haagch

Oh wow actual news: https://nos.nl/artikel/2624737-scanner-van-ing-kan-nieuwe-id...

google translate: https://nos-nl.translate.goog/artikel/2624737-scanner-van-in...

This looks like it proves me wrong and at least two dutch banks will not require a smartphone app to pay with Wero, if this actually refers to the upcoming actual Wero transition.

> At Rabobank, "approximately 8 percent of all transactions" are conducted using the Rabo Scanner, says a spokesperson. A spokesperson says that research shows that 15 percent of customers prefer using the scanner instead of the app because they find the Scanner secure.

> There are no problems at Rabobank with the transition from iDeal to Wero, according to a spokesperson. Therefore, nothing changes for customers who use the Scanner with the transition this autumn.

> At ABN Amro, the tool for making payments via online banking is called the E.dentifier. According to a spokesperson, around 250,000 ABN Amro customers are using this device this month, which is 4 percent of the total. The number of users is declining because, according to the bank, more and more customers are switching to the app.

> Although ABN Amro intends to continue offering the internet banking function, including for payments via Wero, the bank will be phasing out the E.dentifier over the coming year. ABN Amro is currently already in the process of informing the first private customers about the switch to the so-called USB Security Key. The E.dentifier will only disappear once all customers have made the switch.

This gives me some hope that this might also be possible in the rest of Europe...

Will it work the same only for users who use banking apps for ideal, or also for users who use their banking websites to pay with ideal? It's a rhetorical question, right now people can only give their opinion what their statements mean or not. We'll have to wait until the end of next year to see what's actually going to happen. Unless EPI or banks decide to publish an actual roadmap with actual features.

You'd think that basic infrastructure such as payment systems had higher standards than just "most" people having access to it.

It's fine as long as we have alternatives, but if online shops were to start to phase out SEPA payments in favor of Wero and Wero-only shops were to start popping it, it would be a real problem.

Btw the solution already exists: It's still relatively small scale but GNU Taler is live in Switzerland. The EU could make regulation to make it easier to adopt at any time it wants.

I have German bank accounts at two different banks and can send SEPA SCT instant transactions via webinterface and physical tan generator with both of them. Wero however is restricted to mobile apps regardless of what your tan generator is and in fact from what I heard, banks generally force you to switch to mobile app tan generators when opting into Wero.

The GLS bank implies it's not up to them. Generally I feel like implementation details are intentionally not made public. For example so far there is no definitive statement on the public internet I could find about whether iDEAL web based payments will still be available after iDEAL will actually switch to Wero. Statements like "For consumers, the online payment experience will remain largely unchanged, as they will continue to pay through their own bank." are always kept vague.

Replies from the German GLS bank on mastodon imply that EPI does not support the use case where banks add it to their web interface

https://ruhr.social/@glsbank/116215341782832097 https://ruhr.social/@glsbank/116125936995037426

> Good morning, it's not "our" fault. Unfortunately, there's nothing we can do about it—Wero is a service offered by EPI, and they've decided to take a "mobile-first" approach for now. Warm regards from Bochum!

As for the prospects of ever seeing banking apps outside of android/ios, there is only https://www.das-parlament.de/wirtschaft/finanzen/wir-bauen-m...

> What about smartphones that run on free and open-source software instead of the commercial operating systems used by the iPhone or Google? > Tanja Müller-Ziegler: This market is still very much a niche one. There are still too few providers, which is why it’s hardly worth offering banking apps for these devices.

> Perfect is the enemy of good as always.

I'm no expert on iDEAL, but being 20 years old, it's older than Android and iOS and presumably supported web based payments from the very beginning. I really don't understand why nowadays people seem to think that app exclusivity is somehow a natural starting point. It's a relatively recent invention.

It's not the same system. iDEAL supports banks to implement payment in their online banking websites, while Wero is Google/Apple ecosystem exclusive.

> No account necessary and no private american conglomerates can delete that account.

Officially you need a Google or Apple account to download a wero capable app from their stores, and Google and Apple can always delete all wero capable apps from their stores like for example with Russian sanctioned banks.

Some banking apps work on non - google play controlled android smartphones, but always only accidentally. Some banks like for example Consorbank already crack down on "sideloading" their app at all: https://www.reddit.com/r/Consorsbank/comments/1p909w1/commen...

I feel the same but I'm starting to think that EPI is right to not care.

Nobody from any tech media seems to be pointing out the Google/Apple smartphone dependency, let alone ask anyone at EPI about it. If they do, at least they're not writing about the results.

The only article I know of that ever asked the question is actually from the press of the German government: https://www.das-parlament.de/wirtschaft/finanzen/wir-bauen-m...

"What about smartphones that run on free and open-source software instead of the commercial operating systems used by the iPhone or Google?

Tanja Müller-Ziegler: This market is still very much a niche one. There are still too few providers, which is why it’s hardly worth offering banking apps for these devices."

Other than that I have seen ZERO pressure on this point from the media.

Obviously I do think EPI should intrinsically care, but I also am starting to see more and more that from their point of view literally nobody cares, so why should they?

The EU's NGI Zero in cooperation with NLNet has been funding quite a bit of postmarketOS

https://nlnet.nl/project/postmarketOS/

https://nlnet.nl/project/MobileSettings

https://nlnet.nl/project/pmOS-23-24

https://nlnet.nl/project/postmarketOS-daemons

https://nlnet.nl/project/pmOS-25-26

I think if NGI Zero had been around when Meego was killed, we might be in a better situation now.

I also get the feeling, that the fact that there is so little reported and discussed about this funding reflects the actual level of interest in alternatives.

> But in many cases there are not any homegrown alternatives to support.

Everyone who says something like this should be forced to use one of the alternatives for at least a couple of months and then reassess why people don't use them.

Personally I'm using a Volla Quintus with Ubuntu Touch (ubports is a German foundation) because I'm a masochist.

Here in Germany everyone who has an ID card, which is basically everyone, already has a secure chip for this purpose.

Sure.

Something I forgot to mention is that the UBPorts foundation whose mobile operating system I currently use is a German organization.

I second the question, attestation of what? I have a Solo key that I use with webauthn for several services already. Is that not good enough and even if not, there surely are sufficient alternatives, least of all the actual electronic id on the national id card via nfc?

Lots of hospitals don't even serve healthy food in any sense, so expecting a good coverage of dietary options is optimistic...

But to answer the question in a real way: Veganism is often regarded as just a dietary choice like any other, when in reality courts in several countries have more or less agreed to classify it as a matter of conscience, which would give adherents some right to it. Though it seems German courts have been reluctant to draw much legal consequence from it - so far at least.

So in that sense, I don't think people have been talking about digital sovereignty and abstaining from proprietary software under another country's jurisdiction much as a matter of conscience yet. We can thank Trump that it might actually become a thing though.

It really doesn't matter. When you power on an android smartphone with google play installed for the first time you are presented with a gate screen that asks you to consent to google's privacy policy. You can't use the phone without accepting. (for example https://forum.fairphone.com/t/finalising-the-setup-wizard-wi...)

Using smartphones with such a setup should not become required by a European government on a fundamental level.

It's an NFC card that can be read with any NFC card reader, USB or smartphone based.

https://www.ausweisapp.bund.de/en/open-source I just saw that it's available in alpine.

So I tried installing it on my postmarketOS smartphone and it runs out of the box: https://i.imgur.com/nRIAyrq.png

My Shift6mq is listed has not having NFC support in postmarketOS, so I can't actually test it, but I assume the USB card reader option will work once it's supported.

Nah, I'm that one idiot who uses alternative open software and just accepts when services aren't offered to me. The older I get, the easier it feels to not give a fuck anymore.

Can't buy any single fare public transport tickets online here in Stuttgart? Sure, I'll use the DeutschlandTicket NFC card. Can't view the EPA? Fine then I don't. Can't pay with Wero? Fine, I don't actually need to use shops that don't offer SEPA Vorkasse or Lastschrift (only without a dodgy "identity verification" fintech startup of course.

The digital Euro seems still in early planning stages. It seems people want to plan a physical card for it, but whether online payments will work without a platform dependent app is unclear for now.

Wero however is currently only planned as an android/ios app period. There are rumors that a card will come but that's only rumors for now.

In your list of groups to be baffled about I would add journalists. You see many articles about Wero mentioning digital sovereignty, but have you seen any that criticize the required banking apps only being available in google's and apple's app stores?

German citizen here. So why is an implementation going forward when you already know it will not serve all citizens? Why are we not refusing to implement this until we know we can make it work on all devices?

Personally I recently switched from an AOSP based android without Google Play to Ubuntu Touch. In the future with better hardware support I will probably switch to postmarketOS.

> but you can use a physical card reader with your debit card for an OTP to use as well and do it in your bank's online environment in the browser.

That's nice for ideal users, but Wero here in Germany is completely exclusive to mobile banking apps.

I have yet to see any actual confirmation in any way that ideal will keep the alternative web based payment once they fully merge with Wero. On the one hand, EPI never puts out any concrete info, on the other hand no Journalist ever seems to ask EPI representatives the important questions.

I would not recommend OSVR hardware at this time, but the effort for free software XR is still alive. With the recent provisional release of the OpenXR standard we at Collabora started making the code for our OpenXR runtime "Monado" public.

It's not entirely complete right now and relies mostly on reverse engineered drivers that mostly miss positional tracking, but we are hoping to have something better to show for it soon.

https://monado.freedesktop.org/

A short demo of the current status on a fully open source software stack using linux with amdgpu/radv, the godot engine and the libsurvive Vive driver: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eB-vVL-MPos

To add to the other comments, from the very beginning they had a tux on the kickstarter page.

The Oculus 0.2 and 0.3 SDKs didn't really support Linux at first but as the source code was released, jherico fixed it up and linux support got integrated.

The website for the DK2 https://web.archive.org/web/20140919195305/https://www.oculu... clearly said

> The Oculus Rift and the Oculus SDK currently support Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux.

Most of their 0.4 SDK source was still available but they had already started with putting their optical tracking into a closed source binary, which took them quite a while to release for linux, but eventually they did.

Then a few months before the CV1 release there was this blog post https://www.oculus.com/blog/powering-the-rift/

> Our development for OS X and Linux has been paused in order to focus on delivering a high quality consumer-level VR experience at launch across hardware, software, and content on Windows. We want to get back to development for OS X and Linux but we don’t have a timeline.

To be fair, they did release the hardware specs under a good license https://github.com/facebookarchive/RiftDK2.

The source code for the optical tracking software was never released though. So instead of "trashing" it, I suggest donating it to OpenHMD, so someone else can use it for developing optical tracking.

They are going to spend tens of millions of Euro on the migration. The cost of contracting someone to add hotkeys, equations and simple features to libreoffice is nothing compared to that.

Pretty sure SteamVR has been available out of beta for a while but I can't check because scrolling down on http://store.steampowered.com/news/?appids=250820 doesn't actually load old news items...

Firefox's OpenVR support on Linux is enabled in nightly, but it doesn't actually work.

With AMD GPUs the "direct mode" implementation is not quite ready, so when doing stuff with SteamVR it's a very good idea to disable compositing.

Except then with firefox 55 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1377950 happens and you have to close all tabs and reopen them.

I don't want to bash mozilla for this bug. Bugs happen. But this has been known for over a month and firefox 55 released with it...

Perhaps what I said was ambiguous. The error message is from the OpenVR support.

The OSVR support wouldn't have such an error message because the rendering support wasn't implemented in the first place.

I understand the reluctance to spend time investing in it, especially when developers say the OSVR-Rendermanager API and the OpenGL context sharing is awkward to use, but what's the point in investing in it in the first place, with a big announcement from Sensics http://sensics.com/osvr-comes-webvr/ etc?

The thing is, at the moment the only OpenVR implementation is the proprietary SteamVR runtime and it looks like it's unlikely that anyone will implement a FLOSS OpenVR runtime. Isn't Mozilla usually all over libre stuff like OSVR?

Not even ideologically, imagine you're buying a Talos II POWER9 Workstation, plop a Vega 64 in, compile firefox, connect your HMD, and what's that? SteamVR is only available on x86? Tough luck, no WebVR for you! Meanwhile you can compile OSVR for whatever architecture you like.

> though certainly if more devices that can only work on OSVR

There's no such thing because with SteamVR-OSVR all OSVR supported devices can be used in SteamVR (they are having some trouble with controllers, e.g. the Nolo controllers, but that's getting sorted out currently).

The point is really more that Mozilla seems to give a lot more love to proprietary platforms like windows and runtimes like steamvr now than to libre ones.

It's funny because in 2014/2015 with the Oculus Rift DK2 we first got a chromium webvr build for linux and then when it got into firefox nightly, it worked on linux too. Then Oculus stopped their linux support and both browsers stopped caring about WebVR on linux too. That announcement from Sensics is a year old and falls in the time where the OSVR SDK was the only major current and working VR SDK on Linux (and Mac OS X!) but it seems nobody wanted to make the effort to actually make it work. Fair enough, the OSVR SDK is an SDK literally nobody on Linux uses, so we could wait for SteamVR. That came out in February and today here we are, wondering what the problem is.

Have you tried it?

It spams "[GFX1]: SharedSurfaceType::Basic not supported for WebVR" to the console and doesn't send any frames to the SteamVR compositor.

And as I understand it, the OSVR implementation never even bothered to implement OSVR-Rendermanager support, let alone fix the tab crashing after 1-2 seconds.

I'm pretty sure they all know it's broken. A while ago kip said he wanted to work on OSVR "soon" and later that we could expect WebVR on Linux "soon", but it looks like he is literally the only one who wants to work on it and doesn't have the time, at all. After all it's still an open bug: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1310663