A Time of Magic

Not all that long ago the credit card companies followed a really simple security approach. Something scribbled where the signature should be on a credit card slip in Outer Mongolia? No problem, must be you.

Then they moved to a marginally more sophisticated approach and started blocking cards if you were a) abroad, b) tried to charge something substantially more costly than normal and c) hadn’t pre-warned them. That applied right into the 1990s.

Then some of them started started operating a three-strikes rule. Tried using your card three times in one day in the one store recently? Chances are that it will be blocked on the third attempt. Use it abroad three times if you’ve not told them you were going on holiday and the same thing happens.

You’d think that they’d be able to follow your card usage as you book the flights, hotel, buy some stuff at the airport, etc. and thereby work out themselves that you were on holiday but, at the moment, their systems aren’t quite that sophisticated and besides the majority of us don’t stick to using a single card to let them do that anyway.

What’s a bit worrying from the shopkeepers viewpoint is that they don’t always do these checks in realtime. So, when I used my own card in my own credit card machine on Thursday night to transfer some money to pay for a car, the transaction went through no problem. The money was there as expected on Friday morning to let me get the cheque from the bank to pay for the car. Yet, on Friday afternoon the bank tried to get in touch with me several times (not possible as I was off to pick the car up, of course) to query the transactions from the night before.

Now, that doesn’t bother me this time in that I’m transferring the money from me to me so I know it’s OK. However, had it been a large charge from someone else, does that mean that the money isn’t as securely in my account? Worrying thought for those regularly charging large-ish amounts to customers, isn’t it?

If you wander into your local bank, they’ll tell you that it takes 3-5 days for money to be sent to an overseas bank account.

Fair enough you might think. What about when your bank owns the overseas bank? Shouldn’t it be able to do the transfer instantly? It certainly should be able to. After all, it’s not as if it needs to worry about “clearing” the money as their systems can quite clearly talk to one another. Have a Citibank account? No problem in getting statement details in any Citibank branch around the world. Likewise for HSBC. Even the more humble Halifax can manage this.

However, try to do an instant transfer from, say, Halifax UK to Halifax Spain and you can’t. It takes up to 5 days.

Interestingly though, you can do it in one day. If we need to transfer money quickly from the UK to France, all we do is swipe one of our UK bank cards in our credit card machine and it’s in our account in France the next morning. I suspect that it’s in even quicker than that but I’ve not yet bothered to race down to the bank to check the balance when we’ve tried it.

Why the banks only offer their customers the “Pony Express” speed of transfer is anyone’s guess because they already have the technology in place to do it pretty much instantly.

From the late 1800s to the 1950s, having a photograph taken was very much a grand event. It was fairly expensive and only done for special events. Therefore, most of us only have a few photographs of our great grandparents at most.

Things changed dramatically in the 1950s. Cameras became considerably cheaper and the amateur photographer appeared in large numbers for the first time. So, chances are that you’ll have lots of photographs from the 1950s and in increasing numbers through to the 1990s.

From the late 1990s people started to go digital. The first digital cameras were extremely expensive (would you believe £2000 for a 300k pixel camera?) and had poor resolution. If you were in the first wave of the digital revolution, you’ll probably have lots of really low resolution images from then.

By around 2002, the standard was 3mp on compact cameras and the number of photos taken went up dramatically. After all, you could take loads of photos but didn’t have to pay to get them printed out. Roll forward five years and the standard resolution is more like 5mp as people realised that their 3mp images weren’t really good enough to be printed out at a decent size.

But will your grandchildren be able to see those photos? I’d say that the answer for most people is “no”. Does that surprise you? Well, for your grandchildren to be able to see them you’ll need to keep the images for a start and that means that you need to maintain regular backup copies which few people do. Even with the backups, you need to have the images copied onto a backup media that can be read in the future. Nearly everyone uses USB for backup but that’s a technology that’s only been around for about 5 years and probably won’t be around 5 years from now. Copy them to DVD? How reliable is that? Not very reliable at all as a scratch or two and it’s unreadable.

Ironically, I’d say that the photos of me that my great grandchildren are most likely to be able to look at are those which I’ll have put on my websites over the years as they’re archived now and again by the likes of waybackmachine.org.