What Ukrainian software and hardware engineers are achieving, with very significant European support, is nothing short of inspirational. Within four years, under very tough circumstances, they have invented and deployed at immense scale all kinds of systems and technologies that previously didn't exist, allowing them to conduct warfare via remote control and spare their very limited manpower as much as possible. The level of innovation doesn't get the recognition or study it deserves.
I have a database on my local machine with 200 million records in one table and 2 other related tables. Even the most complex queries take about 1 minute to vibe code and paste into the DuckDB browser playground UI and always less than 5 seconds to return the result. For a humble product manager it feels like a superpower.
When you think that the Norman successors still own the vast majority of England to this day, cramming the Anglo-Saxons into rabbit hutches on high density estates, very.
My guess is that the current administration has deleted all internal data from the CIA World Factbook to prevent any attempt to revive it in future. Would be amazing if the next US administration were to use this archived data to rebuild it.
In the EU countries with local instant bank payments schemes they are much more popular with consumers than credit cards when paying attrusted merchants, who in turn pay around a quarter in fees of what they'd have to pay for cards. No need for expensive credit cards schemes in Europe any more.
Key part of what you wrote: "as to the identity and location of aliens" - so whatever claim they have to access health information applies to aliens. The big question is: are they harvesting citizens' health records illegally as part of this effort, and if so, when do those responsible see jail time?
I would add the nuance that the possibility of controlled migration from one versioned API to another should be right from day one, not necessarily the first API version.
I believe that means you are more or less setting yourself up as a payment facilitator, meaning you and your other merchants will be kicked off Stripe at any time if too many of your merchants misbehave. Is your compliance team ready for that?
This should be treated with absolute top priority by the police, with the same level of forensic attention as a terrorist attack. If everybody associated with the crime, including those providing, accepting, storing, transporting and dumping the waste are found an prosecuted to the absolute extent of the law, it would be a very good precedent and deterrent against future repetitions.
Why would merchants fill out docx files? They would submit an online form with their business, director and UBO details, that data would be stored in the Checkout.com merchants database, and any supporting documents like passport scans would be stored in a cloud storage system, just like the one that got hacked.
If it was just some internal PDFs used by the onboarding team, probably they wouldn't make such a big announcement.
It's not just business data though - usually it will include ultimate beneficial owner and directors' passports, tax ID, etc. So there is a risk of identity theft there of potentially some very wealthy individuals.
"The system was used for internal operational documents and merchant onboarding materials at that time"
To me it seems most likely that this is data collected during the KYC process during onboarding, meaning company documents, director passport or ID card scans, those kind of things. So the risk here for at least a few more years until all identity documents have expired is identity theft possibilities (e.g. fraudsters registering their company with another PSP using the stolen documents and then processing fraudulent payments until they get shut down, or signing up for bank accounts using their info and tax id).