[anonymous908213]

1bil+ people have surrendered their right to artistic expression to Google, and another 1bil+ to Apple, and another 1bil+ to Microsoft. Many more billions have surrendered it to Visa and Mastercard. The world will only continue to get worse for the foreseeable future as five corporations assert global control over what is allowed to be published. It is mournful knowing that humanity's peak is behind us.

[lxgr]

Hey, on the other hand, zero malware! It is zero, right? Please say it's zero...

Just today I found a malicious version of Ledger on the macOS app store. It's been there for five weeks, and there are already some anecdotes out there of people losing their coins.

I guess that's somehow the developer's fault for not "staking their claim" to their name, as Apple seems to only monitor for malicious duplicate submissions if the original is in the App Store to begin with...

[iguessthislldo]

A year or so ago I had to speedrun turning on developer mode on Android because my grandma had somehow installed an app that did a ransomware-like fullscreen popup after about 10-20 seconds after bootup. Could've factory reset it and called it, but wanted to try to rescue it for my grandma. Used adb to figure out what app was doing it and removed it. I might be misremembering details, but I think one of the reasons it could do what it was doing was it was using Samsung-specific permissions, which Google shouldn't allow on the store. I reported the app and looks like it's gone now.

[g-b-r]

Sure, and zero ads and total privacy, as well

[ddtaylor]

Ads would never be used for malware either, thankfully.

[cubefox]

And only 30% fees, just for being on the app store!

[peterspath]

15 for most

[NetMageSCW]

Only if you charge for your app - and how much free labor and bandwidth do you give away? Apple gives away millions.

[Sayrus]

$99 per year for your developer account required to distribute applications. At AWS pricing, that's a bit over a TB of traffic. At any normal pricing, that's anywhere from 10TB to a few hundreds. At volume pricing, that's even more. How many apps are paying for traffic they don't use? Apple pockets millions.

[cubefox]

> Only if you charge for your app - and how much free labor and bandwidth do you give away? Apple gives away millions.

I guess a ~2% fee would cover those costs.

[lxgr]

Not on a free app, and I don't think Apple should be coerced to host content for free and cross-subsidize it from other paid content.

[tremon]

I also don't think Apple should be coerced to host content. However, as long as they insist on gatekeeping all installs on the iPhone platform they should be. If Apple doesn't want that coercion, they are free to relinquish their app store monopoly.

[array_key_first]

I definitely think they should be coerced to host content if they insist on being the only avenue of getting content out on the platform.

If they don't want that burden, which is very understandable, then maybe they shouldn't be the sole God gatekeeper of content? That's a choice, after all, and one they willingly made.

[cubefox]

> Not on a free app

30% of 0 is also 0. They are already cross-subsidizing it.

> I don't think Apple should be coerced to host content for free and cross-subsidize it from other paid content.

Nobody said they should be.

[zombot]

So much for their claim that the walled garden is there to protect you.

[oceansky]

Brazil and India have created alternatives to Mastercard/Visa duopoly. EU is seeking to do the same.

[dtech]

Many European countries have had viable online alternatives since forever, and a lot of them are being consolidated into Werk, which will also enable physical payments

[mastermage]

also it seems like the digital euro is getting forward.

[cubefox]

I think you mean Wero

[gambiting]

Many countries have alternatives already. In Poland Blik is ubiquitous and very very easy to use. And I love how it's implemented, Visa and MasterCard could learn from it.

Tldr - you open the app on your phone and it gives you a 6 digit BLIK code, you give that code to the seller, then a notification comes up on the app saying "seller X is trying to debit your account by amount Y, agree?". It's brilliant because then the seller gets nothing identifiable about you. Even if someone overhears the code, it's only valid 60 second so it's useless. Unlike with regular cards there is no risk of losing one or using a fake terminal that scans your card instead. And any transaction has to be explicitly rather than implicitly approved. Love it.

[lxgr]

This is indeed one of the biggest weaknesses of "pull-based" payment cards, and something most if not all natively phone-based methods do better.

The best credit and debit cards can do is PIN verification or biometrics (for Apple/Google Pay), but even there you still trust the terminal to not show you a different amount than you'll be charged (assuming the screen is even pointing towards you; I've often been asked to tap without seeing what I'm even consenting to).

Online, there's 3DS, but that's not required everywhere and for every transaction.

There once was a vision to extend both positive cardholder approval and cardholder authentication for each card transaction, but it turns out the friction of that is higher on average than just letting everything but the most egregiously suspicious fraud go through by default and handle the rest via the disputes process.

Out of curiosity:

> you open the app on your phone and it gives you a 6 digit BLIK code, you give that code to the seller

Is this the flow for online payments as well, or only for in-person payments?

[TeMPOraL]

> Is this the flow for online payments as well, or only for in-person payments?

On-line, too. Or should I say, first, because AFAIK on-line came first. I've been using it for years as my default on-line payment method where available, before noticing it becoming an option on POS terminals.

[gambiting]

>>Is this the flow for online payments as well, or only for in-person payments?

works for both

[lxgr]

Interesting, I wonder if there is some other initiation channel then? The chance of collisions with random 6-digit codes seems non-negligible.

[TeMPOraL]

I've been wondering this too. As I understand it, BLIK codes are generated on the back-end, so I imagine they have some clever anti-collision measures in place. What I know is:

- The TTL of the code is variable; on some days I've noticed it to be as low as 60 seconds, on others around 3+ minutes. Not sure if it depends on the type of transaction or time of day.

- After entering the code in charging widget/terminal, or giving it to a merchant, you still get a screen on which you need to explicitly confirm the transaction; it displays the amount and name of charging entity, so this would presumably reduce the impact of possible collision.

- Sometimes the codes generate instantly, sometimes it takes a few seconds; I always assumed it's network connection lag and/or usual webshit performance issues, but it would also be consistent with an anti-collision measure - if you run out of 6-digit codes, wait a second or two, some will free up.

- Not once I've heard any report or rumor about a collision.

[pzmarzly]

IIRC a few years ago I saw some store asking for 6 or 8 digit BLIK codes, I guess the latter was how they were planning to expand from supporting just Poland to supporting whole EU. But that effort seems to have died out.

[ArekDymalski]

BLIK rocks. In addition to being a payment system for goods and services it can be used for instant private money transfers between individuals.

[tgsovlerkhgsel]

That's the problem. Every country has an alternative or ten, but what people actually need is one system that works across borders. That's the only way it reaches enough critical mass to be useful internationally beyond the EU, which nowadays is a requirement for it to be able to replace Visa/Mastercard in a decade or so.

[thaumasiotes]

There's never been a system like that. Given this reality, it seems like a stretch to say that people need one.

[tgsovlerkhgsel]

Visa/Mastercard is the system right now. European banks issue these US debit cards often as the primary card for an account.

[iknowstuff]

Yeah but approving every purchase from a merchant I trust, like Amazon, would be annoying. Gotta allow for one tap to purchase, like eg apple pay does

[snicky]

IIRC BLIK asks you if you want to skip the verification next time you buy from the same merchant.

[wincy]

I misread blik as “bilk” which is… probably the last word you’d want associated with your credit card or payment processor in English.

[kulahan]

There used to be a beer designed to be mixed with milk called bilk. Last I heard, it was terrible. Maybe it's still around - I think it's Japanese, so it's unlikely I'd happen across it.

[floam]

6 digits effectively the time salted … the other digits are your lat long lol.

[MikeTheGreat]

I'm pretty sure that I know what the answer is (sadly), but I'll try anyways:

Any chance folks in the US can use these, in the US?

This is a genuine question, although I don't have my hopes up. It would be nice to have some actual competition / choices

[lmm]

It costs you nothing but a few hours (heck, you may even make money on the points) to get a Discover card, which you can use on Japanese game sites that don't apply the Visa/Mastercard censorship (they have a partnership with JCB). It's a small move, but most people can't even be bothered to do that much for competition.

[weberer]

I think he's referring to the SEPA network, which isn't really an alternative to credit cards. I've only seen it used to pay for rent and bills. Theoretically there's SEPA Instant payments, but I've never seen any merchants that use it.

[NewJazz]

Hope you like carrying cash.

[wat10000]

China has cleverly replaced the Mastercard/Visa duopoly with an AliPay/WeChat Pay duopoly.

[thaumasiotes]

They'd like to. Vending machines will no longer sell to you unless you can pay that way.

For more significant things, you can still use cash. I'd go down to my landlord's bank every three months to pay the rent.

[kulahan]

Was that like, enforced? Or did your landlord potentially just prefer cash? I know very little about how land-ownership works in China, except that nobody really ever owns their land.

[thaumasiotes]

My landlord preferred to be paid through Alipay. I had to pay in cash because Alipay wouldn't let me make payments that large. (Because my Alipay account was backed by a foreign credit card as opposed to a Chinese bank account, I assume. If you're curious, the rent was about US$700 / month, so the payment would have been about US$2100.)

I don't see that landownership is really relevant. Mostly it's done on the basis of notional 70-year leases from the government. Since the government dates to 1949, the first round of those recently expired. There was a lot of curiosity beforehand as to what would happen, but it doesn't seem to have made enough of a splash that anyone commented about it (where I could see) afterwards. So I don't know how it turned out.

I understand that rural peasants may sometimes own their land outright. In this case, I was renting one apartment in a building with 5-6 floors and I think 4 apartments per floor.

[0x3f]

The EU 'seeks' to do a lot of things but is notoriously ineffective.

[lxgr]

The EU already managed to make card payments significantly cheaper and more secure within a few years than they'll probably ever be in the US (still no PINs and no 3DS, and interchange will probably never get regulated because everybody freelances as a severely underpaid lobbyist thanks to frequent flyer miles), to say nothing of regulating a free and instant bank payment scheme into existence while FedNow is still rolling out.

Say what you will about EU inefficiency and regulations, but in my view, at least their financial ones have been largely on point.

[philipallstar]

Wirecard was pretty good. Assuming you're Jan Marsalek.

[anonym29]

Bitcoin exists. Completely permissionless, anyone on earth can use it. Easier to accept as a merchant than any third party integration. Doesn't require you to trust any government at all.

[snicky]

Cool, but unfortunately, it has the same same drawbacks as cash. If you get scammed, accidentally pay too much or lose your wallet you will never get it back. I sleep safer knowing that there is some protection in the banking system against losing money all of sudden.

[GoblinSlayer]

Just buy insurance.

[lxgr]

Unfortunately it's also pretty clunky for tax reasons in many places and inherently deflationary (and as such problematic from an economic point of view).

Sure, great if you don't trust your government or whoever issues your local currency, but if you can, there are better alternatives. Trust is an asset, not just a liability.

[anonym29]

Well-placed trust is a small asset, but misplaced trust is a massive liability.

[lxgr]

It might not always be warranted, but where it was, increased trust in society, institutions, and systems has been the enabler for economic growth and human development in the past centuries. Talk it down at your own (or more accurately, at all our) peril.

[anonym29]

Economic growth and human development over the last several centuries has been the result of a complex web of interleaved prerequisites, that said, trust wasn't one them.

People trusted institutions for thousands of years prior to the scientific revolution. Europe had plenty of trust in religious institutions between the collapse of the Roman empire and the scientific revolution, and you know what it got them? Superstition, witch hunts, barbarism in the name of proselytizing, failed pandemic responses, and a near complete stall in technological and scientific breakthroughs for a millennium.

What the scientific revolution brought us was the decision to not trust, but to reason, to measure, to hypothesize, to verify. Facts matter. Humans are stupid and it is human nature to place trust exactly where trust is least warranted.

[ddtaylor]

People are downvoting you, but I can literally pay for my meal using CashApp at a diner in the middle of nowhere using Bitcoin.

[thunderfork]

You're paying for your meal using USD, surely?

Is that bitcoin you're paying for your USD with on-chain, or is it just sparkling PayPal Account Balance?

[ddtaylor]

Nope, those are BTC transactions using Lightning. It was rolled out relatively recently but is live.

[DiffTheEnder]

The walled garden approach stifles creativity and robs talented artists of the opportunity to express their work and get paid fairly.

Hope the EU or another progressive regulatory body allows users to fully control what they can/can't download and from where on to the phones they purcahsed.

[user34283]

Maybe regulators can be bothered this decade to do something about these corporations abusing their power over mobile app distribution and payment processing.

The EU's DMA has been a step in the right direction, even if it's yet been fairly toothless with Apple and Google flouting it.

[fuzzy_biscuit]

They could be bothered if they weren't indirectly (or directly, I imagine) on the dole.

[add-sub-mul-div]

Not Microsoft. "Sideloading" is not even a term in Windows culture the way it is with Apple and Google because it's not a second-class citizen.

[groundzeros2015]

Old windows yeah. Now they also require code signing, etc.

[Aurornis]

Not required

Source: I use Windows and Windows VMs sometimes and install whatever I want without hassle.

[groundzeros2015]

On a regular consumer version of windows what happens when you open an unsigned exe?

[debugnik]

Assuming no false-positives from Windows Defender, you just click through a "scary" SmartScreen warning. Note that signing the exe isn't enough to remove the warnings, you then need to build up reputation for your cert by having enough users click through the warnings.

[Shish2k]

It asks "do you really want to run this?", you click yes, it runs and never asks again?

[anonymous908213]

I think a better question, rather than a point about unsigned exes, was: "on a regular consumer version of Windows, what happens if you run literally any program that was not downloaded from the Microsoft Store?". In which case the answer is "you cannot run it, there is a pop-up directing you to the Microsoft Store, and the only way to find out how to run it is it to google the information which will point you through several layers of system menus to disable nanny mode". This will happen to you for something as common and widespread as downloading Chrome or Firefox. Attempting to disable nanny mode will result in an ominous screen warning you about how bad the thing you're about to do is, and telling you that the action is irreversible.

Microsoft is not as bad as Google and Apple, yet, but they absolutely have the power to be as bad and are flirting with how to accomplish greater and greater control of their platform without triggering too much backlash.

[ChoGGi]

They are required for system drivers.

[girvo]

That’s not for lack of trying, though: remember Windows RT?

[ACCount37]

MS has mostly abandoned that approach now. But during Windows 8 days? Yeah. There was a legitimate concern that MS will lock down Windows and try to funnel everything through Microsoft Store, establishing an Apple-style walled garden.

The concern was serious enough that Valve took a defensive posture and started investing into Linux support. Which, at first, largely failed - but eventually resulted in Steam Deck.

[girvo]

For sure, and I'm glad they backed off from it. I'm also glad they did it because of how it pushed Valve into making Steam OS so good. But Microsoft really did want to go down the same path, and I do not trust them not to try it again.

[wiseowise]

WinRT wasn’t locked down.

[girvo]

The Surface RT that I tried absolutely was, and everything else I'm seeing to make sure I'm not misremembering shows that Windows RT was still locked down. So you should expand on what you mean.

Windows S Mode shows that Microsoft still thinks this is a good idea, too.

[debugnik]

You might be mixing up Windows RT and WinRT. The former was Windows 8 for ARM with the Store as the only software source; the latter was the new set of APIs.

[musicale]

> Not Microsoft

No Steam on Xbox Series X/S, last I heard.

> Apple

Steam still works on macOS, last I checked.

[chocochunks]

macOS and Xbox are rounding errors compared to iOS and Windows.

[musicale]

If Apple rounded off $33 billion in revenue (8% of total) they'd probably get in trouble.

However that is not the point (or points) I was refuting.

[PurpleRamen]

Surrendered in what way? Do those billion of people exclusively only use android/iOS and only pay with Visa/Mastercard?

[fortyseven]

These companies control content by exerting pressure on those they either control directly or indirectly, by denying them and their customers access to their services, if they in any way threaten the profitability of their business.

And when this kind of power it's consolidated with a handful of companies, you leave people with nowhere to go for any kind of real success. So you're forced to compromise your vision in order to get any shelf space.

Money money money money money money money money money.

Money.

[PurpleRamen]

> you leave people with nowhere to go for any kind of real success.

This game is available on Steam, Epic Games, itch.io, MacOS, Xbox, Switch, Playstation, iOS, and probably some more. Play Store is just one platform, a big one, sure, but it's not like there is a coordinated attack on banning this game from the internet.

[theturtletalks]

Sellers across every marketplace have to rise up and demand interoperability and then these rent seeking marketplace will fade.

[sambuccid]

I'm very hopeful for the "digital euro" that is planned in europe, and if it works and as they say brings digital, anonymous, online and offline transactions, that are not dependent on a private bank, I think it could be an amazing example that other countries could later follow

[Ferret7446]

I wonder if this was coerced by Visa/MasterCard yet again, as they have done against many Japanese styled games in the past years. Despite some motions from the current administration, the payment processor monopoly seems keen on policing the public, which is one reason why crypto must still exist as a plan B payment method.

[Cider9986]

Monero, or honestly any cryptocurrency is a huge improvement on trad payment processors.