It seems to me that the opposite is happening, cloud ready distros are choosing systemd.
No meaning? Look up CVC3 security. Apple did nothing new here. It is all standard. It just works because the credit card companies have been building this stuff up for years and years. You don't have to know about the counter, it is there to prevent cloning.
What if you decrement? That is the whole point! You can't clone a transaction! Even if you get the CC number, the counter would prevent it from being used. This is a low level security measure that makes NFC payments more secure than magstripe. It is a good thing. I'm happen that Apple finally added NFC.
NFC has a counter feature as part of the standard. Each time a credit card number is used, the counter goes up one. This is to prevent a replay attach. The problem is you can't take a plastic credit card with NFC and put that number into the phone and expect the counter to work correctly. Use the phone, the counter goes up, use the plastic, the counter goes up. Use the phone again, counter is wrong. To fix this problem, Google creates a new credit card number for tap and pay. Apple says they go one step further and create a new number for each transaction. That seems to go a bit further than needed. The counter would prevent replay attacks since this virtual card would only be used for tap and pay. I just wonder if the wording by Apple today was slightly off. Just a guess.
The main point is what Apple was doing is, by and large, standard stuff. Both Google and Apple just implemented a standard. Yeah, a few tweaks here and there, but it is certainly now revolutionary!
Where there's a will, there's a relative.