I hear that a lot but would that actually work? Sure, you will get a redhat level 1 support employee within the hour for a severity 1 ticket. But does the actual contract (which I don’t have access to) make any legally binding guarantees regarding the time-to-resolution? I seriously doubt it. Which is to say – your legal team will be SOL.

They also won’t take responsibility for any fuckup on your part if you install a bad driver or deviate from the admin guides in anyway (which is why Legal says for a minor issue you can’t apply a patch from StackExchange, you must raise a ticket and wait 3 business days for RedHat to tell you to apply the patch from StackExchange).
Getting phished definitely falls in this category BTW. Vendors may or may not help you but they certainly won’t accept any liability.

It’s still a good enough safety net to have for corporations with no trustworthy in-house expertise as vendors do have an incentive to keep their customers happy and most will help to the best of their abilities (which often isn’t as much as one might think…), but it’s hardly a legal panacea. If you need guarantees against catastrophic financial losses, that is what insurance is for.

Does not work around the necessity to get all major retail banks or the central bank on board, as they outline in their FAQ.

There’s no magic bullet, if you want to act as a payment processor you only have a handful of options:

• Do a bank wire (but it’s not pre-authorized so you’re just providing a deposit account for your customers, like PayPal)
• Use Visa/MC (which PayPal falls back to if you have no money in your deposit account)
• Use regional payment processors where they exist (e.g. Bancontact/iDEAL in the Benelux, which Stripe conveniently abstracts for the retailers; however most countries don’t have such a widespread alternative to American payment processors)
• Use physical cash
• Agree on a protocol to pre-authorize transfers on behalf of your customer with all banks your customers are likely to be using (in the EU you can do that with SEPA mandates, which PayPal does support as well)

In practice the EU is doing that last thing with Wero (which already has partnered with all major retail banks in Benelux+France+Germany) and Brazil successfully did the same with Pix. It’s not that the technical part is particularly hard, it’s that convincing the banking sector to adhere to and commercially promote a new standard is a long, expensive, arduous process that requires strong political connections.

And I want a unicorn for Christmas.

Look, right now I don’t even have a good reason to hope that Israel will be stopped before they finish their genocide. But step 1 is to get a permanent ceasefire in place. Whatever fantasies we might have beyond that is a moot point. But recognizing both parties as sovereign would go some way towards facilitating the terms and enforcement of that ceasefire.

If you’ve got a plan to achieve that and doesn’t involve genociding israel, shoot for it. But I don’t think “unrecognizing” Israel is a particularly productive step towards that.

In this context? Someone who is currently on the good side of the current apartheid system in Israel/Palestine.

Don’t play dumb with me, you know full well what I meant. If you have a point, make it.

So no Israel, just Palestine? That would leave Israelis a majority population in Palestine. Do you expect Israelis to magically not outvote the Palestinians, or are you proposing an autocracy or an apartheid system stripping Israelis of their voting rights?

I would also strongly suggest you do some reading on the factors leading up to the Rwandan genocide. A “just” peace isn’t enough; after generations of life under apartheid, there are no easy or quick paths to lasting peace. I won’t commit the hubris of pretending I have a definitive solution, and I think it’s important to underline that as outsiders to the conflict, the best we can do is offer to safeguard peace. That’s what the Two-State Solution was meant to do, that’s what arms sanctions are meant to do, that’s what the threat of economic retaliation would be meant to do (granted each with their own significant shortcomings). Denying the practical existence of either Israel or Palestine is antithetical to building a path towards lasting peace and a meaningful international effort towards safeguarding said peace.

For a practical example, assuming a peace treaty ever gets signed, sending UN Blue Helmets would be diplomatically easier if all parties involved recognized Palestine and Israel as sovereign states. Even if that all seems like a moot point right now what when neither Israel nor most Western nations are actually looking forward to peace.

So there are two interpretations I could make of your comment, one of which is more charitable than the other.

1. You are using the Chinese and Israeli playbook of weaponizing statehood recognition as a value judgement. That is profoundly problematic, both on a practical and a philosophical level. De-humanization should not be a tool we have to use on our enemies. Our moral high ground should speak for itself.
2. Your are dog-whistling for the genocide and/or deportation of all Israelis. In which case our conversation is done here.

To be clear, Israel is committing genocide and every single member of its government and of the IDF should be tried at The Hague. But laws and international order exist for a reason, and trying to circumvent them like this is a very bad look that Israel has been rightfully criticized for for decades.

The first part applies to… Most of the world outside of Europe?

The second part applies, to lesser degrees, to a large part of the world. Such as the USA.

What even is this argument. Israel’s not a state? Well fucking great, so following that logic which state should we hold responsible for Israel’s crimes then?

Europe’s colonial past is a whole-ass subject but amongst all the potential ways to try to make up for it, “stop formally recognizing former colonies because we fucked it up too badly” is one of the worst takes I’ve heard.

So do regular fiat payment processors that are beholden to citizens and not faceless shareholders. Wero and Pix for instance.

Democratic governments are supposed to safeguard your ability to exchange legal tender for legal goods and services. The fact that Visa/MC have a duopoly and a stranglehold on the entire online economy is a major governance failure that needs to be rectified ASAP.

Crypto goes a lot further and says no-one, not even the government, should be able to prevent a transaction from taking place. Not necessarily an invalid idea but it does come with some huge unanswered challenges, such as “what happens when someone makes 1B€ through fraud and refuses to hand over the coins” and “how do we even prevent large-scale fraud in the first place”.

Did magisk become a lot better at hiding from banking apps? Because people have been saying “it’s fine, just install magisk and use the option to hide it” but my experience is “it only works sometimes for some apps, otherwise you’re fucked or you will be fucked next time the app updates its countermeasures”. But that was a few years ago.

It’s an absolute dealbreaker though. Without reliable mobile banking and eID it’s very painful to do any kind of online payment or admin work.