lxgr

For going back to cash, I mean.

Only for unauthorized payments, i.e. for transactions you did not consent to.

This does not cover products/services not received at an online merchant, for example, just like how you can’t retroactively cancel a check. Cards do allow chargebacks in this situation.

This is not allowed in west as credit cards require same price as cash transactions

Network rules disallowing customer surcharges have actually become prohibited by law in quite a few places.

Do you have any examples?

If you call FIOS the "bare minimum", what is an acceptable connection to you? In my experience, it's one of the best ISPs I've ever had.

Installation alone was phenomenal. This is probably largely downstream of NYC allowing a sprawl of overhead wiring in many neighborhoods, but I was deeply impressed by an installation team building out an entirely new fiber line to our apartment within less than 48 hours of putting in the order, for free, climbing through backyards and drilling exterior walls and everything.

They did physically cut the existing Spectrum cable to the apartment for absolutely no reason, so maybe playing fair competitively isn't quite there yet, but all in all, the dynamic between the two providers seems to create very good outcomes for end users there.

Of course, if your landlord does not allow any of that (common if you live in a larger building in NYC) and you're stuck with a monopoly, your experience can be miserable, so this probably really only works as a strategy if you enforce access and accept overbuild as an outcome.

Are you arguing that a country as large and wealthy as the US can only solve one problem at a time or that fast, affordable Internet access is somehow a luxury problem?

Smaller territory is an often-repeated claim for why any particular infrastructure strategy doesn't transfer to the US, but that makes no sense to me as most numbers can just be scaled up and still make sense.

Density is probably closer to the real reason, but I suspect the big one is homogeneity: Residential internet connections are regulated in so many different ways across the US, so any comparison would better pick one or a few representative markets and then examine these.

What exactly is the point of the LLM-generated infographics in this article? I don't have a problem with LLM-generated content in principle, but the bare minimum an author has to do is to check them for trivial errors such as duplicated labels, inconsistent diagrams etc., and just the first one falls short at that.

Maybe more importantly, I don't understand what it's supposed to tell me: It mentions that "duplication is inefficient", yet shows no example of duplication. It shows various levels of building density, yet does nothing with it (and neither does the article), leaving me wondering if I'm missing something yet again. Then for the horizontal split: It looks like it's trying to either contrast/compare water and communications infrastructure, but they just look the same, so why present both?

The software running on the smartcard? You write that yourself, and hopefully your security processes are good. The nice thing about smartcards is that the trusted computing base is massively smaller than that of a regular operating system.

If you disallow installing applications post-issuance (which is probably a good idea for ID cards), you don't even have to worry about VM runtime integrity either, as there will be only your application running on the card.

Smartcards have attestation too.

I think Iridium SBD, which is what a lot of IoT applications are based on, already worked with the old constellation, which is actually quite impressive given that it doesn't seem easy to retrofit that onto an in-space switched network.

Not offshore though, as they only have domestic spectrum.

There's a relatively simple and much more open and secure solution to this: Make physical EU ID cards the attestation source, and require users to tap them against their phone for critical operations (high-value signatures, login on a new device or after repeated authentication failures etc).

That would solve the open hardware/OS "problem" on the device entirely, as there's no trusted hardware or OS signature required anymore. You could argue that this adds the possibility of a MITM attack on the phone (since you don't know what you sign anymore or who you are providing with your PIN, as the card has no display and no PIN pad), but I wonder if mitigating this is worth all the lock-in concerns that phone attestation goes hand in hand with.

As it is, all EU ID cards already have mandatory strong cryptographic authentication, but in a form that's usable only for in-person ID checks (under the corresponding ICAO biometric identity document standards), not for remote ID attestation. This is frustratingly close, but not what's needed.

Kind of: Phones will probably need some Iridium-specific RF hardware (unless their existing baseband and amplifiers happen to cover the band it uses), but the baseband and signaling stack won’t be proprietary anymore if I understand it correctly.

Several mass-market phones already are IoT-NTN compatible, e.g. Google’s Pixel line.

Definitely, and I think GP raises a valid point: Without beamforming, there’s no point in having more than one station covering the same area, whether terrestrial tower or satellite-based spot beam.

And while 4G and beyond use some mild device-side beamforming, it’s a whole different ballpark than parabolic antennas or phased arrays in terms of gain.

1. Iridium uses frequencies fairly close to GPS (~1.6GHz). 2. Iridium uses cylindrically-polarized transmissions (like GPS), which enable compact omnidirectional helical antennas

Which part of my argument is this an objection to?

Are you saying that using circular polarization, the same would be possible in the Ku or even Ka bands? Because that’s definitely not the case due to the different aperture/gain tradeoff vs. L-band, and that’s my point.

This is AI slop?

Did I say anything incorrect there or do you just not like my writing?

No, the point of using an electrically-steered beam antenna is that it improves SNR, so that you are not bandwidth limited.

Sure, but my point was: At low frequencies, you can steer to become more efficient per bit, but at high frequencies you almost have to, as you’re sending energy in suboptimal directions otherwise. And then if you’re already steering, why not use a less-scarce band?

Yes, for more than one satellite covering the same area on the ground with a spotbeam on the same frequency at the same time to make sense, you inherently need steering/beamforming.

That's why Iridium has the constellation planned out so that you never have more satellites in the sky than strictly necessary for full coverage on the equator (where satellite density is lowest), and outer spot beams get turned off progressively as the satellites approach the poles as they'd only create interference without increasing bandwidth due to the lack of terminal-side steering.

Now I wonder if they already changed that for the second generation sats, given that there are some steered terminals available that could probably make good use of the extra satellite density near the poles, which is also an area underserved by geostationary beams?

Yep, it's one of only two satellite communications systems certified for both GMDSS/SOLAS and aviation operation and safety (ATC) use cases, and the only global one at that (the other one being Inmarsat/Viasat, which does not work near the poles due to being GEO based).

It took Iridium over a decade to get that certification; availability and political concerns are probably much larger in that segment than for e.g. home or passenger entertainment Internet use.

In the medium and long term, I can see the high-throughput LEO players eat Iridium's lunch for aviation, though; small antenna size (and the lower drag that goes with it) used to be their main advantage over Ku and Ka band offerings, but now most airlines want passenger connectivity anyway, and once you have that, the pressure to just get that certified for safety (with HF as backup, which you need anyway as far as I know) is going to be significant. The case for shipping is probably similar and even stronger.

How much market is there for people that just want low speed connectivity from the middle of nowhere?

Militaries generally find this capability pretty relevant, among others, and they have deep pockets. They were the ones to bail out Iridium the first time around, after all.

All of it. You can't really get around physics.

Iridium has historically targeted low-power, omnidirectional terminals (antennas can be larger at lower frequencies without requiring steering than at higher frequencies).

They recently had some forays into steered, high-bandwidth antennas with their Certus line and their second-generation satellites that now allow native packet switching (the first gen was circuit-switched at 2.4 kbps only), but that brings you into the bandwidth-limited regime, and is honestly just a waste of scarce L-band spectrum and much better served by all the Ku- and Ka-band LEO competitors.

It's going to be interesting to see if Rocketlab start also serving that market, like some of their main competitors already are.

They didn't circumvent phone antennas being largely omnidirectional (unlike VSAT or phased arrays, which are highly directional) and as a result having much lower gain, they just work with it, just like Iridium, Globalstar, Inmarsat, Thuraya, and all the other early players in what's now called "direct to device".

The market is as bimodal as ever on the device side: On one side, you have small, battery-powered, (mostly) omnidirectional device antenna, portable devices that mainly operate in the L-band, which works much better in these conditions; on the other side, you have highly sophisticated, steered, high power (dozens of watts) antenna arrays operating in the Ku or Ka band.

On the satellite side, both can be served by the same satellites, as has been the case for e.g. Inmarsat's I-6 series and Starlink's direct-to-cell capable satellites (I believe these all include Ku-band coverage as well).

Iridium is launching 5G standards-based direct-to-device capabilities this year: https://www.iridium.com/services/iridium-ntn-direct

I think a more sane approach would to require every copyright takedown to require a court order.

In a country with an efficient legal system, maybe…

Requiring the claimant to put something at stake (make it a nominal deposit you get back in case of either no challenge or the case actually going to court) seems more realistic, but I’m not holding my breath for a reform of the law to that extent.

you use binary floating point where a value of 1.0d = 0.000001 dollars

Is that actually better than just defining one dollar as 1.0? In my (pretty limited) understanding of floats, this doesn't seem to add any precision or prevent any edge cases.

Financial applications need user interface elements too, and doing these poorly has caused quite some [1] harm in the past...

[1] https://financialregulation.linklaters.com/post/102j8af/the-...

Why wouldn't I take it personally if some corporation decides that blocking their existing customers based on purported geographic location (VPNs exist, people travel etc.) is acceptable collateral damage in their presumably largely ineffective attempts to block scrapers?

Too many American websites these days put random geoblocking in place.

What’s even more frustrating is when it happens without any explanation in mobile apps via breaking a few specific APIs.

Just yesterday I was struggling with a bank/fintech that would send me through KYC every time I’d open the app from abroad as an existing user, which would then hang forever. Using a US VPN, everything would work normally. Good thing fraudsters don’t have access to US VPNs…

I think you’re mixing up clouds here…

It’s really annoying, but even if Cloudflare/AWS etc. offer a big “block all access from abroad/evil GDPR abroad/…”, I feel like the site owner is still the one to blame for pressing it.

Usually that, but in binary, which causes lots of headaches for financial math.

Ideally it’s not, but I’ve seen it leak so often that I’d rather be safe than sorry.