Mullvad's focus on privacy has been fantastic so far. But this ad made me reconsider: I want a VPN service that silently does its job in the background, not one that screams "look at me" with silly stunts and attempts at becoming viral.
Not sure Wero will succeed, but European country-specific mobile payment systems like Swish (Sweden), Vipps (rest of Scandinavia), Bizum (Spain), iDeal (Netherlands), Bluecode (Germany and Austria), Twint (Switzerland), BLIK (Poland) etc. are also working on interconnectivity under the EMPSA association. Combined they already have 110+ million users.
Wero is like a monolith, while EMPSA is more like mobile phone roaming. If I would bet, I would bet on EMPSA.
Like sepa, this initiative can be forced by law and made open rather than tanken hostage by large cooperates, which may then exclude parts of the market.
Very European approach: the winner is chosen by law. Is Wero really a success? According to this article, in 2024 it processed over €7.5 billion.
Polish BLIK, which is not even mentioned in the article and which has joined the EuroPA Alliance, processed €83 billion in 2024, with a 30% y/y increase in H1 2025. I understand that BLIK is much older, but it invested significant effort and money in marketing and promotions while delivering a good user experience. BLIK is now trying to expand to Romania and Slovakia, yet Wero is getting all the hype on Hacker News. Maybe this is a case of East, South, and West Europe being treated differently. Is the only “European” solution one that comes from Western Europe?
If BLIK is better then it will prevail over Wero. There is no law mandating Wero.
Just looking at the banks that make up each - 16 for Wero and spread over Germany, Belgium, France and the Netherlands versus 6 Polish banks - it feels like the systemic risk is higher with the latter. But time will tell.
Last year BLIK also signed a letter of intent to join the EuroPA which has Italian, Spanish and Portuguese banks involved.
The EU consists of 27 different countries, with substantial practical barriers between their internal markets (even if it's one single market in theory). Often, only EU intervention can overcome those barriers. Otherwise, you end up with national fragmentation.
What people in Europe do very frequently is buying from online shops of another country, either because they do not find the product in a local shop or because of better prices.
What is needed is a card for online shopping that is valid in all Europe.
But it's not the card. Wero isn't doing anything new. It's just yet one more payment method to implement. Adyen, Stripe, Shopify and many other already support different local payment methods.
One problem I see with some of the EMPSA systems, is that if you're a developer and - if you don't have a company behind you, you're pretty much shit out of luck trying to integrate any of these payment solutions.
That have at least been my experience, trying to integrate Vipps in Scandinavia.
We wouldn't even need these services if instant payments were the norm. I guess we have to thank the Visa and MasterCard lobbies for this to happen at least 10 years too late.
Yeah that's pretty much the only reason people use Wero: transferring money faster than a snail between people. This was filled by the likes of Lydia before, but their shenanigans trying to become a bank pushed people to Wero (which is indeed a rename of something else I don't remember, but I used for less than a year).
The real deal is the card payment networks that your plastic thing can use at a merchant's point of sale. All the rest is moot as we already have SEPA for e.g. online payments (it does have its issue for sure, but it's something).
I thought they were interconnecting all those ideal-like systems from different countries and then rebranding to Wero? So the tech may be different per area but they all interconnect and the UX is the same.
But maybe I misunderstood and other places are actually replacing tech.
Note that the exact date in May has not yet been announced, but there is a hint: in all the videos and screenshots of displays the date and time is shown as "Mon 25 10:10".
Now when Ive was still at Apple, the first screenshots of iPhone showed a time of 9:42 because that was the time they expected when the device was first shown. And that time was placed in all the official PR images well in advance.
Extracting from that, a Monday the 25th could be the time we'll first see the full car. Going through all 25ths of each month this year, May is indeed the only month where it falls on a Monday, so it's probably the 25th of May.
- Kröger, Jacob Leon; Raschke, Philip (2019). "Is My Phone Listening in? On the Feasibility and Detectability of Mobile Eavesdropping". Data and Applications Security and Privacy XXXIII. Lecture Notes in Computer Science. Vol. 11559. pp. 102–120. doi:10.1007/978-3-030-22479-0_6. ISBN 978-3-030-22478-3. ISSN 0302-9743.
- Schneier, Bruce (5 December 2006). "Remotely Eavesdropping on Cell Phone Microphones". Schneier On Security. Archived from the original on 12 January 2014. Retrieved 13 December 2009.
- McCullagh, Declan; Anne Broache (1 December 2006). "FBI taps cell phone mic as eavesdropping tool". CNet News. Archived from the original on 10 November 2013. Retrieved 14 March 2009.
- Odell, Mark (1 August 2005). "Use of mobile helped police keep tabs on suspect". Financial Times. Retrieved 14 March 2009.
- "Telephones". Western Regional Security Office (NOAA official site). 2001. Archived from the original on 6 November 2013. Retrieved 22 March 2009.
- "Can You Hear Me Now?". ABC News: The Blotter. Archived from the original on 25 August 2011. Retrieved 13 December 2009.
- Lewis Page (26 June 2007). "Cell hack geek stalks pretty blonde shocker". The Register. Archived from the original on 3 November 2013. Retrieved 1 May 2010.
So specific models from before secure operating systems like Android and iOS. Now those operating systems even show an indicator whenever they are recording.
All the references are to old phones before Android and iOS came out. Or they are fake features phones sold to the target. So while this is something that was possible in the early 90's and early 2000's it's not longer a thing.
I still don't get it. The outside is dirty, right? He said in his post "You dip this probe into beer, sewage, or canned food a-stewing". So when you say "when really the window is just dirty" I don't get it - yes it will always be, because that's what it is placed in, no?
A dirty window only ruins the reading if you are measuring the speed of the oxygen passing through it. The three electrode design stopped measuring speed and started measuring balance. Unless the gunk is a total airtight seal (which is rare on the scale of an oxygen molecule), the sensor will eventually reach the right answer, whereas the old version would fail.
The permiability of the membrane would still be reduced by stuff on it, but as long as there is any permiability, the inner compartment will reach equilibrium eventually.
The big gain comes from a change in how you interpret the presence of electrons.
The older approach converted oxygen to electrical current, the magnitude of current flow relating to magnitude of oxygen depletion. The assumption built into that approach is that low oxygen depletion levels meant low oxygen levels, but that wasn't the only potential cause, because it ignored variation in the permiability of the membrane.
The newer approach equates current flow to oxygen concentration, as the system doesn't deplete the concentration any longer. The permiability of the membrane in this setup only contributes to a longer initial delay as the inner chamber comes to equilibrium with the surrounding concentration.
I think maybe one thing you have to consider is that sensors still require maintenance. Software can measure the length of time the sensor requires to reach equilibrium and send a maintenance required alert and someone cleans it (like if the software expects equilibrium in 10 seconds but the reading settles at 60 seconds, it can calculate the sensor is 80% clogged and requires cleaning). There's also all sorts of techniques that can be used to mitigate gunk depending on how the sensor is being used such as physical wipers, air-blast systems, ultrasonic cleaning systems, and chemical coatings. So as long as some oxygen can get in and an equilibrium is made between the fluid outside the sensor and inside the sensor, you'll get a reading that you can trust.
> In a statement posted on social media late Dec. 12, Michael Nicolls, vice president of Starlink engineering at SpaceX, said a satellite launched on a Kinetica-1 rocket from China two days earlier passed within 200 meters of a Starlink satellite.
> CAS Space, the Chinese company that operates the Kinetica-1 rocket, said in a response that it was looking into the incident and that its missions “select their launch windows using the ground-based space awareness system to avoid collisions with known satellites/debris.” The company later said the close approach occurred nearly 48 hours after payload separation, long after its responsibilities for the launch had ended.
> The satellite from the Chinese launch has yet to be identified and is listed only as “Object J” with the NORAD identification number 67001 in the Space-Track database. The launch included six satellites for Chinese companies and organizations, as well as science and educational satellites from Egypt, Nepal and the United Arab Emirates.
Alternative: the system exists, so people in the know may well have done proper risk assessment and may have identified multiple reasons that could result in a collision. Some of those reasons are accidental, some are not.
If so, SpaceX's longer term response being "here's our SSA data for everyone and here's how we source it" is a good one for all parties involved (even more so for SpaceX and govt customers they share it with if they have other capabilities...)
Well we already know Starshield (the military version) has specialist space domain awareness capabilities that aren't being shared, and it's entirely plausible that data from regular Starlink sensors/receivers (other than the disclosed star trackers) can be fused into something useful by SpaceX and/or the Space Force.
Remember when the original dev of TrueCrypt (the VeraCrypt predecessor) suddenly abandoned the project and wrote that people should use BitLocker instead? [1] [2]
We now know that BitLocker is not secure, and an intelligent open source dev saying that was probably knowingly not saying the truth.
The best explanation to me is that this was said under duress, because somebody wanted people to move away from the good TrueCrypt to something they could break.
alternatively, they knew truecrypt/veracrypt to be irrepairably compromised, and while bitlocker may be backdoored in the same way, it is at least maintained
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