NaibofTabr

In a practical sense it's true that most businesses can't afford to not accept Visa & MasterCard.

This is not a choice made by banks. The credit payment networks are not banks and are not owned and operated by banks.

A business does have the choice to accept other forms of payment besides Visa & MasterCard, which is the point I was making. If you want to use a different method to pay for something, the business has to accept that form of payment.

So, I'm not assuming that you or the person I replied to are in the US specifically.

But in the context of the US, if you (generally) chose not to vote in the 2024 election then you are guilty of doing nothing to prevent the atrocities committed by the Trump administration, when you in fact had the opportunity to do something - which is to say that you are guilty of negligence.

If you encouraged others to not vote then you are complicit in the actions of the Trump administration, because you helped put them in power.

There is no "blame-shifting game" being played here, as there is no need to shift anything. The blame is direct, valid, and undeniable.

Only toxic positivity in the building!

Congratulation! You have high-roaded the environment into the dumpster! You are complicit in all the actions of the election winners, because you helped put them in office!

May all your moralizing keep you warm at night.

The problem with answering this question is that on the consumer side you don't really make this choice. The businesses that you pay for things at make this choice.

Visa and Mastercard are payment networks. The businesses that accept them are renting access to those payment networks, because ultimately accepting those forms of payment helps them make more money.

There are other options for payment systems, but for you to use them requires that the business you want to buy something at accepts those options.

There's no place like 127.0.0.1

Anti-protecting-terrorism-kids

The easiest way to make sure your product works with everything else is to lower all the barriers, set all the defaults to the least secure options, make the configuration as open as possible.

If you don't do this, you have to provide lots of end-user support to your customers to help them configure your product so that it works for their environment and use case, which is expensive and time-consuming.

On the other side of the problem, the sysadmin that has to get the product (that the middle manager bought) working in their environment doesn't have time to dig through all the documentation (if it exists) and learn how to configure the product securely while still interoperating with everything else, because management wants it working yesterday.

As a result, everything is Swiss cheese forever, because only the minimum configuration work required to get something working is done. The people who make purchasing decisions don't care about security, and the people who do care are overworked and understaffed. Even after something bad happens management still doesn't care, beyond the limits of liability.

There will never be security in these systems except whatever is forced by government regulation.

Obviously the solution is to have thousands of nodes per file transfer to increase the bandwidth.

This is a perfect plan which has absolutely no downsides.

The existence of Wide Area Network implies Narrow Area Network.

meshtastic

Meshtastic is a project that enables you to use inexpensive LoRa radios as a long range off-grid communication platform in areas without existing or reliable communications infrastructure. This project is 100% community driven and open source!

...as in... like... LAN?