Simple bills themselves as a “worry-free alternative to traditional personal banking.” I would recommend you go directly to their site to read more, but apparently their development team wants to force you to use JavaScript to read anything.
Sorry, but Simple requires Javascript for all kinds of things. Please either try a different browser or enable Javascript. The rest of your web activity may also get a bit snappier as a result.
Snappier? What if I don’t put performance first? And is it just me or are they making things more complicated than necessary? I can’t even get to their contact page unless I bother to read the scripts they want me to run.
After experiencing service failures last week they have posted this explanation, which highlights performance concerns and operations monitoring:
Our response to these failures was delayed because our automated monitoring did not catch the abnormally low transaction ingestion rate, the incorrect records for some new customers or the increased error rates on simple.com/activity. Though we already collect hundreds of thousands of data points about our service, we had not identified these important metrics or ensured that changes in their behavior would alert our engineering team. We’re adding more metrics and live tests to our services to help catch these and similar issues more quickly in the future.
We’ve also updated our services to explicitly check for the problematic data we received, and are examining all of our services to ensure that they properly validate all data.
Remember when the FBI complained about the cost and delay of building a fingerprint database from remote offices? CIO gave the story in 2004.
The wider use of fingerprint scanning technology in recent years has made it easier than ever for law enforcement officials to share information about criminals and quickly compare a suspect’s fingerprint image with millions of similar imprints, according to a January report from the General Accounting Office. But it can still take small police departments that can’t afford the electronic equipment more than five months to mail batches of fingerprint cards to state repositories, the report said.
…the GAO found that many small law enforcement agencies still don’t have the money for Livescan optical scanning equipment that allows them to electronically submit fingerprints.
Fast-forward to today and the banking industry has stepped up to solve the problem. Fingerprints are now taken electronically for account holders or when an account is opened. The module upgrade to existing ATMs to support fingerprint reading was hailed last week as a major success in Vietnam.
Mekong Development Bank triples current account base with launch of Vietnam’s first biometric debit card, through TEMENOS T24 Biometrics, at NCR ATMs across Vietnam Temenos (SIX: TEMN), the market leading provider of banking software, today announces the launch of Vietnam’s first fingerprint-enabled debit card, at Mekong Development Bank. The bank has implemented Temenos T24 Biometric fingerprint authentication to provide the ‘unbanked’ population of Vietnam with access to banking services.
[…]
[Lee Volante, director business solution group for APAC], Temenos continues: “Mekong Development Bank’s experimental nature in the field of biometrics is something for other banks to sit up and pay attention to.”
The Drinks Business has just posted a story of an American visiting the northern town of Garda, Italy who objected to wine bottles decorated with images of Adolf Hitler.
The shopkeeper allegedly told [Philadelphia lawyer Matthew] Hirsch that the bottles were part of history, “like Che Guevara.” “The only crime that could be currently attributable to this is that of apologising for fascism,” prosecutor Mario Giulio Schinaia told news agency Ansa. “At this point though, it would be opportune to invent the crime of human stupidity,” he added. The mayor of Verona said the bottles will be removed from the supermarket.
Source: The Drinks Business
I am surprised he tried to use “like Che Guevara” as some kind of fancy intellectual insult instead of just saying the classic snide phrase “like your mom”.
Apologizing for fascism was made a crime in Italy after 1952. What is left out of the story is that this is not an isolated case (pun not intended).
Note the former news stories from 2008, 2007, 2003….
Those traveling in northern Italy will often find souvenier imagery of Hitler in shops. I have noticed it myself. When I asked shop keepers in 2001 for an explanation they gave me a simple one:
Austrians love Hitler paraphernalia so they come to buy it from Italy.
Italians sell it.
Here is a photo I took of a case of mini-bottles of wine displayed prominently in a convenience store in Assisi, Italy.
The yellow words with a pretty picture above the wine when you open the box cover say “Vino d’Italia”; that’s Italian for the “wine of Italy”.
Basically the stricter regulation in Austria against “promoting or glorifying” the Third Reich has created a market in Italy.
Even Austria’s law, however, earlier this year was tested and failed. The Daily Mail explains that “You can sell Hitler schnapps!”
…state prosecution official Heinz Rusch said the investigation ended because of a lack of proof that it was intended to glorify the National Socialist era. He said the 48-year-old, known as Roland M by prosecutors, from Vorarlberg in the east of the country, was motivated by profit and not by ideology.
Should consequence be ignored when it lacks ideological motive? Likelihood of harm obviously will be far higher if protected by a profit clause. Meanwhile, popularity for Hitler is found even among the Austrian youth, as the Daily Mail also warns.
…new survey asked youngsters aged between 16 and 19 what they thought of the dictator. Pollsters were astonished when 11.2 per cent of them said that Hitler ‘did many good things for the people’.
What good things?
And who are the people? Protip: genocide isn’t great for people.
Maybe it should have asked whether Hitler did good things for their mom. Protip: fascism isn’t great for women.
Or perhaps these Austrian kids are so ignorant of history (in a culture famous for cover-ups) and confused by the Italian merchants that they think Hitler is just some cheap brand of bad wine?
Human stupidity clearly is not a crime, and the Italians seem to think of it as good for profit on dumb Austrians.
