I have a story about this; People had an HSM (in USB key form) which needed to be shared. The question came to create some elaborate piece of software for lending to prevent people from accidentally leaving it in their pockets and accidentally going home with it (which had happened a couple of times).
Instead I went to the hardware store across the street and bought the biggest (and cheapest) screwdriver I could find and attached it with some cord to the HSM. They never lost it afterwards.
In the Netherlands, before VISA, there already was a national debit card standard called PIN [1]. Sure, times have changed and it's probably not super easy, but it's also not going to be super hard.
Fun fact: until about a year ago it was not possible to pay using normal debit cards in most Dutch shops, you had to have a local card. I distinctly remember that AH, Vomar and Jumbo would typically reject foreign cards while Lidl and Dirk would typically accept them. Of course there were exceptions, but that was the rule of thumb.
Most Dutch people were unaware of the issue (because Dutch cards worked abroad), and those who were, were fully convinced that it's because Dutch system is objectively better (it wasn't, it was just a separate network). Then in like 2024/2025 Visa and Mastercard finally retired their special V-Pay and Maestro brands, and now most terminals in the Netherlands accept most normal cards.
> The system validating the authentication needs only to verify that the credentials are correct. If users want to use TPMs, HSMs,etc.. or none at all, that's up to them.
That's not up to the user in a corporate environment. If you use company supplied hardware keys for FIDO2 you don't want users using some software emulator on their phone because they think it's easier.
In the Netherlands Signal is getting traction. I talk to most people via Signal, about 85% of my messages are via Signal. Which includes my parents, and I didn't even put them on Signal.
Going to be interesting to see if these machines will be capable of running anything else than Windows. Or if they are either so incompatible (no UEFI, etc.) or so locked down they can't run anything else.
Even if that is the case, as per my comments, Windows is my main OS driver despite its flaws, and I have not found any ARM laptop that I would bother buying.
On the GNU/Linux side, the only thing has been Chromebooks, which aren't worth their money for the usual 4/8 GB, 126 GB, average SOC, most devices have.
I have seen few cases where UEFI was not actually usable on non-OEM configurations.
In fact, my current ASUS laptop did not allow me to install Windows until I have performed a sophisticated dance to update/flash some sort of low-level disk-related Intel bloatware. The laptop was sold without OS and was accompanied by a small paper referencing a website with instruction how to flash the firmware to actually make the laptop usable.
I'm sure you consider yourself a clever person, ever consider that the situation was more complex than your one line comment? That maybe it's possible the German banks were so happy to see a country that suddenly had the backup system of the European Central Bank, i.e. a country full of customers they could lend to, that they flooded it with offers of loans? That Greeks, like the sub-prime borrowers of the USA, thought "Well, if everyone is saying the future looks bright, why not borrow money and pay it back with the promised future income?".
That, if I knew my friend was going to be irresponsible with money but their parent was going to bail them out, why shouldn't I lend them money with interest? Is that irresponsible of me? Do I deserve to get all my money back, instead of suffering some of the losses as well? (In this highly simplicized example, I = German banks, my friend = the Greek society, their parents = the ECB. Not saying all of Greek society was irresponsible, but in aggregate, it was a risky "investment")
A lot of the Greek bailout could be summarized as the German government bailing out German banks with EU taxpayers' money...
Here's a long article about what happened when Germany got flooded with money in the 1870s: https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2015/02/michael-pettis-syriz... . It's longer than your one line, maybe you'd rather hold on to your more succint (and maybe more intelligent) summary...
There are plenty banks owned and operated within the EU. One bank folded for US pressure but when push comes to shove the EU can force banks in the EU to uphold EU rules and regulations.
That's not the case for digital infrastructure like Google Workspace, Google cloud, Office 365, AWS, etc.
> when push comes to shove the EU can force banks in the EU to uphold EU rules and regulations.
This made me realize that many people who are extremely critical of the power the EU has, have no idea how much that power is often protecting them.
This is not a dismissal of the fact that it's absolutely critical to stay vigilant about how that power is used. But it's quite clear that without that power, the US would've abused theirs way more within Europe.
When the US sanctioned Hong Kong’s Chief Executive in 2020, because of a law allowing extradition to China, no single bank was letting her open an account, including Chinese ones. She was receiving her salary fully in cash.
The EU compelling banks to do business despite US sanctions seems pretty unlikely even if relations continue to degrade.
Instead I went to the hardware store across the street and bought the biggest (and cheapest) screwdriver I could find and attached it with some cord to the HSM. They never lost it afterwards.
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