Yes. In Germany there is Giropay, where you get redirected to your online banking (it remembers your bank), you have to log in, and submit the already pre-filled transaction. It's literally a normal bank transfer from the user perspective. Not something that happens on the server side.
I don't know about the others, but Giropay just does a redirect to your online banking account and prefills the bank transfer form. The actual payment is literally the instant bank transfer solution. (I think it's called TIPS, not SWIFT.)
It's a scheme layered on top of regular SEPA bank transfers. As such, it does not work across borders, for example, and not even with all German banks.
> TIPS is a harmonised and standardised pan-European service with common functionalities for the settlement of Instant Payments across different countries and jurisdictions. It is based on the Single Euro Payments Area (SEPA) Instant Credit Transfer scheme.
> In 2020, Lael Brainard announced the upcoming FedNow service would provide "a neutral platform on which the private sector can build to offer safe, efficient instant payment services to users across the country",[20] after 2018 the European Central Bank launched the TIPS instant payment settlement system.[21]
Unfortunately not every country in Europe. Zero banks in Ireland have implemented SEPA Instant and transfers still take at least a day. Thankfully though they have a deadline to implement this that's coming up soon and will be forced to comply.
Sometimes it can be worthwhile to see what other countries have been successfully doing for decades. It won't prevent anyone from reinventing the wheel if they still have their mind set on it :)
It’s not actually much different. The main reason to use this is because it’s the standardized version of that concept and has been analyzed by people. All the smaller cryptographic detailed like domain separation, proper key derivation, weak key rejection etc. have been worked out for you. So it’s a plug and play solution that previously didn’t exist.
Grim is the thought experiment of imagining 1.8 million chicken's being gassed to death. It's nearly psychopathic to think it's not just because human's kill exponentially more everyday. Not to disimiliar to brushing off someone's dying in a car accident because there's over 40,000 motor vehicle fatalities a year.
But that's what we do, don't we? You don't care about someone on the other side of the world dying on the road, or the next city over. It's not even newspaper-worthy. It's just another day.
The idea of "appear to be resistant to attack" is an empirical one. When someone says that, they are saying that we simply have not found a good attack against this problem. That can change any day, in principle. Unfortunately, "we don't know of an attack" is about as strong a statement you can make in cryptography, when talking about a fundamental hardness assumption. More verbosely, you'd say "the best known attacks take 2^whatever operations on a computer (classical or quantum), and that's expensive, so we're probably fine unless someone makes a significant leap tomorrow"
imo, this isn't quite true. there are a lot of areas where we can say "this looks sufficiently secure for now, but given the rate of advancement in this area in the last decade, we expect it will probably lose a few bits of security in the next decade"
For a book on this subject, "dead tree + printing costs nothing" (and then asking 100% of the sales price for a 'free' ebook) is a bit hypocritical, no?
I don't know Winston (VoiceDream developer) personally, but there a bunch of things that impress me about both his product and himself.
On the product side - it's long been a well established app in the space. I think it's been out for 10+ years, offers a lot of voice options, handles a lot of input document formats, has good support for offline playback, and has been well featured in a bunch of publications.
I was also very impressed when I read this : https://www.voicedream.com/macos-reader-subscription/
I really admire Winston for bootstrapping VoiceDream for so long - his initial users bought the iOS app for $2 and he has held true to continuing to provide them with the feature set that grew considerably since the app's origins.
His blog post also details how he was on vacation when VoiceDream had a P0/downtime issue and he caught the first flight back to address this, motivated by many users who really depended on the app (such as students studying for exams).
There is a ton to admire here.
Do you have a source on it being a net carbon sink? I'm skeptical bc there's a lot more effort to make and distribute paper bags than cutting down a tree
