My bank’s website is down
My bank’s website is down, and that’s pathetic. From my work as an IT professional I am fully cognisant of the impossibility of 100% up-time. Software breaks, and systems fail. Ѕhit happens. But I rather think a bank can afford two servers, not to mention enough IT staff to roster on for weekends. You upgrade your servers one at a time, so that if everything goes pear-shaped you just divert traffic away from the screw-up.
Ultimately, banks only provide three services: authentication, authorisation and bookkeeping. If these sound familiar, that’s because authorisation and authentication are the foundation of any security management system, including the one in the dotnet framework.
Once upon a time, banks provided real services. In particular, a big lock-up to put your gold in: a big armoured fireproof vault with a sodding great lock requiring multiple keys too far apart for single person operation, and time-locks and so forth. Now, they mostly serve as privatised tax collectors.
Every server in the IT universe can do authentication and authorisation. So why are we paying banks to do something you can get from a cheap machine? As they say in crime novels, if you want to know what’s really going on, follow the money.
Back when they really did provide an essential service, banks got thoroughly entrenched, operationally and psychologically in the minds, hearts and wallets of all the first world nations.
Large, slow-moving and thoroughly cashed-up, they provide easy targets for grasping governments. Politicians may be self-serving, but they aren’t as dumb as they pretend. They farm banks, giving them privileges enshrined in law to guarantee they grow fat, regulating them so they can’t run away, and milking them like mad. Better yet, once you retire from parliament, you can augment your meagre stipend by working on the board of a major bank or three.
As a result, governments regard finding an effective way to avoid using banks as a kind of tax evasion, which is pretty much what it is.
So, it’s hard to hate the banks. They’re just cattle, kept so the farmer doesn’t have to eat the grass.
In the meantime, they could at least provide the services they’re paid for.