The plight of Tesco banking customers, who have had £17m stolen from their accounts in some kind of cyberattack, calls into question our weird faith in online banking. Forty-eight hours before the news broke, I was on the phone trying to sort out my own little crisis.
Last week I transferred a not inconsiderable sum of money from one account to another – both mine, but with different banks. It’s precisely the sort of everyday administrative pain in the arse that online banking has revolutionised: click, confirm, done. The money promptly disappeared from one account – and singularly failed to materialise in the other. I waited a day. Then another.
When nothing changed, I rang the first bank to make a polite inquiry about the anomaly. After checking I had input all the numbers correctly, the man on the helpline said there was nothing more he could do – I needed to speak to the other bank. To me he sounded like an airline spokesman explaining why a plane that has vanished off the radar is actually the responsibility of the destination airport.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, the helpline woman at my other bank didn’t really feel like taking responsibility for a transaction she had absolutely no record of. At this point I started to get a cold, fluttery feeling in my chest. Shuffling money around cyberspace – what had made me think that would work?
The helpline woman suggested I call the first bank and ask them to put a forward trace on the money, or something. The first bank transferred me around a bit before telling me I needed to update my security settings in order to proceed further. I patiently followed instructions for changing my password to one with more numbers in it, all the while resisting the urge to shout “WHERE’S MY MONEY, MAN?” into the phone.
Eventually I achieved a security clearance sufficient for them to confess they had held up my transaction on purpose because it seemed so out of character. I got a letter to that effect three days later.
Solar confusion
Way down the US election ballot, below Clinton and Trump, there were also all manner of local referendums to be voted on. From legalising pot to reinstating the death penalty, this is how a lot of state laws are made in America these days.
You may have lately become acquainted with the notion that a referendum is a pure expression of the people’s will – preferable to representative democracy – but in most cases that depends on the relative clarity or opacity of the question being asked. Should you ever need a startling example of the latter, look to Florida.
Florida’s amendment 1 promised to guarantee residents’ constitutional right to own solar panels. Sounds great. But a second part of the amendment – its true purpose, cynics might say, since the measure is supported by big power utilities – relieves residents who don’t produce solar energy from the obligation to subsidise its production. In other (less weasly) words, it would end the solar panel owner’s automatic right to sell surplus electricity back to the grid. So, yes or no to solar, voter? Quickly, there’s a queue.
Glimpsed in the black mirror
I experienced another sort of cyberattack this week, when Facebook dropped a picture of me “7 years ago” into my timeline, asking if I wanted to Share it.
No thanks. It’s just me, sitting at my desk, staring into the webcam. I don’t even remember taking it. It felt like an invasion of privacy, although my main reaction was one of denial: that was never seven years ago.
I didn’t own that shirt seven years ago. I didn’t look like that seven years ago. I was young seven years ago. That old man in the picture: that’s what I look like now.
I stared at it, disbelieving, until my screen went dark, and I got a quick reflective glimpse of what I really look like now.
