I use a pretty basic one (with an N100 microprocessor and intel integrated graphics) as a TV box + home server combo and its excellent for that.

It’s totally unsuitable for gaming unless we’re talking about stuff running in DOSEmu or similar and even then I’m using it with a wireless remote rather than a keyboard + mouse, which isn’t exactly suitable for PC gaming.

Mind you, there are configurations with dedicated graphics but they’re about 4x the price of the one I got (which cost me about €120) and at that point you’re starting to enter into the same domain as small form factor desktop PCs using things like standard motherboards, which are probably better for PC gaming simply because you can upgrade just about anything in those whilst hardware upgradeability of mini PCs is limited to only some things (like SDD and RAM).

The UK NHI doesn’t work well because the neoliberal parties in successive governments (both the Tories and New Labour) have been defunding it so that they can - like Thatcher did with the railways - once its quality has fallen due to lack of funds claim that it’s bad because of Public management whilst it would be much better if it was Private because the Private Sector is much more competent, and privatise it.

Just like the US has fatcats that are perfectly happy to mass murder people for personal profit, so does the UK (and the British Political System is almost as bad as the American, so it’s definitelly sold to the highest bidder) and plenty of those jhave wet dreams of the country having 13% of its GDP flowing through a Private Healthcare sector like the US were they can make billions of pounds doing exactly the same as the fatcats do in US Healthcare.

Source: I lived in Britain for over a decade.

By the way, you “read that the UK NHI doesn’t work very well” is exactly because the UK media is overwhelmingly owned by tax avoiding billionaires who are part of the above mentioned fatcats who see themselves as profiting massivelly from Britain having a Healthcare System like the US. It’s not by chance that the level of trust of Britons in their Press is one of the lowest in Europe.

The exact same kind of tactics were deployed by Tatcher back when she wanted to privatise the Railways with the result that satisfaction with the Railway system in the UK is now even lower than when there was a public operator even after Thatcher defunded it to claim “Public is Bad, Private is Good” to amass enough public support to privatise it.

From what I’ve seen, treatments not being covered are only the case were those treatments are very expensive and there are other effective treatments (though less effective) which are much cheaper.

There’s also often a delay between a new and very expensive experimental treatment coming out and it becoming covered because it won’t be covered if it doesn’t demonstrate that it’s advantages over the other available treatments are sufficient to justify the additional cost.

Mind you, I’m talking about Public Healthcare Systems, not the so-called Mixed Systems that have mandatory Health Insurance (usually highly regulated and with a Public Insurance option for the less well off) - Mixed Systems have some of the same problems as the US System at least in my experience living in countries with one and with the other kind of system.

I’m talking about Universal Health Care systems (for clarity: totally free healthcare for residents in that country), not Public Health Insurance systems.

Europe is unfortunatelly also riddled with the latter system and having lived in countries with one kind and countries with the other, they’re quite different and the system with Insurance is invariably worse in terms of denials of coverage as well as cost (also because nowadays they all have laws that force every resident to have health insurance, which as result is more costlier than before those laws - as I saw first hand when I lived in a country with such a system when such a law came into effect), whilst UHC tends to have longer waiting lists (think 1 or 2 years of wait for some cirurgical procedures).

Absolutelly, some of the absurdities of the US system are also present in the so-called “Mixed” Systems (i.e. the ones with healtcare insurance but more regulated and with a public option for some) and if you look at the kinds of governments in those countries for the last 3 decades, you’ll notice they’ve been invariably neoliberal mainstream parties (setting up such systems is part of the broader tendency in Europe to privatise just about everything that has been going on since the 80s and was copied from the US).

IMHO, except for the long waiting times, the problems with Healthcare systems in part of Europe are the result of them having been transformed to become more like the US system in the last 3 decades.

Fair enough.

In several countries the mainstream party politicians (who are Neoliberals) have been slowly privatising healthcare by forcing the Public Healthcare System to outsource more and more of the work to the Private Sector and using the same technique as Thatcher in the UK used to privatise railroads (of which now, decades later, you can see the horrible results) - defund the Public Service and when the quality falls because of it claim that the Public Sector is always incompetent and the the Private is always competent so that’s why that Public Service had problems hence it needs to be privatised to improve.

On top of that there is the actual genuine problem (rather than artificial meddling with the Public Healthcare System to send more money into the hands of politician’s mates) that populations are aging and older people require much more Healthcare Services in average.

I’ve lived in a couple of countries in Europe and some have Universal Healthcare systems (such as the UK and Portugal) but others such as The Netherlands and Germany have Mixed Systems with Health Insurance but highly regulated and were some people can get Health Insurance from the state.

You’re not going to go bankrupt from the treatment or get treatment denied in countries with UHC.

However if you lose your job or never find a job in the first place due to illness related issues or disabilities you’ll almost certainly end up on benefits which again can be better or worse depending in the country.

I would say things have been getting worse all over Europe (personally I think it’s exactly because there’s been too much copying of shit from the US), especially when it comes to the level of benefits for poor people being sufficient (the house prices bubbles all over the place and the lack of building of social housing have made this a massive problem in most countries), but that’s not the same as simply going bankrupt from medical bills because you’ve had an accident, ended up in an emergency ward and got a life saving surgery.

So it’s literally something that’s not legally supposed to happen, unlike in the US.

Mate, as I’ve said it’s not one but TWO countries I lived in with Universal Healthcare, and you can’t be a Nationalist (as you’re trying to imply) for TWO countries.

If you’re comparing like to like - i.e. the average poor disabled person in both a country with Universal Healthcare and the US - you’re going to get some cases of those having insufficient treatment in countries with UHC (especially in those were neoliberal governments have been defunding their UHC systems to try and privatise Healthcare even against popular will, like the UK), whilst the vast majority of those people will be fucked in the US (unless they’re Veterans).

I’ve lived in several countries and it’s just an enormous peace of mind living in a country were you know that if you’re involved in an accident and end up getting costly treatement in an emergency ward, you’re not going to be ruined.

I think you’re seeing the problems relative to a specific baseline and you think that there are massive problems there (which I’m sure there are) but the thing with the US system is that the baseline itself is way worse and all those problem you see would also be problems there but much worse (or maybe not, as those people would die a lot faster, at which point no problem would be visible) and on top of that in the US there are way more people with even worse problems when it comes to Healthcare than the “poor disabled person” in a country with UHC.

For every case of a disabled persion on benefits having to wait 1.5 years for a non-urgent operation because they can’t afford private healthcare, there are a million of cases of people who get a common problem like Diabetes or Cardio-Vascular problems and get treated for free (down to getting the medicine for free, which for a person below the poverty line will be true even for the worst countries) rather than suddenly being faced with an extra monthly bill for medicine (which would be a massive hit for those poor people you cosplay as caring about for the sake of argument) or a massive bill for urgent surgery.

(Which reminds me: one thing that will NEVER happen in one of those countries, unlike in the US, is when one ends up in the emergency ward and requires an expensive treatment to save their life, they won’t get a massive bill at the end)

Oh, and even if you pay out of pocket for medicine, it’s way cheaper in those countries than the US, as governments have used their leverage to limit what Pharmaceutial companies can charge, unlike in the US.

The healthcare risks for the average individual in countries with Universal Healthcare aren’t even in the same universe as in the US.

Having lived in two countries with universal healthcare, that meme is absolutelly true and you’re the one bullshitting.

The most “extreme” it can get in such systems is that they won’t pay for very expensive treatments (i.e. the kind of stuff that costs a million dollars per shot) if a person can keep going with cheaper ones even if they’re not as good.

Even then, sometimes they will if it’s actually worth it (as in: for something that’s a cure, not for something that just keeps the patiet going and is only 10% better than the next best option whilst costing 1000x more).

That’s “your quality of life won’t be as good if you have a chronic disease that makes your life miserable and the best treatment in the market is insanelly expensive because they’ll only pay for a not as expensive one”, not “death panels”.

People in those countries absolutelly aren’t going bankrupt due to being denied life-saving treatment and having to pay for it from their own pocket.

As for any complains you might have heard from people in countries with universal healthcare, them complaining about it is like people in Scandinavia complaining about public services: relative to what they have there are bad parts, which is something altogether different than it being bad relative to the World and when it comes the healthcare the US is 3rd World when it comes to results delivered relative to the amount spent in it.

PS: For avoidance of confusion, by Universal Healthcare I mean countries were the State provides the Healthcare and you get it without paying, not the so-called “Mixed Systems” that also exist in Europe (for example in Germany and The Netherlands) and which have Mandatory Healthcare Insurance for all residents, though much more regulated than in the US and with a Public Provider for the less well off. Mixed Systems do have some of the problems of the US System and massivelly depend on the strength of local regulations and the seriousness of the Regulator to not decay into the same kind of situation as the US since the Private Insurance Companies there have the very same natural tendency to shaft their clients as the ones in the US and only the local regulations stop them.

Well, I haven’t really made any large wire transfers to accounts outside the EU from that bank in over a decade so can’t really confirm or deny.

I do know that in past experience with banks in general, the people checking the validity of suspicious transations (and large transfers to accounts outside the EU tend to fall into that classification given the prevalence of online scams from countries were the Law is a bit of a joke) will actually call you, or at least they did in the UK some years ago (pre-Brexit) which was the last time I had experience with something like that.

(At one point I also worked in a company that made Fraud Detection software).

Maybe they switched to SMS to save money, I don’t know.

Ah, I see.

Your point is that the use of a secondary channel for a One Time Pass is still an insecure method versus the use of a time-based one time password (for example as generated in a mobile phone app or, even more secure, a dedicated device). Well, I did point out all the way back in my first post that SMS over GSM is insecure and SMS over GSM seems to be the secondary channel that all banks out there chose for their 2FA implementation.

So yeah, I agree with that.

Still, as I pointed out, challenge-response with smartchip signature is even safer (way harder to derive the key and the process can actually require the user to input elements that get added to the input challenge, such as the amount being paid on a transfer, so that the smartchip signs the whole thing and it all gets validated on the other side, which you can’t do with TOTP). Also as I said, from my experience with my bank in The Netherlands, a bank using that system doesn’t require 2FA, so clearly there is a bit more to the Revised Payment Systems Directive than a blanked requirement for dynamic linking.

It think you’re confusing security (in terms of how easy it is to impersonate you to access your bank account) with privacy and the level of requirements on the user that go with it - the impact on banking security of the bank having your phone number is basically zero since generally lots individuals and companies who are far less security conscious than banks have that number.

That said, I think you make a good point (people shouldn’t need a mobile phone to be able to use online banking and even if they do have one, they shouldn’t need to provide it to the bank) and I agree with that point, though it’s parallel to the point I’m making rather than going against it.

I certainly don’t see how that collides with the last paragraph of my original post which is about how the original thread poster has problems working with banks which “require a separate device that looks like a calculator to use online banking” which is an element of the most secure method of all (which I described in my original post) and is not at all 2FA but something altogether different and hence does not require providing a person’s phone to the bank. I mean, some banks might put 2FA on top of that challenge-response card authentication methods, but they’re not required to do so in Europe (I know, because one of the banks in Europe with which I have an account uses that method and has no 2FA, whilst a different one has 2FA instead of that method) - as far as I know (not sure, though) banks in Europe are only forced to use 2FA if all they had before that for “security” was something even worse such as username + password authentication, because without those regulations plenty of banks would still be using said even worse method (certainly that was the case with my second bank, who back in the late 2010s still used ridiculously insecure online authentication and only started using 2FA because they were forced to)

I literally said 2FA over SMS is not secure because of weaknesses in the GSM protocol.

It’s still more secure than username + password alone, but that’s it.

Those little boxes are just a bit of hardware to let the smartchip on the smartcard do what’s called challenge-response authentication (in simple terms: get big long number, encode it with the key inside the smartchip, send encoded number out).

(Note that there are variants of the process were things like the amount of a transfer is added by the user to the input “big long number”).

That mechanism is the safest authentication method of all because the authentication key inside the smartchip in the bank card never leaves it and even the user PIN never gets provided to anything but that smartchip.

That means it can’t be eavesdropped over the network, nor can it be captured in the user’s PC (for example by a keylogger), so even people who execute files received on their e-mails or install any random software from the Internet on their PCs are safe from having their bank account authentication data captured by an attacker.

The far more common two-way-authentication edit: two-channel-authentication, aka two-factor-autentication (log in with a password, then get a number via SMS and enter it on the website to finalize authentication), whilst more secure that just username+password isn’t anywhere as safe as the method described above since GSM has security weaknesses and there are ways to redirected SMS messages to other devices.

(Source: amongst other things I worked in Smart Card Issuance software some years ago).

It’s funny that the original poster of this thread actually refuses to work with some banks because of them having the best and most secure bank access authentication in the industry, as it’s slightly inconvenient. Just another example of how, as it’s said in that domain, “users are the weakest link in IT Security”.