When the northeast blackout hit in 2003 in NYC I dont remember any panic. We still had house phones and they still worked in the blackout thanks to telcos being legally obligated to give a shit about reliability.
I stopped by a friends house and we then went on a walk. Some stores were open and cash was accepted. We hung out later that night and had a few beers. The sky was amazing as there was next to no light pollution. Next day was totally in the dark as well and again, no panic. More beers were enjoyed.
The choice to move to electronic everything without having to give a shit about reliability is a failure of modern government. Move fast and break society for a dollar.
> thanks to telcos being legally obligated to give a shit about reliability.
Yeah, they don't need to do that anymore. Around me, enough towers have battery backups that I can count on 2 hours of coverage when utility power goes out (if it goes out late at night or early morning, there's usually coverage until 6-7 am when people start waking up and use up the rest of the power). I don't have a real landline, but the telco DSL would drop instantly with utility power so I don't have big hopes and I wasn't willing to pay $60/month to find out.
Around when I moved, stores would pull out the credit card imprint machines, but those don't work anymore because cards are flat. Cash might work, and I've got some, but I don't think many people in my community do; people don't have cash for the snack shack we run at my kid's sports, so I doubt they have it for restaurants and stores either. And we get frequent 2-4 hour power outages, at least one, usually two or three per year; and ~ 24 hour outages every few years. The snack shack runs during summer where electricity is most reliable, but I doubt people stock up on cash in the fall and use it all up before spring/summer; they probably just don't have any.
> stores would pull out the credit card imprint machines, but those don't work anymore because cards are flat
It's the other way around: Cards are flat because a carbon imprint doesn't afford the merchant any payment guarantee by the card issuer anymore anyway. (In other words, the "floor limit" above which cards require electronic authorization is now zero.)
At that time merchants probably still checked the signature on the back of your card against your signature on a bill. These days nobody bat an eye when I use my unsigned card. I guess at that time a matching signature would give the merchant enough confidence to process the card offline.
The merchant's confidence is irrelevant if it's not backed by a guarantee of the scheme (effectively forcing the issuer) to pay even in case of fraud.
The people operating these imprinters are sales clerks and waitstaff, not graphologists or experts in detecting altered physical credit cards. The sophistication of fraudsters has also advanced, and as a result, a system that might have been good enough in a pinch 20+ years ago isn't necessarily good enough today.
That said, in my view there's no excuse to not leverage the physical chip present on effectively all credit and debit cards these days, which is technically capable of making limited autonomous spending decisions even with both the issuer and terminal offline in scenarios like this. It probably won't happen without regulatory pressure, though.
I started signing my cards with an all caps "ASK FOR PHOTO ID" 30 years ago. It raised a few questions when I would travel to the US and use them there, but was never refused a transaction.
That’s an urban legend, and stores are not required to actually do so. (And as far as I know, a thief could sign the receipt in all caps, ASK FOR PHOTO ID, and it would be a valid signature :)
In fact, even verifying the signature is no longer required in at least the US.
Signature verification also only solves cardholder authentication, not card authorization (i.e. figuring out if the card is funded, still valid etc.)
Please point at particular people and parties without wording it as "some politicians".
In Poland alone we have far right, a lot of centric parties and some more or less leftist parties.
The most popular (by popular votes) "right wing" PiS is not "right" for the most part for several years now, had a Marxist/socialist prime minister and gave so many social benefits away to grab votes that it made "left" blush. They are "right" only on the level needed to get church-goers votes.
And, with antisemitist agenta, PiS was buying Pegasus subscriptions from NSO to spy on opposition and unvafourable journalists just in hopes that they'll get something from it.
So - which "particular politicians" are you quoting?
2003 was over two decades ago. Most people didn’t have mobile phones let alone smart phones. I’ve been in Lisbon today and it’s surreal being 100% cut off from friends and family back home and a big relief power is back on, we’ve become very used to and reliant on seamless instant connection. Our mindsets and how we live our lives with that instant communication is totally different to 22 years ago.
> 2003 was over two decades ago. Most people didn’t have mobile phones let alone smart phones.
Maybe it depends on the country, but my memory of 2003 is almost every non-elderly adult I knew (in my own upper-middle class milieu) already had a mobile phone. Not a smart phone as we understand the term today, but a lot of phones back then had primitive smarts that are now largely forgotten, such as WAP/WML browsers (which maybe not many people used, but I certainly remember using one), JavaME applets (vaguely remember using them too-maybe post-2003, but higher end 2003 phones definitely could run them), vendor-specific mobile app formats such as Symbian
It must be. Most people I know got their first cell phone in 1997. That year over a few months it went from almost noone has a cell phone, to almost everyone having one.
That sounds like the sensible reaction, at the time at least.
It's interesting to think about and realize how much things have changed now though, and how reliant people are on everything, and especially their tiktoks etc. working all the time.
Some of the panic is likely related to the war in Europe too, and especially the general talk about war
Back in the 90's I worked at Nortel and visited a modest size Captive Office in Los Angeles. It supported maybe 20k or 30k people. I was amazed by the field of lead-acid batteries, 1.5m high x 50m^2.
Like 10-15 years ago before VOIP I sold internet/landline services door to door for a summer. My biggest selling point was explaining to people (usually who had children) that the VOIP service they switched to would not work in an emergency where power wasn't available... Worked like a charm to get people to switch back.
I stopped by a friends house and we then went on a walk. Some stores were open and cash was accepted. We hung out later that night and had a few beers. The sky was amazing as there was next to no light pollution. Next day was totally in the dark as well and again, no panic. More beers were enjoyed.
The choice to move to electronic everything without having to give a shit about reliability is a failure of modern government. Move fast and break society for a dollar.