Thin end of the wedge

[Bruce Tuncks]

i always reckoned the "11th hr" stuff was too theatrical to like. What about the poor buggers who died on the tenth hour?

[nomadpete]

5 minutes ago, old man emu said:

Until the electronic system that cashless runs on either has a major disruption caused by either an unexpected software error, or a physical component failure, or, MOST SERIOUS OF ALL, an intentional cyber attack by either a nut case or enemy nation.

The point was raised by the Optus network failure. And the vulnerability  of our retail monetary system due to relying totally on a data network. Lose the network for a week and most folk run out of food.

 

I'm not sure if the POS equipment can even open the till without  network connectivity? This could have prevented about half of all retail outlets from doing business even with cash? (Jerry?)

 

But certainly those Optus connected businesses  couldn't  do cashless without the network.

 

So as more businesses put "Cash Only" signs, and remove their cash handling gear, the greater the risk of severe consequences to the public when a network failure occurs.

[old man emu]

Well, there had to be a time set, but why it had to be mid-morning is inexplicable. If the troops knew that they were to put down their arms at 11:00 am, ending the war, having defeated  Germany, why would they bother to continue fighting? 

 

Henry Nicholas John Gunther (June 6, 1895 – November 11, 1918) was an American soldier and possibly the last soldier of any of the belligerents to be killed during World War I. He was killed at 10:59 a.m., about one minute before the Armistice was to take effect at 11:00 a.m.

 

Obviously those who had been wounded earlier and died after that hour should be considered, but I think the concept of "the last person to die" relates to death in action.

[Marty_d]

12 minutes ago, nomadpete said:

The point was raised by the Optus network failure. And the vulnerability  of our retail monetary system due to relying totally on a data network. Lose the network for a week and most folk run out of food.

 

I'm not sure if the POS equipment can even open the till without  network connectivity? This could have prevented about half of all retail outlets from doing business even with cash? (Jerry?)

 

But certainly those Optus connected businesses  couldn't  do cashless without the network.

 

So as more businesses put "Cash Only" signs, and remove their cash handling gear, the greater the risk of severe consequences to the public when a network failure occurs.

I'd be surprised if tills don't have manual override. 

There's a lot of vulnerability in our food supply.  I'm more worried about impacts to the power grid, transport system etc. Without power or trucks the food is not available at all, if the EFT system were down for a few days I reckon shops would have people signed up on a tab.

 

I do think it's funny (and slightly confusing sometimes) that "Point Of Sale" and "Piece Of Shit" share the same acronym.

[old man emu]

EFTPOS - Electronic Funds Transfer Point Of Sale

[red750]

As previously mentioned, donations to buskers/beggars becomes problematic. What about passing the plate in church? At the Men's Shed, the co-ordinator collects the daily fees in cash. He would have to get an EFTPOS machine.

[red750]

This topic has nothing to do with Remembrance Day.

[nomadpete]

2 hours ago, Marty_d said:

I'd be surprised if tills don't have manual override. 

True, the old ones that I used had one.

However, that in itself does not allow the business to deal in cash. The point of sale would need a paper receipting system  to document each transaction. And if your customers (assuming they had some cash socked away someplace for emergencies) present a $50 note for a loaf of bread, do you think they will say "keep the change"?

 

So every eftpos only

store would need a cash float and receipt book in the back room. They don't.

 

The weakness in the system is not actually the cashless concept. It is in the high risk of having a single point of failure (internet integrity) is that collapse of network paralyses the whole economy and even the food chain. The unlikely solution is to provide duplication of the whole internet infrastructure

[nomadpete]

2 hours ago, Marty_d said:

I do think it's funny (and slightly confusing sometimes) that "Point Of Sale" and "Piece Of Shit" share the same acronym.

When they first came to my cash register, the acronym was a synonym

[onetrack]

One more good EMF event like the Carrington Event, and we'll be right back to the early days of the colony, and totally reliant on barter.

[facthunter]

It used to be known as ARMISTICE DAY. CASH out of the Senate but keep it everywhere else. Didn't OPTUS just make it a no brainer? . It's not that long ago the IF an employer wanted to Pay by cheque there HAD to be some near  facility to permit it to be cashed in without question or delay. Why give the Banks any more control over you than they have already? They've proven themselves untrustworthy.  Nev

[onetrack]

Nothing proves Nev's last sentence more, than the article on the ABC this morning, about the rotten tactics indulged in by the Commonwealth Bank, to stall any investigation into its shonky practices.

 

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2023-11-11/the-dirty-tricks-the-cba-used-to-silence-whistleblowers/103086260

[Bruce Tuncks]

I got the grandkids to take an interest in arithmetic by pointing out that if you couldn't count properly, you could hand over a $50 note and get change for a $5 note.

It impressed them to know that there were indeed examples of this happening.

[nomadpete]

6 hours ago, onetrack said:

One more good EMF event like the Carrington Event, and we'll be right back to the early days of the colony, and totally reliant on barter.

And what useful things might the hungry city dwellers be offering the farmers in exchange for some milk to put in their latte?

[nomadpete]

All the IT experts put a lot of careful design into the ends of the computing systems - servers, cloud storage, customer systems, etc. And these areas are where the most money  goes, and is most visible to everybody.  It is fairly well sorted.

 

But there is a massive invisible complex of technology between say a customer terminal and a bank computer. The IT guys just know that it all goes into a RJ45 socket at one end and comes out of another RJ45 at the bank.

 

ALL devices, whether mobile phones,  POS terminals, network servers, etc, are interconnected by digital broadband telecommunications networks. These rely heavily on accurate timing signals without which any of the thousands of links will shut off. Synchronising of transmission clocks is maintained by master  cesium standard atomic clocks and coordinated around the world by GPS satellites. Local clocks in each digital repeater or multiplexer in the network are locked to this and are accurate to millipoofteenths of a second. They can take days to resynchronise if they drift off due to loss of master signal.

 

The whole digital network can crash if timing is lost.

 

So if banks cannot access any cloud stored info, or the POS goes deaf, nobody can withdraw cash, nor buy anything. Nobody can write to the bank, the newspapers, or their MP to complain. Etc, etc.

 

Fortunately  these clocks take days to drift in the event of loss of master. Eg GPS satellites failure.

 

But it remains a single (system) point of failure that would be very serious.

 

Probability = low

Consequences  = catastrophic.

[nomadpete]

So I keep some cash in the house in case my bank account gets hacked. So I can still buy stuff until I sort it out. But I don't  fret about low probability doomsday possibilities.

[willedoo]

3 hours ago, Bruce Tuncks said:

I got the grandkids to take an interest in arithmetic by pointing out that if you couldn't count properly, you could hand over a $50 note and get change for a $5 note.

It impressed them to know that there were indeed examples of this happening.

Back in the 80's when I used to do some work in the Kimberleys, I heard stories of unscrupulous shopkeepers ripping off the tribal people. A lot of people knew nothing of denominations; money was just money at their level of education.  If they handed over a $50 note and got 50 cents change for a packet of chips, they didn't know any different. A bloke I worked with sprung a shopkeeper doing it one day and roused on him. The shopkeeper very sheepishly then gave the Aboriginal person the right change.

 

Back then I thought that in another generation's time their education would be better. I thought the lack of any English language and basic counting skills was a dying thing.  Unfortunately not so. There's still young people in their 20's who can barely speak English and their knowledge of mathematics consists of 'maybe one, maybe two', meaning any number.

[Jerry_Atrick]

11 hours ago, nomadpete said:

I'm not sure if the POS equipment can even open the till without  network connectivity? This could have prevented about half of all retail outlets from doing business even with cash? (Jerry?)

I honestly don't know.. I haven't worked with retail systems since the mid 90s at the Toronga Zoo (nickname for then Coles Myers' headquarters in Toorononga, Melbourne). My last gig with Ralp Lauren was 2003, and that was the wholesale. But I would imagine there would be some manual release of the drawers. The problem, as pointed out above, how much float would be in there?

 

Not sure about Aus, nor even London come to think about it, but I was rather annoyed when a grannie in front of me was counting her money to hand over to the checout operator. When I finally got to be servied, I joked about who uses money. The response was an emphatic it is still quite popular.

 

1 hour ago, nomadpete said:

The IT guys just know that it all goes into a RJ45 socket at one end and comes out of another RJ45 at the bank.

The postfrom wehich this quote is taken  is a really good synopsis of the global digital network, those the above needs to be slightly corrected. I have been to our on-premises data centre, and the pipes coming in from teh telco are not just twisted pair, but fibre and straight to ATM and STM multiplexes. And there is a lot of redundancy - four sets of pipes from four different cable operators, although the co-miongle in the broadband cloud.

 

I, too am concerned about the general movement of large-scale corproate and government services to cloud providers (these are not telcos that provide the network, but huge data centres that provide and allow scaling of the computer hardware, software, etc). These create massive almost-single points of failure. And whether anyone cares to admit it or not, a dedicated pipe is needed from the data centre to your office to maintain anything like the response of on-premises (with remote hot-disaster recovery sites) computing.

 

Not long after I joined financial services in London, someone drove a backhoe or similar through a trunk cable near Liverpool street. It brought trading in the city to its knees for about 5 hours.

Edited November 11, 2023 by Jerry_Atrick

[old man emu]

I believe that Google has a massive server farm near Liverpool (which is near Bankstown Airport) that deals with a lot of this digital stuff for big business. Not that Google is doing it to hack your TAB account, it's just that Google has the experience running digital stuff. Anyway, imagine the catastrophic effect on the economy if a "smart bomb" was deployed against the building.

 

As for basic food supplies, the butcher, the baker and green grocer could keep operating on a cash only basis for the consumer, provided that the wholesalers were prepared to simply keep issuing invoices and accept payment in Promissory notes.

 

The biggest problem for the small business using cash would be getting young cashiers who could calculate the correct change to be returned. After all these days 

1 hour ago, willedoo said:

There's still young people in their 20's who can barely speak English and their knowledge of mathematics consists of 'maybe one, maybe two', meaning any number.

 

[nomadpete]

My apology, Jerry. No offence intended by the RJ45 comment. Of course most major data delivery is via fibre. But most IT people in Aus are hired under the general umbrella title of "telecommunications specialist" which is a gross misnomer. Until now I haven't met a IT specialist who had any idea what happens between one access point and another. I discovered this when I applied for telecommunications jobs and found they actually wanted IT skills.

[nomadpete]

3 minutes ago, old man emu said:

Anyway, imagine the catastrophic effect on the economy if a "smart bomb" was deployed against the building.

More probably a careless backhoe operator pulling up a bunch of fibres somewhere down the road.

 

Note I expect they would have several diverse service providers on different fibre, just in case there is a failure.

 

In reality, I have seen some instances where the diverse comms routes share a common pit or even share a common duct! I know where Murphy would make the failure.

[nomadpete]

9 minutes ago, old man emu said:

As for basic food supplies, the butcher, the baker and green grocer could keep operating on a cash only basis

Remember also a secondary effect - most retail businesses use the POS input for stock control.  Automating reordering, and running their BAS for GST, etc. That would be lost.

 

So an prolonged loss of data will take a lot of manual typing up of the non electronic stock movement, money movement, accounting.

 

That assumes they wrote a paper receipt for each sale, including barcodes.

 

A potentially big impact on  a small business.

 

Not much issue for butcher but would be for retail sellers.

 

[old man emu]

I wanted to infer that people would abandon supermarkets because of the inconveniences you point out, and go to the small retailer whose business inventory control did not rely on digital inputs.

[Jerry_Atrick]

1 hour ago, nomadpete said:

My apology, Jerry. No offence intended by the RJ45 comment.

No need to apologise - no offence was taken - apologies if my response came back as a rebuke - 'twas not intended. More to allay peoples' fears that the digitial banking system nay be literally hanging from a thread. But I do get your sentiment..

 

FWIW, one bank I worked for had a more than 2 second inaccurancy to the atomic clocks. They were fined a not-insignificant amount for that faux par.

 

And yes, a lot of telco workers don't even know what goes on in the backbone network, and to be honest, these days, apart from a conceptual understanding, neither do I.

Edited November 11, 2023 by Jerry_Atrick

[Jerry_Atrick]

1 hour ago, old man emu said:

believe that Google has a massive server farm near Liverpool (which is near Bankstown Airport) that deals with a lot of this digital stuff for big business.

Google is number three in the cloud, behind Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure. And I believe they are quite a way behind the big two. Anyone can get the benefit of AWS for free (with some restrictions and some services not free); Azure is far more restrictive. Google obviously provide mission critical services as well.

 

When I was in the game, there were data centres you could purchase computing power where their physcial location was secret. And others, in the US, boasted that their data centres were designed to withstand an all out nuclear war. I used to think the last thing anyone would want to worry about was where their case of Chateua La Ha Ha wine was in a nuclear war.