This is pretty disconnected to how EU has been behaving towards both startups and AI.
146 karma · joined April 4, 2018
There are benefits to non-QR based payment systems, such as not wanting to pull out your phone, open an app, scan a QR and approve to make a payment that takes me 2 seconds with regular contactless payments.
Physical cards are also a nice fallback to have in cases of running out of battery, theft, etc.
There are examples of other co-branded national payment systems out there (troy + Discover comes to mind).
If a European payment system (with cards, at a store) is to exist, then visa/mc will still want a piece of the pie by at least playing along to remain as a co-brand and taking their cuts from international payments.
A % of that also goes to the issuing bank*, not to MC/Visa, so I suspect the mentioned 0.2% is talking about what MC/Visa has as their cut.
*: That's also how banks can profitably offer things like cashback.
(where I live a car would also be slower for delivering mail than a horse, most delivery people are given trikes, but alas)
This is how all industrialization/automation works in general: When you have a way to deliver faster/more, you're given more mail to deliver in your work time. Your pay does not go up, but any given road blockage or instance of traffic makes you fall behind quota significantly more. You're not paid by how many letters you deliver, but by the hours you work. Maybe you even make less as there's less overtime. Post will then proceed to simply employ less people over time as each employee is made to deliver more letters, then maybe you're part of the people whose jobs are cut. Or they might just reduce wages for everyone anyways, as now the job is much more accessible and there's more supply of labor than there is demand.
This is not an argument against industrialization or automation, but your perspective of what would happen if we had more industrialization is... very narrow.
We must consider the potential future where there's simply not enough work for most people to do (a realistic future now), and how we'll prevent that from going the same way it would currently go (losing income -> losing domicile -> starvation/freezing/etc).
If I walk into your house, take a picture of your financial documents, that's not theft. That's still (potentially:) breaking and entering, trespassing, and depending on what I do with those pictures also fraud, but it's not theft.
This is all semantics of course, but I just really dislike the idea that digital data can be "stolen".
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But also: No one deserves to get their things broken into, but if you expose things to the internet without proper security, you can't cry too much if you get broken into I think. It's not okay (and possibly illegal? idk) for me to read other patients' medical records if they're in open display when I go to the doctor's office, but they also have an obligation to secure this information.
I do like the approach of "Mens rea" / "Guilty mind" overall, to differentiate of children/teenagers fucking around (ofc depends on the extent of what they do), white hat researchers finding vulnerabilities (should not be criminalized), and black hat people doing things with criminal intent.
I made time during a family emergency, and attended a call on US west coast time while living in EU (was supposed to be 9PM for me but they pushed it to 10PM right before due to recruiter messing up the invite and having it off by a week).
He didn't ask any relevant questions. He didn't seem interested. He just looked like he was doing a favor to someone that asked him to give me a shot. Original call was supposed to be 1h, then after reschedule it was 30m, but he thanked me for my time after 20 minutes. Ofc I got rejected after, even though the people before had good opinions of me.
All in all, if you're doing hiring, at least try to look interested. phew.
- Congress on years where there's cccamp tends to be planned by people who are understandably more exhausted. 37c3 and cccamp23 were on same year and 37c3 slogan was appropriately "resource extension".
- The venue was back from Leipzig to Hamburg (CCH was doing renovations for a while, so it was moved to CCL for a few years).
- 4 years between events lead to both changes in the orga people, and general concern that the older set of people had been at this point less familiar with running an event of this scale ("can they still do it and make it feel the same?").
- Covid precautions were a divisive topic. Some didn't want precautions, some wanted more precautions. Ultimately some measures were taken, but none were mandatory. We have distributed free tests and masks last year, we'll do it again this year, though mainly aimed at volunteers, so you should bring your own mask and test if you can, see the info page^1 for full recommendations :)
All this lead to people being unsure if 37c3 would be good and not coming. But I think that trust has since been regained, seeing as this year sold out really fast (same as past years).
I think one other issue was that chaos community is getting older and many are having families, which makes going to congress between christmas and NYE difficult. We did, imo, really good outreach since then and now there's more young people joining chaos communities again. Still, coming to congress is costlier for younger people that earn less (175eur for ticket but cheaper options are available on request, plus 400-600eur in hotels, plus trains/flights/visas etc).
(I was/am part of the infection protection team at 37c3 and 38c3 but am speaking on personal capacity.)
You can absolutely get tickets on public sales by knowing when sales start, refreshing on the dot and doing the captcha as fast as you can. Reducing your latency (ethernet, fresh browser profile without extensions) helps. Add some friends into the mix and you'll get all the tickets you need.
Professional interpreters cost a lot of money, and as such it's done by volunteers. There's little to be done while maintaining the spirit of the event.
Nothing prevents people from redubbing talks either, which may honestly be a good community effort.
Congress is a gathering ground for likeminded people from all sorts of interests. Talks can be watched at home (except for ones that are not recorded at the request of the talk-givers), but being in the room with likeminded people, talking with them, learning from them is IMO irreplaceable.
I did go to 36c3 (end of dec 2019, right before pandemic) and the difficulty of buying tickets was the same as this year.
2) Hackerspaces get a number of tickets with priority, thru replicating tickets (you can only buy one per day). The amount of replicating tickets given depends on size of area (a hackerspace can be tasked with giving vouchers to relevant people in their city). There's a limited quantity of these tickets, separate from amount of vouchers.
The main point of the congress is primarily to bring the chaos crowd together, then the rest of interested parties. That model may not fit your vision, but chaos events year after year succeed at not leaving out the core crowd.
Also, this year I have bought 2 tickets on public sale for friends without issues (best way to get tickets is to group up with your friends).
It's always taken high effort to buy tickets for c3, needing to be exactly on time (not 30 seconds late) to each sale round.
37c3 was an exception due to low sales, caused by skepticism in the event returning after years of not happening. This year that trust was regained and buying tickets became hard again.
I was told 2 months ago (and since, every morning at 9:23 -a good ritual-) that unless I go down to 5TB they will make my data read-only in 2 months.
I ignored this as it's hard to get rid of so much data, and hoped they'd let me stay read-only. Deadline elapsed yesterday and they told me they're going to nuke my account in a month. I'm okay with this outcome.
I got a couple gigabit lines at my disposal and for this one I'll be using our local hackerspace's gigabit line, which is going through freifunk[1]. I'm also only planning on saving 20TB or so at most, which is definitely more reasonable with a gigabit line with a month to spare. (and to not bother everyone else, I'll limit the bandwidth use)
This does mean all the data is zipped tho, so you cannot be selective on what gets saved and what not, and I will have to use conventional gdrive methods (rclone etc) to download selectively instead.
They changed from unlimited to 5TB/seat years ago (but they rolled out the enforcement very gradually: I heard that several friends got hit by this last year) and I was given notification to cut down my use 2 months ago (with threats of making it read-only), but one does not simply go from 400TB to 5TB. I wanted to try my chances on it staying read-only and google stopping nagging me about it.
Chances were not in my favor, and the read-only deadline was yesterday, and it changed instead to "we'll delete all your data in a month".
I'm not complaining (if anything I'm happy that I got a mad deal on storage for years), but it is indeed a matter of "unlimited" does not mean "unlimited forever".