It’s possibly the second best show involving Michael Emerson as a scientist turning against the controlling tech-cabal he once worked for, aided by a more lethal human companion and a very good dog.

(and it’s partly the same dog too)

And what other show would that be?

Fallout

This is a proposal to operate a regulated payments processor, supervised by BaFin. All the usual, necessary regulations and consumer protections will apply under German law.

The announcement claims a "privacy-preserving [...] payment system". Are you saying this would come in conflict with German law?

Taler is privacy-preserving for the payer, but not for the payee. This solves many legal issues such as tax evasion and money laundering.

I think it is the European sense of privacy where the government is implicitly inside everyone's trust circle.

no

it's a practical doable improvement to the existing system in the existing legal framework

the outcome might be similar but there is a big difference in intend and framing there

I think Taler is designed to be privacy-preserving while being able to comply with national laws. So not the currency you're looking for if you wanna buy something illegal.

Nor something that you want to remain private.

Sounds like that's the only thing it's good for. As far as I can understand it's designed so the merchant has to report it in order to verify it exists. I find it really hard to understand, but I think the thing I'm missing is that the person who buys Taler in the first place simply has to trust the issuer - because they can't verify that they've actually received any without leaving a record i.e. becoming a merchant who is receiving Taler in exchange for cash.

So if you get Taler from your bank and spend it somewhere, the government can see it at your bank, and they can see it where it was spent, but they don't see you at all. You've done your trusting out of band.

If that's right, it could still be used for illegal and untaxed transactions if the entire chain was trusting out of band. I could use it to buy drugs without paying taxes if by dealer would be happy to shoot me later if they couldn't spend it at a retailer, rather than to check if it was good.

I still don't understand it. I've tried periodically for years, but I'm missing something.

> buys Taler

it's more transaction tokenization system then a crypto currency, so you don't really "buy Taler (currency)", you give Taler digital Euros and they give you a token representing this digital Euros in a more anonymous way. (They also can work for other currencies, but doesn't do currency exchanges/cross currency transactions itself).

Effectively this means:

- The merchant (e.g. your local grocery store, restaurant etc.) doesn't get information about you they can aggregate, sell etc. This is the main improvement.

- It's not controlled by a US company, this is also a pretty big improvement.

- Taler doesn't strictly require customer wallets to be bound to an bank account nor do they identify who you are as a customer. This makes it hard for Taler to abuse the audit log, which is also an improvement.

- It does strictly require merchants (anyone receiving money) to be bound to a bank account for given currency (here Euro). It's best to think about it as the money going directly to the merchants normal bank account.

- Taler has audit logs containing what token was used from which customer(id) with which merchant (which is strictly bound to having to have a bank account), as well as logs about how money got into the customers wallet and all this methods you can put money into it will (likely) be traceable, so criminal investigator and similar can still pretty much trace back who did which transaction when. Just with a bit more effort/extra steps. So with enough automation states can as much surveil you then they can now. Practically it seems to make things a bit more high effort then today, which is a good thing to have.

IFF Taler allow putting digital Euros into a wallet using gift cards buyable with cash this indeed could still be used for money laundering (similar to how most gift card systems can be used for it), but I think it's unlikely they allow such things and most people practically will likely link up their bank account.

Another thing to consider is that for any ordering of physical good you normally have to put in a shipping address with your name, even if you send it to a post box.

And for a bunch of other things the vendor also has to get your identity out of band (independent of used payment processing). E.g. many kinds of contracts, high value payments, currency exchanges etc. etc.

This doesn't make it useless. It still is an improvement. Especially if payment terminals in physical shops get support for it and/or digital goods can be bought with it. In Germany a lot of the large chains with physical shops more or less all use the same payment terminals for card payment with support relative flexible software so it's actually possible I think. Just hard to happen without regulatory pressure, similar to Wero support on a payment terminal.

> Taler has audit logs containing what token was used from which customer(id) with which merchant

This is completely wrong. The Taler exchange doesn't know which tokens you have. When you spend them as a customer, the merchant passes your tokens to the exchange. It's like physical coins: you give them to the merchant, the merchant deposits them in their account. The exchange know which merchant deposits the tokens but has no information on the customer because the tokens (like coins) are anonymous.

I think the proper comparison point is not something like Monero, but multinational credit card companies. Taler is obviously much more private than those.

private from whom

large companies, that should work

the state if it does an criminal investigation, that won't work, also at least for now there is no need to do so if you don't to anything criminal. Sure if fascists take over that would change but they then also would ban any system which would allow avoiding their gaze so not sure it's relevant tbh.

and as things are currently you have to far more worry about US companies and state knowing about what transactions which are legal but you want to keep private then about your local EU government

The problem with this line of reasoning is that is works for all values of "they", "criminal", "investigation", and "fascists". Right now we probably don't think it's a problem that you can't buy drugs with this system. In the future, if they ban books about Tiananmen Square, and this system gets introduced and it also doesn't let you buy books about Tiananmen Square, we won't think that's a problem either.

Thank you so much for reminding me! I had kind of given up but your comment prompted me to check again and it turns out Bandai Namco recently put all the original soundtracks on streaming. Na na na na na na na na …

It is not just company policies, this reflects the law across the EU.

Do you have a reference to this law? I researched it in Germany (where the incident happened) and did not find anything that prohibited it.

The applicable laws are at the national level.

Can you find any laws in any EU member state that prohibit photographing or taking videos of airline crew? I haven't seen any yet.

I thought parent was implying it would be some EU-wide data protection / privacy law, and I was just responding that, were any to exist/apply, it would be at the national level, and not any EU-wide law

I think it's the publishing that's restricted in e.g Germany and France, not the act of filming

And no, no law I know of. Hence putting things in conditions of carriage etc

Ugh. Trying to get something running with openRewrite at work.

A private, authenticated repo is going to be a spanner in the works since now it means setting up and maintaining custom stuff in Artifactory, and getting that sponsored.

Depends on the infra, and the level of anxiety generally and specifically.

Petty vandalism no, but I’ve worked at a few and know more completely non-military business premises that absolutely have “military barricade” or the like quietly in their contingency plans.

Funny thing is, a bit of arson is kind of normal on their estates. But usually it’s just stolen cars.

The EU already classifies digital services like those provided by Starlink as "critical infrastructure".

Operators of such services have to comply to the highest level of the EU CER-directive for Physical and Cyber Security. This includes physical shielding, strict access controls and resilience against physical sabotage/terrorism as well as natural disasters or severe climate changes. This is the duty of every player in this business.

The government has a job to stand up against a potential adversary of the country (be it other countries or local terrorists), and in case of an attack on critical infrastructure the government will also step in to protect it, I agree on that.

But it doesn't have the job to take over Starlink's (or whoever's) business operations and make it secure. That is the job of the company, long before it even appears on any map of a potential adversary...

It’s quite a take to make lan sharing some kind of grand conspiracy. Is LAN manager sus too?

The company that runs it is

I works assume if/when something really kicks off the starlink and starshield networks would be high priority targets.

(I’m mildly curious what their ground stations in Central Europe look like from this perspective).

That's the thing, to take down any of the megaconstellations you need thousands of antisat weapons and that's just one constellation. Not sure about the competitors but at least for Starlink their laser links should provide ample fallback for ground stations going out of service.

Just a few destroyed satellites would likely produce enough debris to take out everything else in orbit: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2007_Chinese_anti-satellite_mi...

I quite like the way passports touch on this - the electronic part has a password; that password is made up of info from the printed data page - so you need both sets of information to validate it.

The ICAO standard for passport chips is really well done. Especially since you can read the photo from the chip itself.