Thank you?

It sounds like someone got ahold of a 6 year old copy of Google’s risk register. Based on my reading of the article it sounds like Google has a robust process for identifying, prioritizing, and resolving risks that are identified internally. This is not only necessary for an organization their size, but is also indicative of a risk culture that incentivizes self reporting risks.

In contrast, I’d point to an organization like Boeing, which has recently been shown to have provided incentives to the opposite effect - prioritizing throughput over safety.

If the author had found a number of issues that were identified 6+ years ago and were still shown to be persistent within the environment, that might be some cause for alarm. But, per the reporting, it seems that when a bug, misconfiguration, or other type of risk is identified internally, Google takes steps to resolve the issue, and does so at a pace commensurate with the level of risk that the issue creates for the business.

Bottom line, while I have no doubt that the author of this article was well-intentioned, their lack of experience in information security / risk management seems obvious, and ultimately this article poses a number of questions that are shown to have innocuous answers.

Everything is transient and eventually becomes shitty, sure, but I generally trust them because they’re able to make money just from people using the service. I don’t know how profitable they are, but I am reasonably certain that as the card issuer they get a cut of every transaction. Given that they aren’t issuing physical cards and have no obvious costs other than maintaining their platform, I don’t see a reason not to trust them in the medium term.

I’ve generally had good experiences with Privacy.com. It seems like a decent solution when I want something from a semi-reputable website.

I particularly enjoy the bit where cards are vendor-locked, which has been interesting to observe in a couple of instances where a site seems to have had their credit card db breached and the attackers turn around and try to use the card on another site, where it is inevitably denied, but I still get an email that shows which site got hacked and where the attackers were trying to use the information.

You lucky bastard. 😁

How many wrong guesses were you allowed before the system would lock your account?

I’ve always assumed you’d melt the gold down and create coins or other tradable sub-amounts of the gold that you could exchange for goods and services. If people are still peopling, they’ll still want a currency to transact with; if the dollar has failed then gold has a historical precedent that would probably make it easier to convince people to trade with you using it as a medium of exchange. It always seems like it’s more suited to be an emergency measure than a plan A to me.

You’re being too kind.

While I know where you’re coming from, there’s no path to ever making things better without kindness, empathy, and an open mind. Yes, their actions are draconian and misguided, steeped in superstition and myth, but if we simply give up entirely, we don’t have any hope of making the progress that we all seem to agree needs to be made.

I don’t have a silver bullet to solve the problem, I’m simply suggesting that those among us who are truly progressive should steadfastly seek to enroll others in our cause, rather than simply writing them off as a lost cause. Some people certainly are, others simply haven’t had issues explained to them in a way that fits into their world view. Good luck to us all on the path that lay ahead.