Despite benefiting tremendously from crpyto, I don’t believe this narrative.
The article mentions the core problem: being your own bank is a HUGE risk. I can accept that risk and deal with complex security mechanisms I have to maintain to both protect my own bank and keep it accessible. But a good security guide for crypto is 20-30 pages and requires serious cryptographic understanding. Currently, I can’t expect that from average users.
Everything can be solved over time. Social recovery wallets and user-friendly hardware might become mainstream. But I don’t see that happening in the next 5-6 years, and I fully expect CBDCs to be far along in that time. Then, countries will be a lot less motivated to promote crypto for the unbanked.
I never thought about this, but yes, I think it can be MITM'ed exactly as you described. Same attack can probably be performed on the web, where Smart ID is also a sign in method.
Banking systems in Baltic countries use a unified 2FA system called SmartID[0]. When authenticating to bank via phone, they ask for two things: your user ID (which is not secret), and to authenticate using Smart ID, which means entering a PIN on your phone.
However, each PIN entry is accompanied by "code check": bank's support person says their 4 digit code, and you can verify that it matches on request for PIN screen. This neatly prevents someone pretending to be a bank during a call, because each PIN request uses a different "code check".
It's also very simplistic. In subject matter, in character archetypes, sometimes in acting, and most annoyingly, in editing (how it never trusts the viewer to remember what happened 25 minutes ago, so they show flashbacks to remind you).
So, China is the worst because of censorship (strictly controlled information), and US is in a bad spot because of too much misinformation (too little control on information).
Initial Safari design was quite different from what shipped today (beta process worked!). The main differences were: all the buttons where crammed into the address field, dropping the toolbar (shipping design returned the toolbar), and the address bar was floating over content, detached from the bottom. This caused many sites to break.
Current comments seem to be responding to the wrong topic. This article is not at all about energy use, but about mining hardware lifetime and resulting eWaste. Which seems like a legit argument, and harder to dismiss with "but it uses renewable energy".
What if 3 US citizens said "fuck no", and it was someone on much shakier ground who felt the pressure to say yes? Not a given at all, just makes it more likely.
The way I look at this, the UI would be only to speed things up / simplify things a little bit. It wouldn't try to do full error validation before execution. It's the job of a command-line app to fail with an error if wrong combination of flags or inputs was provided, and the UI might display that error in a pretty generic way.
It seems to me that a lot of these projects aim to deliver really "good" apps: native UI, table output, etc… Results are great, but the UI building complexity also becomes quite high.
I think that's the wrong goal. The goal should be really simple definitions and ok quality apps. Simple JSON (or XML, don't care).