The point more is, this is one primary mechanism to spy on the populous. Primarily via 5-eyes, which means Americans are buying this data to spy on UK citizens.

I think they are pointing out it's an oxymoron. There's nothing to secure if the service itself is insecure and leaking..

Digital banking might be unavoidable but what did your app do that you couldn't have possibly done via your banks website?

We’re not at nor heading towards peace. Pax Americana is failing. There isn’t a hippies-and-unicorns exist from that structure, not in a disorderly way.

I didn't realise only people at war used cash

Rather the opposite. Peacetime is the only good opportunity to promote robustness and refuse toleration of vulnerable systems.

If you allow your banks and courts to be hacked freely by an adversary, then you can be manipulated into losing control of the escalation ladder.

> All of which...depend on the same communication infrastructure that the app does.

That being the internet, which in the vast majority of cases doesn't depend on satellites either. Wifi, fiber, coax, and copper would continue to work just fine.

> I remember when I went camping a bit ago my phone died and I was unable to unfreeze my card.

Not even over the phone? I'd be furious. Cell phones die, get lost, get stolen, get run over, etc. I'd personally hate to feel so entirely dependent on my phone being there 100% of the time. I don't even always carry mine with me.

I’m in my early 30s and I don’t think I’ve ever written one. When I had my first bank account when I was maybe 10 I was given a cheque book, I don’t know where I’d get one now. I did recently receive a cheque for $12.99 or something like that from an Amazon settlement that I think is probably legitimate. Apparently Monzo can cash a cheque through their app so I’ll try that at some point. I’m guessing it won’t work with an international one though.

There are several companies in the UK offering cheque cashing services so I presume somebody there is getting them.

No

Or checks?

Presumably it'd be the loss of mobile service and/or GPS that would cause every banking app in the UK to fail, but I'm a bit skeptical that either one of those is a strict requirement.

> not being funny - if the internet goes out how does a website make this better?

The internet for most people doesn't depend on banking apps, or satellites. Wifi would still work great. If the internet actually did go out everywhere, how would an app help you?

That would imply that somehow a bank's website was a less accessible option than the app is, when the app is dependent on a mobile device as opposed to the website which is avilable on virtually any device with a browser including the same mobile device the app is installed on.

I should start calling my jar of quarters the "laundry tokens" haha.

Those cloud hosts like AWS have infrastructure in the UK and a UK bank's data should already be there for performance reasons (see https://docs.aws.amazon.com/global-infrastructure/latest/reg...).

I can't promise that amazon has taken into account the possibility of not being able to phone home to the US, but I would hope an undersea cable cut is something they'd have already given serious consideration to. Cuts do happen every so often. Scandinavia in particular has seen several disruptions because of cable cuts.

Either way, it's a bit of leap to go from "We need to jam other countries satellites to protect your banking app" to "but what if the UK lost every satellite, and every undersea cable was cut, and all the local data centers and internet infrastructure in the UK stopped working!"

Pretty sure there's no way current satellites can even get close to the bandwidth of satellite links.

Also isn't GPS always wireless ?

That makes the issue worse as the actual app/device likely just relies on querying some NTP pool for accurate time. Then that would mean the actual stratum 1 servers are not working right.

I wouldn't be surprised if financial institutions use GPS for time keeping.

It's more accurate than getting it from a NTP pool.

Tap to pay is also doable with a credit/debit card, but paying via phone is a legitimately useful feature although also not remotely critical or something that would be world ending if it were disrupted.