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14 years? I didn't think it'd been quite that long? Some googling suggests that the first Australian bank to introduce contactless/tap payment was the CBA with a NSW trial in 2006. Still, wow, the years are flying by.

> It proves that if you can give a corporation tax breaks and throw off the shackles of regulation, they will do better and want to hire more people. Oh...wait.

I was actually doing an Excel thingy the other day, simply looking at how company profits actually relate to employment. This information is freely available from companies' annual reports. For example:

Woolworths Limited (annual reports) graph: http://i.imgur.com/iNagiLN.gif

For companies like Woolworths, whose operations are fairly labour-intensive, profits do relate to employment though, as you can see, profits rise far more quickly than employment does.

Then take Comm Bank (I'm Australian): (annual Reports) graph: http://i.imgur.com/w6orwfi.gif

For Comm Bank, profits rise confidently, however the effect on employment is comparatively modest. Employment even drops for a period. Over the long term, the relationship between profit and employment is minor.

From the few I looked at, profits of major companies rise far more sharply than does employment, and sometimes there is little relation at all. I imagine there is a closer relationship between profit and employment in small to medium businesses. IMO, large companies should be more highly regulated (also so they can't off-shore their tax) while small-medium businesses are the ones who should be encouraged more.

The files show that the National Security Agency and its UK counterpart GCHQ have broadly compromised the guarantees that internet companies have given consumers to reassure them that their communications, online banking and medical records would be indecipherable to criminals or governments.

As an example to compare against, I chose a major bank in my country (Australia's Commonwealth Bank), and looked around their website. There is a page called 'Security', and the first thing I spot on that page is the statement: "100% Security Guarantee: With NetBank, the safety of your money is 100% guaranteed."

Putting aside the fact that the SAFETY of something is not necessarily the same as the SECURITY of something, what does this news mean to a banking customer? Does the bank have the obligation, under the advertised "100% Security Guarantee" to find and implement methods that hinder NSA/GCHQ access?

And this doesn't affect just Commonwealth Bank (I just chose it as an example). One of the main points of putting money in a bank is that it's SECURE. If a government agency (from another country, even) has the ability to reach into my bank account and make my money disappear in a virtual puff of smoke, then how is the account any more secure than, for example, hiding cash under a mattress?

you start typing netba and it autocompletes to https://www.my.commbank.com.au/netbank/Logon/Logon.aspx - and then lights up in green to tell you it's got a valid ssl cert match with the site. Typing it manually... there's more likelihood you will mispell it, and end up visiting all the one letter off dodgy websites.

Wrong, the Commonwealth Bank (bank in TFA ) offer 2FA hardware tokens (à la SecureID) as an alternative to NetCode (the 2FA used in this instance). They offer this primarily to customers travelling overseas (and can't/don't want roaming) or those who are frequently out of coverage zones.It's free, too.

Yeah now that I think about it, you are right. You used to get essentially no interest in AU banks in the 90s.

In 2002, ING Direct came to Australia though. They shook the market up massively with their high-interest, online-only account. They were the first well-known such account in Australia ... I remember signing up in 2003 and was sceptical at first but, wow, it was awesome.

In the next few years a bunch of ING-like competitors surfaced. And by around 2006-07, EVERY bank offered such high interest accounts. The big four were the last to offer them, but they had to cave into pressure eventually. Commonwealth Bank's is the NetBank Saver: http://www.commbank.com.au/personal/accounts/netbanksaver/

So your assessment of Australian banks in the 90s is pretty accurate ;) They sucked. But they are a hell of a lot better now.

In Australia, an email has recently done the rounds containing a .pdf file about a recent ATM scam. The email contained hundreds of pictures of devices that have been fitted to ATMs which look like normal components that capture both the card number and user's PIN, which are subsequently collected by the scammer not long after that.

This email was the first thing that came to my mind. I don't really see anybody looking from the ATM refiller's perspective; I am sure they have been told to record events like these; and for this exact reason they had the incident report.

I don't know what is up with America. Every time a police officer arrests somebody over being a smart-arse about something trivial, you all scream FUD. I do not know anybody that even has or has used a lawyer before here. Has your legal system become so backward that exercising your amendments forbade common sense? Yes, i have prepared myself to be modded troll, and yes; i listened to the entire lecture by Professor James Duane (which i found very interesting), but there's no burglary or murder going on here. A simple "I took a photo of your ATM because I like to learn how the insides of things work; Would you like me to delete the photo from my iPhone and Google it when i get home instead?" should have sufficed.

The mentioned .pdf can be found here.

I must profess not to know the situation in the US, but in Australia it is possible to outpace inflation by depositing money in a bank. Just taking a quick look at what might be a typical savings account[1] from the Commonwealth Bank of Australia (a major bank here in Australia), you can earn an annual effective interest rate of 3.04% p.a. as long as you make one deposit each month and no withdrawals (a reasonable practice for a savings account). If I were to put my money in an ING Term Deposit for 1 year, I could earn 7.5% p.a.[3] By comparison, the current CPI inflation rate according to the Reserve Bank of Australia[2] is 1.9% p.a. and has not gone above 4% for the last 3 years.

It is true that money under the mattress is a terrible investment strategy, as money is the only financial instrument that depreciates over time. A good way to save your money would be to put it into something of actual value, be it commodities like gold, or an interest-bearing bank account (which has actual value because the bank can use your money to finance profitable ventures, giving real value back). But that does not change the fact that money is a great medium for the measure and transfer of value across space (not time).

Having something used only for measuring value, and nothing else, allows us to decouple the measure of value from unrelated market forces which may be operating on a commodity currency. The money value of a meat pie today is unrelated to the supply and demand of gold, or any other metal you might use to back a currency. I would consider that a good thing. Fiat currency also has a nice side-effect of letting governments exploit market inefficiencies to stimulate the economy during hard times.

Money does not store value, it only measures it.
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[1] http://www.commbank.com.au/personal/accounts/awardsaver/rates-fees/default.aspx
[2] http://www.rba.gov.au/
[3] http://ingdirect.com.au/savings/our_products/term_deposits.htm

View this page from Australia's Commonwealth Bank in any Mac browser:

http://www.commbank.com.au/personal/

I could previously use Internet Explorer with an Apple MAC, why can't I now?
NetBank no longer supports Internet Explorer with Apple MAC. It is recommended that you upgrade your browser to a supported version for NetBank.

I could previously use Internet Explorer with an Apple MAC, why can't I now?
NetBank no longer supports Internet Explorer with Apple MAC. It is recommended that you upgrade your browser to a supported version for NetBank.

I didn't think that argument existed in the first place.

A lot of people have said "check the certificates". Well, I've seen local (Australian) banks use bad certificates! Yes, the Commonwealth Bank's website has at various times provided invalid certificates, usually due to not updating them quick enough. So, when you go to their secure section, you would get a warning box! Yet it really was the right site.

I've noticed two prominent companies in Australia already using Flash in these types of devices: Coles Supermarkets - in their POS units, and Commonwealth Bank - in some new (very recently installed) ATMs. They both use Flash to display advertisements on the screen, and not to run the actual POS / ATM application itself (who in their right mind would??). Personally, for advertising, I think its a good step forward (you can do so much more with Flash than you can with the ol' ATM 40x24 character screens!). However, I know that in Coles' case (who have had Flash ads showing for several years now), they in fact use Windows NT 4 workstation on their POS units (soon to be upgraded to Windows XP), so whether or not Flash is available in Embedded devices is a non-issue for them.

And if we take bank fees into consideration...

The TM can be for the logo, symbol, wording etc.

In this case I would assume that they could not claim rights to the word (as posted above it's the Japanese word for Green), but to the presentation/logo of the word/mark.

For example, if you check out one of Australia's largest banks, The Commonwealth Bank you will see that the 'mm' characters are glued together in the word. The word commonwealth can't be copyrighted, but the logo when the 'mm' is glued together like that can.

The Commonwealth Bank Of Australia Conditions for Netbank.

Well, it used to be, anyway...
I use the Commonwealth Bank for some of my online banking, and in it's previous incarnation, their NetBank service used to have a _very_ secure login interface.
It would prompt you for your 8 digit NetBank ID code, and then for your variable length PIN. When the time came to enter your PIN, it popped up a keypad on the screen, disabled keyboard input and you had to click on the keypad with the mouse. In addition, the keypad moved to a random location between every click, so you couldn't even track screen coordinates...
All in all, very secure and very annoying.
They've now gone 'back' to using standard keyboard input and SSL security.
--kai