California is teeming with homelessness, whatever they call "cheap housing" isn't helping. They have the highest poverty rate in the nation (or close to it https://www.ktvu.com/news/california-has-highest-poverty-rat...). Nearly half of California's population can't afford even the basic costs of living and millions struggle to afford food (https://www.kcra.com/article/new-hunger-research-shows-milli...) so while the state has done well in some areas (health care coverage for example) you can be sure that there are plenty of very desperate people who might end up resorting to crime in order to meet their basic needs.

one page up/down at a time though. It gets there eventually, but it's ugly.

I think it means they used amazon's shipping services to send it and so amazon knows that something was actually shipped out on time even if it never got where it was going.

> Defence Secretary Wes Streeting said daily lives depend on satellites that power everyday technologies like mobile phones and banking apps, adding the loss of GPS would cost the UK economy £1.4bn a day.

Oh no! Not our precious banking apps! What a weird thing to call out specifically. It's also kind of strange to talk at such length about how critical satellites have become to people's lives, national economy, emergency services, and people's "daily freedoms", only to conclude with "So now we're using ground-based systems to take out the satellites other countries depend on for all of those things"

In a largely cashless society like the UK, ‘banking apps’ are effectively people’s wallets. Knowing you got paid, being able to pay your rent, being able to pay for goods and services… seem like pretty everyday concerns.

That's going to be a problem when the UK faces sustained service disruption attacks. Building fragile systems like this during peacetime is usually an ill-informed bet.

Surely one of the great dividends of being at peace is not having to live like you're at war?

We’re not at nor heading towards peace. Pax Americana is failing. There isn’t a hippies-and-unicorns exist from that structure, not in a disorderly way.

Rather the opposite. Peacetime is the only good opportunity to promote robustness and refuse toleration of vulnerable systems.

If you allow your banks and courts to be hacked freely by an adversary, then you can be manipulated into losing control of the escalation ladder.

At the very least the idea of a population fearing for their future if an app doesn't work is frankly horrifying. In the case of banking apps there are already multiple, simple, well established, and widely supported alternatives to using the app available to them, but that should really be the case for anything actually critical an app provides.

What does this have to do with the claim at hand which is ‘we need to keep our comms infrastructure secure because critical things like the primary way our population conducts economic transactions depend upon it’?

That you find the population’s choice to use such mechanisms questionable, or that you think it is foolhardy to do so, does nothing to disobligate the government from trying to keep that infrastructure up and running.

The point more is, this is one primary mechanism to spy on the populous. Primarily via 5-eyes, which means Americans are buying this data to spy on UK citizens.

I think they are pointing out it's an oxymoron. There's nothing to secure if the service itself is insecure and leaking..

It's classic what-aboutism though. Availability is part of security and that's what seems to be considered here. It's also the more immediate concern. Yes, the software supply chain and where your data goes has high potential for compromise. But I'm not actually seeing rampant fraud in my accounts or data leaks from my bank very often.

High potential for compromise? No, the point is that every single transaction you make is being sold on the open market, that's the problem. Using cash prevents this. Using debit cards, credit cards, banking apps ensures this.

The banks provide the data anonymized, but then provide means to de-anonymize it.

You are discussing concerns that are completely orthogonal to the thread. The availability of digital banking was the concern. Not end to end privacy.

So yeah that sucks, but... what does that have to do with the concerns being discussed here?

Digital banking in some form is pretty unavoidable for me unless I want a "live in the woods" type lifestyle and all the consequences of it. And I don't even live in the UK where they've embraced it more. My mortgage was sold to a very distant company and we've had mail problems. My dog recently needed middle of the night surgery and they wouldn't start without payment that exceeded normal cash reserves + daily.

Yes, all these things suck, but shooting digital banking in the knee without a solution to all that isn't helpful.

Digital banking might be unavoidable but what did your app do that you couldn't have possibly done via your banks website?

You know, I didn't rush my laptop to the vet with me. If you're going to argue with the "mobile phones and banking app" line to this extent, I will freely admit: yes, if you want to be a Luddite, satellites are indeed unnecessary. You are absolutely right. But still not convincing me that's a weird thing for them call out here.

Realistically, paying your mortgage isn't giving any data a credit pull wouldn't. It's not a secret you live where you do. And one off emergencies aren't the problem.

It's foregoing cash for every single thing you do. That, combined with the telco selling data, Google linking that data to the number, and apps such as your banking app working in this same ecosystem, and companies such as Yodlee, your profile has a minute by minute location, plus what you spend and where.

It lets intelligence agencies, buying this data, create links between people. Who you know. Who you talk to. Where you go. What your hobbies are.

This gives the power of manipulation, for knowing who you are in the real world, combined with what you do online, means they know you better than you know yourself. And that's quite important, if you want to manipulate opinion.

All this may not matter to you, and if so, that's fine.

But this data is, quite frankly, what gives the Americans the power they have. The Americans aren't mighty due to guns, and weapons, and an army. They are mighty because of information.

Information is how you send a mere 40 dudes to kidnap the President and his wife from Venezuela. Information is how drone strikes perform targetted attacks. Information is how you manipulate elections in foreign countries. It's the sort of power that means you don't even have to fire a shot, to overthrow a government.

This information is what modern banking, and its apps, and companies such as Yodlee give to the Americans.

And as a Canadian, with the Americans blathering on about 51st state this and that, I am perhaps over sensitive to this fact. Because the last thing we need, is to give Americans power over us.

Any power.

Even the tiniest bit.

And information? Is more powerful than anything else they have.

You are discussing concerns that are completely orthogonal to the thread. The availability of digital banking was the concern. Not end to end privacy.

It's OK. You can talk about things tangential to the main thread. It happens all the time on HN. And I'm not blaming you for anything.

My frustration is likely just showing, on this specific topic.

All of that can be handed via your bank's website, ATMs, a credit card, or even (god forbid) writing a cheque.

All of which (except the cheque, which we can ignore - nobody in the UK has a chequebook any more) depend on the same communication infrastructure that the app does.

> All of which...depend on the same communication infrastructure that the app does.

That being the internet, which in the vast majority of cases doesn't depend on satellites either. Wifi, fiber, coax, and copper would continue to work just fine.

I imagine that if all banking apps go down as a result of war then bank websites, credit cards, basically any other digital financial thing will also be down.

A lot of banks in the UK have mobile-app-exclusive features / services. I imagine this is because of security, but it also makes little sense. If you don't have a smartphone it is about 5x harder to do anything online-banking related here. I remember when I went camping a bit ago my phone died and I was unable to unfreeze my card.

Also, cool username =)

> I remember when I went camping a bit ago my phone died and I was unable to unfreeze my card.

Not even over the phone? I'd be furious. Cell phones die, get lost, get stolen, get run over, etc. I'd personally hate to feel so entirely dependent on my phone being there 100% of the time. I don't even always carry mine with me.

Do people write cheques in the UK?

I’m in my early 30s and I don’t think I’ve ever written one. When I had my first bank account when I was maybe 10 I was given a cheque book, I don’t know where I’d get one now. I did recently receive a cheque for $12.99 or something like that from an Amazon settlement that I think is probably legitimate. Apparently Monzo can cash a cheque through their app so I’ll try that at some point. I’m guessing it won’t work with an international one though.

> when I was maybe 10 I was given a cheque book, I don’t know where I’d get one now.

I'm guessing you'd walk into your bank and ask for one. You can probably order one from their app somewhere.

I’m older (not in UK, in EU) and cheques are something weird from old movies. Never seen one in real life and concept is really strange.

A couple of years ago during lockdown, I was working with someone definitely qualifying as a boomer, to start up an e-commerce site for him. He was proudly showing me his ledger book of checks that he had to shell out $200 to receive while declining a debit card. On a couple of occasions, I went with him to get cash by driving to a bank branch, writing a check, and having the teller cash it for him. It took months to convince him that he absolutely needed a debit card when people were constantly asking if they could use Venmo/CashApp/etc to pay for products.

So we're still in a transitional stage where some people are still stuck on using checks.

At least I see them being used less often in stores. Also how on earth was he paying $200 for checks? You can get them for < $15. Here's a book with a fish on it, and a ledger, and a cover for under $25 https://www.checks.com/p/856/wonders-of-the-sea-checks

Man, don't get me started. However, business accounts are more expensive than regular accounts. Also, why are you surprised that a bank has found a way to charge more fees?

Check processing I think, not writing them

No, the ~$200 fee was for the book ledger and blank checks. I have no idea what kind of monthly fees the bank was charging for the account. He was also getting raked over the coals on his merchant account to process credit cards because it was deemed a high risk business so most reputable places would not accept the business.

There are several companies in the UK offering cheque cashing services so I presume somebody there is getting them.

No

Or checks?

Certainly not spelt (or spelled) like that.

Why is it strange? Millions of people use banking apps daily to make transactions essential to their lives and businesses.

It's also a favourite stat of the UK space industry that a large percentage of UK GDP is vaguely linked to space in some way, and "some of your financial transactions touch a satellite uplink or require location data" is one of the more tangible non-obvious ones.

Those apps can all be replaced by a website, and most banks already have those websites, which means if all the banking apps on earth stopped working right now the solution wouldn't involve anything more complicated than stabbing your finger at different icon on your phone and typing the name of your bank into a search engine.

There are very few things that would cause banking apps to stop working while their websites continue to function.

Presumably it'd be the loss of mobile service and/or GPS that would cause every banking app in the UK to fail, but I'm a bit skeptical that either one of those is a strict requirement.

not being funny - if the internet goes out how does a website make this better?

> not being funny - if the internet goes out how does a website make this better?

The internet for most people doesn't depend on banking apps, or satellites. Wifi would still work great. If the internet actually did go out everywhere, how would an app help you?

The UK is an island nation that's reliant on undersea cables. If those cables are cut (which is something that Russia seems to threaten) your only fallback is satellite connectivity - so protecting that connectivity is pretty key to ensuring e.g people can access their money.

I would guess that was how Wes Streeting was briefed (and then completely bungled in public comms).

ideally British banks would have their infrastructure located in Britain and therefore would not rely on undersea cables

Monzo (a major UK bank) use AWS and GCP. Hopefully their DCs don't fail in some way when losing access to the outside world but I would hazard a guess something goes wrong.

https://monzo.com/blog/tolerating-full-cloud-outages-with-mo...

Thats the point, the reasons the apps dont work would be the same reason the websites dont work. They are not work around, I think apps is just mentioned because 90% of people use them over the website

Banking apps don't depend on satellites, either.

I think this comment is the tech equivalent of "if they can't eat bread, let them eat cake"

That would imply that somehow a bank's website was a less accessible option than the app is, when the app is dependent on a mobile device as opposed to the website which is avilable on virtually any device with a browser including the same mobile device the app is installed on.

That’s beyond about 90% of the population.

It's not and it's also not uniquely a British thing either. Most of my friends and myself use our phones as wallets, in the US. The only time I use my physical cards is to pull cash from the ATM, ha.

In my household, we refer to coins as “parking tokens”.

I should start calling my jar of quarters the "laundry tokens" haha.

Why does a banking app require GPS?

- The UK is an island nation

- In event of all undersea cables being cut (which is a serious threat from Russia), satellite internet is your only option to have traffic leave the UK

- Unfortunately most major banks in the UK have very fragile infra that relies on foreign cloud hosts e.g AWS or Azure, which could well fall over in unexpected ways if the UK was cut off from the world

To be clear I disagree with Wes Streeting on a lot of this but the UK is in a uniquely precarious spot when it comes to how much is reliant on internet access.

Those cloud hosts like AWS have infrastructure in the UK and a UK bank's data should already be there for performance reasons (see https://docs.aws.amazon.com/global-infrastructure/latest/reg...).

I can't promise that amazon has taken into account the possibility of not being able to phone home to the US, but I would hope an undersea cable cut is something they'd have already given serious consideration to. Cuts do happen every so often. Scandinavia in particular has seen several disruptions because of cable cuts.

Either way, it's a bit of leap to go from "We need to jam other countries satellites to protect your banking app" to "but what if the UK lost every satellite, and every undersea cable was cut, and all the local data centers and internet infrastructure in the UK stopped working!"

Pretty sure there's no way current satellites can even get close to the bandwidth of satellite links.

Also isn't GPS always wireless ?

GPS relies on very very accurate timing. I would wager that the timing side of GPS is used more than the positioning side - but I have no way of confirming that.

Accurate timing is needed for banks accepting/sending payments (not just £5 for the window cleaner - more billions flowing every day).

That makes the issue worse as the actual app/device likely just relies on querying some NTP pool for accurate time. Then that would mean the actual stratum 1 servers are not working right.

I wouldn't be surprised if financial institutions use GPS for time keeping.

It's more accurate than getting it from a NTP pool.

Security - checking your not accessing it in UK one minute and australia the next minute

Some bank apps can block this access or request more validation

Data collection and targeted advertising

To track you

It doesn't. They're making shit up.

Just read the article and the conclusion was that they're using ground based systems to disrupt other countries satellites that are targeting the UK, not the one's that those countries depend on for their own internal services.

I guess the question is what does "targeting the UK" look like exactly? Flying over it? Flying over it with a camera?

They call out "tracking the movement of the UK's nuclear armed submarines or other sensitive military operations, such as those involving special forces." but that could mean they jam military satellites that are doing that, or it could mean they're jamming satellites that might be capable of doing that. What would that mean for something like a weather satellite?

Look, I'm a big believer in the importance of cash as an option in our society and the importance of keeping a supply on-hand for emergencies, but my mortgage company, employer, and a lot of other financial concerns are hours away from me, so yeah - my banking app is pretty fucking important to my daily life, and I don't even live in the UK where they have embraced digital banking even more.

It's light on the details of what they're disrupting and how, but there is zero suggestion in the article that they are disrupting digital banking, the Internet, or consumer services at all for for other countries.

I work for a UK fintech that is bank-adjacent, the backend for the apps and the website are the same.

Asbolutely. Tap to pay options, and the better ones have stopped pushing SMS for 2FA and they will prefer their own apps over third-party ones. JPMC, Capital One and E-Trade (now Morgan Stanley) definitely all do this.

Tap to pay is also doable with a credit/debit card, but paying via phone is a legitimately useful feature although also not remotely critical or something that would be world ending if it were disrupted.

If banking went down we'd have a hell of a time. It's not like I keep 6 months rent in cash on me.

The UK's largest export is banking (i.e. money laundering).

Hate to break this to you, but not all banking is money laundering. Not even all banking in the UK. Not even all banking exported from the UK.

You don't need another country to export your ordinary banking.

The US has ROCkN https://www.darpa.mil/research/programs/robust-optical-clock... but that seems to be just for military use

Not a strange thing at all. London sees itself as the competitor for the finance capital of the world. Why would you think it's strange?

TIL my banking app goes via satellite internet /s

I have no idea what that quote is trying to say...

As far as I know, the most common form of tracking in inkjet printers is in the ink itself. Companies add chemical markers to their inks which can show when the ink was made, and which company made it. The FBI collects that data in the International Ink Library https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Ink_Library

There are also databases cataloging the specific printing characteristics of various models of printers and research has demonstrated that it's possible to trace documents back to individual printers based on slight variations in how they print.

> If your product fails at its primary job because of some other priority its junk.

As far as the company is concerned it's primary job is personal data collection and being an ad platform. Anything else it does, like keeping your food cold, is an optional feature that can be remotely disabled at any time.

This is the most accurate definition of Samsung products I ever read.

"Never buy hardware that requires and app to use" has been my rule for a long time and I've never once regretted it. If the need for an app wasn't disclosed before purchase the item gets promptly returned.

It's true with basically all technology these days. We have a lot of cool and useful technology, but every company who will sell it to you has designed it so that the device you paid for is also being used by them to screw you over.

Microsoft might have killed FoxPro but even in windows 11 they still have the icon for it in moricons.dll where it will live presumably forever in every version of windows Microsoft ever releases.

My daughter loves foxes. When I made a desktop shortcut to allow her to easily hibernate her school laptop I knew right where to go to get an icon she'd like.

moricons.dll holds a very special place in my heart.

https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20250505-00/?p=11...

https://retrocomputing.stackexchange.com/questions/6705/what...

I love the detail in these things... icons today don't take advantage of the incredibly high resolution of modern screens, they're just wishy washy corporate logos

> Maybe banks and governments can secure themselves (and that’s a big IF) but it really feels like something fundamentally has to change.

The problem is that most companies don't care if they get hacked so long as the hackers are just taking data and not interfering in their ability to bill customers and make money.

They face zero meaningful consequences if their data gets leaked. The money they save by not taking security and employee/customer privacy seriously will more than pay for the year of "identity protection" they'd have to pay for (assuming the hack gets found out) anyway.

They actually care about ransomware, but most of the time that's also something they can comfortably buy their way out of. We've seen a lot of companies pay off ransomware gangs rather than invest in the kinds of robust backups that would make recovery possible/less painful than rewarding the hackers.

What's needed for change is regulation with actual teeth that makes not protecting their data either meaningfully expensive or criminal resulting in executives spending time behind bars for their negligence. Without that, things are only going to get worse, especially as companies experiment with using AI and increase dependence on third parties and cloud providers who themselves become rich targets.

That probably still won't help the FBI though. Our government isn't exactly big on holding themselves accountable or even prioritizing competency right now.

>We've seen a lot of companies pay off ransomware gangs rather than invest in the kinds of robust backups that would make recovery possible/less painful than rewarding the hackers.

Experienced Ransomware gangs will set the price target as something high, but not cost more than the price of being down a few days while you rebuild, making paying them seem like the most cost-effective solution

> Our government isn't exactly big on holding themselves accountable or even prioritizing competency right now.

Hasn't been since before Vietnam.