Electronic Financial Transactions….have we progressed much since the 90s?
With announcements such as this one in Computerworld and ZDNet Australia, I wonder how much we have progressed. An old story from the mid 90s is interesting reading today; from Wired (circa 1994).
Since then, a score of ideas and businesses have come and gone. The dot com bust probably did not help most but floored business models did not help either. PayPal must standout for how it has entrenched itself and looks like being around for a while but who else apart from the traditional guys (Visa, Mastercard, Amex etc) are really competing and have potential to be major players? (Even these established players have had quite a few “ideas” that just went nowhere).
The principles remain the same - pay someone for a product or service. In turn, accept money for a product or service. Did some of the start-up failures overly complicate this basic principle? On the flipside, a new standard/market leader could relatively easily oversimplify the process and from a security perspective, further open up a raft of security issues to endanger economies and open up new opportunities for financial and cybercrime. Not that there’s not enough of this already.
No answers here but keen on people’s opinions on this.
November 26th, 2007 at 4:51 pm
90’s no try the 70’s
http://www.cs.virginia.edu/~evans/cs551/saltzer/
“In reviewing the extent to which protection mechanisms are systematically understood (which is not a large extent) and the current state of the art, one cannot help but draw a parallel between current protection inventions and the first mass produced computers of the 1950’s. At that time, by virtue of experience and strongly developed intuition, designers had confidence that the architectures being designed were complete enough to be useful. And it turned out that they were. Even so, it was quickly established that matching a problem statement to the architecture–programming–was a major effort whose magnitude was quite sensitive to the exact architecture. In a parallel way, matching a set of protection goals to a particular protection architecture by setting the bits and locations of access control lists or capabilities or by devising protected subsystems is a matter of programming the architecture. Following the parallel, it is not surprising that users of the current first crop of protection mechanisms have found them relatively clumsy to program and not especially well matched to the users’ image of the problem to be solved, even though the mechanisms may be sufficient. As in the case of all programming systems, it will be necessary for protection systems to be used and analyzed and for their users to propose different, better views of the necessary and sufficient semantics to support information protection.”
D2 wants to take it ‘Back to Basics’ and wants to know what are the economic drivers to incentivise or force the market to fix such a messed up imbalance.
November 27th, 2007 at 12:26 am
SET was still being taught in Australian Universities 2 years after it died a quiet death. But it was still taught as something in place well after it was never implemented! AND tested in exams……so you wrote in the exam; “well here’s the right answer……blah blah blah….but here’s the answer you taught us Mr Acacamic…. Yes….SET is the way of the future….etc etc”.