Tag: London

London, an Year and a Half Later

Given that nearly everything we hear, both here in the UK, and it appears everywhere else, is the stinking pile of burning rubbish that is Brexit, I thought I would bring at least a bit of positivity, by giving an update on my life in London, which I announced just shy of two years ago.

London has been a significant change of pace for me, both professionally (not always in a good way) and personally (almost all in a good way). I now live in a flat with my girlfriend, who’s the world to me. I have effectively stopped globetrotting, compared to Dublin — because I have so many things to do here, that were not available there. And I’m actually dedicating a forced 45 minutes a day to reading books (and another 45 are usually dedicated at reading the news), thanks to my higher-than-median commute.

As I said, the professional change of pace was not entirely positive. I ended up with a bad case of burnout between teams, and took two weeks of stress leave in February to “recenter myself”, which mostly involved me spending time on usbmon-tools, and a few kernel patches that (hopefully) I’ll be sending out this week. I am not entirely sure if this is due to a difference in the office environment, or in my own way to relate to the office itself. In Dublin I found there was more camaraderie, which might be caused by being a smaller office for my organisation, or the fact that so many of us lived in the same area that we spent a lot more time together outside of work too. As for myself, I find myself trying to put more explicit boundaries on how much I interact with my colleagues, even when I find them stimulating company.

On the personal level, the past two years (including the few months before the actual move) have been a roller-coaster ride, between the fear of change, my computer getting stolen, meeting my girlfriend, attending a number of concerts (not all, but most, metal), and getting photographed together with some of my most admired celebrities (I would put Simon Jones, John Lloyd, and Alexander Siddig as the top-three!)

And even when we didn’t go full-fan waiting over two hours to get a quick sketch of Spider-Man from John Romita, Jr, being able to go and see the Elves at No Such Thing as A Fish, or listen to Stephen Fry tell stories of ancient Greece all have had a very positive impact to my personal mental health.

And now that the rollercoaster is slowing down (and ending in a high note, at least on the personal side, ignoring Brexit), I think you may get more content from me. Because I have missed my blog tremendously, and migrating to WordPress was also a very good idea, as it allows me a lot more flexibility in writing.

Yesterday’s Disruptors, Today’s Encumbents

You know, I always found it annoying how online stores such as Amazon, or even IKEA, have been defined “disruptors” all these years. But nowadays I can mostly see how they changed the rules of the game, particularly in favour of the customers themselves, against their own workers, and suppliers. And so, nowadays, I can accept that they have been called that way for a reason.

Of course that’s not to say that I agree them being called that way still.

Since I have moved to London last year, I have been using both Amazon and IKEA shipping quite a bit, whether it is for the random bits and bobs (Amazon) or full blown household furniture (IKEA). It’s kind of needed sometimes, or at least very convenient, because you know there’s selection and (usually) good customer support.

But at the same time, things are no longer smooth as they used to be. Or maybe they are just as smooth, but we (I) got to expect better from them.

Let’s take IKEA: I wanted to order a number of items from them just last week: a garbage bin, a bedding set and some extra towels, as well as some spice jars. I put everything in my “bag”, and tried checking out. Somehow the PayPal integration failed, the loading page got stuck, and I tried restarting… and the site decided to lock my bag “for up to 45 minutes” because of the incomplete checkout.

I’m not sure how the locking is done and timed out, because an hour later it still didn’t let me order, despite logging out and back in. So I ended up going to Marks and Spencer’s website and order (more expensive) bedding set and towels from there. Alas their shipping option appears to be significantly worse as a track record (it got split into three deliveries, and only one made to my office’s mailroom by the expected date, but it was not urgent at all). But the checkout worked perfectly fine.

Unfortunately M&S didn’t have a bin, so I looked for one at Amazon and found something I liked for £25, so on Friday I ordered it with a “nominated day delivery” of Tuesday. That should be enough lead time, no? I also ordered a smaller trash container for the bathroom, to throw things like the non-sharps injection side-results.

Fast forward to Tuesday, when I took a day off work (because I needed to relax anyway), which I spent assembling the daybed I got from IKEA… a year ago (oops!) By 2pm I see that the smaller of the two bins is “Out for delivery”, but the bigger one (the one I really needed!) was not. Although with an expected delivery of the same day, between 7am and 10pm. I have immediately contacted Amazon on Twitter, pointing out the low likelihood of them delivery on the day, but they insisted that it was still going to be delivered.

Cue 4pm when I get an email (but obviously enough no Android push notification) that tells me that they are sorry, but a delay caused the delivery to be skipped on the day and that it would happen in a one-week window following it.

You read that right. They suggested that, for an item that was meant to delivered on October 2nd, and missed delivery, the new delivery window would be October 3rd to 9th. You can imagine just how happy, as a customer, I would be about that. So I called Amazon up, and asked them to cancel the delivery, because I already skipped a day of work (sure I was going to take the day off anyway, but I could have gone out to Kew Gardens instead of staying in to wait for them), and I wouldn’t want to spend an unbound amount of days home in the hope that they would be able to deliver a garbage bin. They confirmed it would be done and an email sent to me “within 24-48 hours” and I thanked them.

Then, I ordered a (different) bin on Argos. They actually had the same bin, but at £32. I didn’t need anything as fancy, and their lower end was actually much better looking than Amazon’s, so I settled for a £10 model. And for £3.95, they allow you to select a 3 hours delivery window — If I did that right when I realize the delivery would have been missed, Argos would have delivered the same day, instead I had to settle for the following day, Wednesday, between 7am and 10am. Indeed the day after, at at 7.20am, I was the happy owner of a cheap, simple garbage bin.

This is not the first time that, on Amazon’s failure, I redirected on Argos. And after this adventure, I think they’ll just be my first and default destination for anything that I want delivered at home (which is usually bulky stuff too uncomfortable to bring across London on the Piccadilly). The last time, it was a clothes iron and board, that somehow Amazon refused to do any nominated day delivery for. Argos was happy to deliver them on a Saturday morning intead. And practically speaking, a 7am-10am delivery weekday window means I can receive at any day, before heading to the office.

I wish that it all ended there, though.

On the same Wednesday that I received the Argos delivery, while at work, the Amazon app on my phone decided to notify me that the bin (the one that I asked to cancel the delivery of), was going to be delivered that day. I once again turned to Twitter where Amazon informed me that the request for cancellation might not have been reflected yet, and that they will not deliver if it was requested not to.

Except that at around 6pm, while I was commuting home, I also received another notification to tell me that the package was delivered. Checking this, it reported the package was delivered “to the resident” — except that my building requires a fob to access, and I was nowhere near home to let them in. So either they left it in the corridor (assuming someone else opened them the main door) or they left it outside altogether (in which case, it would be unlikely for it to stay around until I made it home).

Since the Amazon Android app allows you to contact them via chat, I did so, selecting the order with the bins, explain the situation, and explicitly talking about the nominated day delivery failure. At which point they confirm they would prepare a return request, and that they would organize for pick up. I also note with them that it’s a 40 litres bin, which makes the box very big and not something I’d bring to the post office myself. I also made sure to point out with them that, as I would not have an idea where they manage to leave the box without me, I would just leave it there, and let them pick it up the same way they left them. They confirmed all of this is okay, and after greetings disconnected the chat.

A few minutes later I get an email confirming the return request for… an unrelated set of bamboo spoons that arrived the same day. Not the one I was talking about, which would have been clear from both the bulk of the object we have been talking about, the delivery type, and the delivery address. And of course the price of the spoons was significantly lower than the bin. Sigh.

Another round of chat with Amazon, and they issued the return for the right item. They also told me not to worry about the pick up, and that I could keep the bin… which I don’t need anymore and would take a lot of space. I asked explicitly for a pick up anyway, and they agreed to organize it with Hermes. It was not until I got home and checked the email they sent me, that they expected me to print the return label — but I have no printer at home.

At least expecting Hermes to contact me, if anything to complain that they can’t access the building, I left the box in the hallway where they left it for the day after. Two days later, no pick up, no note, and no call later, I checked the status of the return to find out that they marked it as “completed”. While leaving the box with me. And I now have a fancy bin in the master bathroom, which is open to a good home in West London if someone were to want to deal with it (but probably not worth doing).

I’ll add a few more words about this later on, as Amazon in particular seems to be going the wrong way, for me at least.

Software systems and institutional xenophobia

I don’t usually write about politics, because there are people with more sophisticated opinions and knowledge out there, compared to me, playing at the easiest level, to quote John Scalzi, and rarely having to fear for my future (except for when it comes to health problems). But today I need to point out something that worries me a lot.

We live in a society that, for good or bad (and I think it’s mostly for good), is more and more tied to computer systems. This makes it very easy for computer experts of one kind or another (like me!) to find a job, particularly a good paying job. But at the same time it should give us responsibilities for what we do with our jobs.

I complained on Twitter how most of the credit card application forms here in the UK are effectively saying “F**k you, immigrant scum” by not allowing you to complete the application process if you have less than three years’ addresses in the UK. In the case of a form I tried today, even though the form allows you to specify an “Overseas address” as previous address, which allows you to select Ireland as a country, it still verifies the provided post code to UK standards, and refuses you to continue the process without it.

This is not the first such form. Indeed, I ended up getting an American Express credit card because they were the only financial institution that could be convinced to take me on as a customer, with just two months living in this country, and a full history of addresses for the previous five years and more. And even for them, it was a bit of an issue to find an online form that did indeed allow me to type that in.

Yet another of the credit card companies rejected my request because “[my] file is too thin” — despite being able to prove to them I’m currently employed full time with a very well paying company, and not expecting to change any time soon. This is nearly as bad as the NatWest employee that wanted my employer’s HR representative to tell them how long they expected me to live in the UK.

But it’s not just financial institutions, it’s just at any place where you provide information, and you may end up putting up limitations that, though obviously fine for your information might not be for someone else. Sign-up forms where putting a space in a name or surname field is an error. Data processing that expects all names to only have 7-bit ASCII encoding. Electoral registries where names are read either as Latin 1 or Latin 2.

All of these might be considered smaller data issues of nearsighted developers, but they also show how these can easily turn into real discrimination.

When systems that have no reason to discard your request on the basis of the previous address have a mistake that causes the postcode validation to trigger on the wrong format, you’re causing a disservice and possible harm to someone who might really just need a credit card to be able to travel safely.

When you force people to discard part of their name, you’re going to cause them disservice and harm when they will need a full history of what they did — I had that problem in Ireland, applying for a driving learner permit, not realising that the bills for Bord Gáis Energy wrote down my name wrong (using Elio as my surname).

The fact that my council appears to think that they need to use Latin-2 to encode names, suggests they may expect that their residents are all either English or Eastern European, which in turn leads to the idea of some level of segregation of them away from Italian, French or Irish, all of which depend on Latin-1 encodings instead.

The “funnies” in Ireland was a certain bank allowing you to sign up online with no problems… as long as you had a PPS (tax ID) issued before 2013 — after that year, a new format for the number was in use, and their website didn’t consider it valid. Of course, it’s effectively only immigrants who, in 2014, would be trying to open a bank account with such codes.

Could all of these situation be considered problems with incompetence? Possibly yes. Lots of people are incompetents, in our field. But it also means that there was no coverage for these not-so-corner cases in the validation. So it’s not just an incompetent programmer, it’s an incompetent programmer paired with an incompetent QA engineer. And an incompetent product manager. And an incompetent UX designer… that’s a lot of incompetence put together for a product.

Or the alternative is that there is a level of institutional xenophobia when it comes to software development. In the UK just as in Ireland, Italy and in the United States. The idea that the only information that are being tested are those that are explicitly known to the person doing the development is so minimalist as to be useless. You may as well not validate anything.

Not having anyone from the stakeholders to the developers and testers consider “Should a person from a different culture with different naming, addressing, or {whatever else} norms be able to use this?” (or worse, consider it and answering themselves “no”), is something I consider xenophobia1.

I keep hearing calls to pledge ethics in the field of machine learning (“AI”) and data collection. But I have a feeling that those fields have much less impact on the “median” part of the population. Which is not to say you shouldn’t have ethical consideration in them at all. But rather than we should start with teaching ethics in everyday’s data processing too.

And if you’re looking for some harsh laugh after this mood-killing post, I recommend this article from The Register.

  1. Yes I’m explicitly not using the word “racism” here, because then people will focus on that, rather than the problem. A form does not look at the colour of your skin, but does look at whether you comply with its creators idea of what’s “right”. ↩

UK Banking, Attempt 3: Tesco Bank (and the Irish credit card)

It feels like most of what I end up writing nowadays is my misadventures across a wide range of financial service companies. But here we go (I promise I’ll go back writing about reverse engineering Really Soon Now™).

The last post on this topic was my rant, about how Fineco lacks some basic tools to be used as sole, or primary bank account in the UK. Hopefully they will address this soon, and a sane bank will be available in this country, but for now I had to find alternatives.

Since the various Fintech companies also don’t provide the features I needed, I found myself having to find a “high street bank”. And since my experience up to this point both with Barclays and NatWest was not particularly positive, I decided to look for a different option. Since I have been a mostly-happy customer of Tesco Bank for nearly four years, I decided to give their UK service a try.

At first it appeared to have an online sign-up flow that looked sweet for this kind of problem… except at the end of it, they told me to wait for them to ask me for paperwork to send them through. Turns out the request was for proof of identity (which needs to be certified) and proof of address (which needs to be in original) — the letter and form I could swear is the same that they sent me when I applied for the Irish credit card, except the information is now correct (in Ireland, the Garda will not certify a passport copy, though it appears the UK police forces would).

Let’s ignore the fact that by mailing me at that address, Tesco Bank provided their own proof of address, and let’s focus instead on the fact that they do not accept online print outs, despite almost every service (and, as I found out now, themselves) defaulting to paperless bills and statements. I actually have had a number of bills being mailed to me, including from Hounslow Council, so I have a wide range of choices of what to provide them, but as it turns out, I like a challenge and having some fun with corner cases (particularly as I already solved the immediate need for a bank account by the time I looked into this, but that’s a story for another day).

Here is a part of the story I have not told yet. When I moved to the UK I expected to have to close every account I had still in Ireland, both because Ulster Bank Private is a bloody expensive service, and because at least in Italy I was told I was not entitled to keep credit cards open after I left the country. So as soon as I was in working order over here, I switched over all the billings to Revolut. Unfortunately I couldn’t do that for at least three services (Online.net, Vodafone Italy and Wind/3 Italy) — in two cases because they insist they do not accept anything but Italian cards, while somehow still accepting Tesco Ireland cards.

While trying to figure out an ad-interim solution I got to find out that Tesco Bank has no problem with me still having the “Irish” credit card, and they even allowed me to change the address (and phone number) on file to my new London one. We had some snag regarding the SEPA direct debit, but once I pointed out that they were suggesting breaching the SEPA directives, all was good and indeed the card is debited to the EUR Fineco account.

This also means i get that card’s statements to my London address. So of course I ended up sending, to Tesco Bank, as proof of address… a Tesco Bank Ireland credit card statement. As a way of saying “Do you feel silly enough, now?” to whoever had to manually verify my address and send the paperwork back to me. Turns out it worked just fine, and I got not even a passive aggressive note about it.

Now let’s put aside the registration and let’s take a look at the services provided. Because if I have to rant, I would like at least to rant with some information to others to make up their own mind.

First off, as I said, the first part of the registration is online, after which they get in touch with you to send them the proofs they need. It’s very nice that during the whole time, they “keep in touch” by SMS: they remind you to send the paperwork back, they tell you that the account was open before you receive the snail mail, and so on.

I got a lot of correspondence from Tesco Bank: in addition to the request of proofs, and the proofs being mailed back, I received a notification about the account being opened, the debit card PIN, and a “temporary access number” to sign up online. The debit card arrived separately and through a signature-required delivery. This is a first for me in the UK, as most other cards just got sent through normal mail — except for Fineco, as they used Fedex, and they let me receive it directly at the office, despite it not being the proof of address I sent them.

Once signing up for the online banking, they ask you for an 8-digits security code, a long(er) password, and a selection of verbal question/answers, that are the usual terrible security (so as usual I’ve answered them at random and noted down what I told them the answers were). They allow you to choose your username, but they suggest it to stay the email address on file.

The login for the first time from a different computer is extremely awkward: it starts with two digits of the security code, followed by a SMS second factor authentication, followed by the password (not a subset thereof, so you can use a password manager easily for this one), all through different forms. The same happens for the Mobile Banking application (which is at least linked directly from their website, and very easy to install). The mobile banking login appears to work fairly reliably (and you’ll see on the next post why I call this out explicitly).

I set up the rent standing order on this account, and it was a straightforward and painless process, which is the same as a one-time transaction, except for saying “I want to repeat this every month” checkbox. All in all, it looks to me like it’s a saner UI than Barclays, and proper enough for the needs I have. I will report back if there is anything particularly different from this that I find over time, of course.

UK Banking, Fineco is not enough

You may remember that the last time I blogged about UK banking I had just dismissed Barclays in favour of Fineco, the Italian investment bank, branch of UniCredit, This seemed a good move, both because people spoke very good of Fineco in my circles, at least in Italy, and because the sign up flow seemed so good that it sounded like a good idea.

I found out almost right away that something was not quite perfect for the UK market, in particular because there was (and is) no way to set up a standing order, which is the standard way to pay for your rent in the UK (and Ireland, for what it’s worth). But it seemed a minor thing to worry about, as the rest of the features of the bank (ability to spend up to £10k in a single transaction by requesting an explicit lift on the card limits with SMS authentication, just to say one).

Unfortunately, a couple of months later I know for sure it is not possible to use Fineco as a primary account in the UK at all. There are two problems, the first being very much a problem to anyone, and the second being a problem for my situation. I’ll start with the first one: direct debit support.

The direct debit system, for those not used to it in Europe, is one where you give a “debtor” (usually, an utility service, such as your ISP or power company) your account details (Sort Code and Account Number in the case of the UK), and they will tell the bank to give them money at certain time of the month. And it is the way Jeremy Clarkson lost £200, ten years ago. There is a nearly identical system in the rest of the EU, called SEPA Direct Debit (with SDD Core being the more commonly known about, as it deals with B2C, business-to-consumer) debits.

After I opened the Fineco account, I checked on Payments UK’s Sort Code Checker which features were enabled for it (30-02-48) and then, as well as the time of writing, it says «Bacs Direct Debits can be set up on this sort code.» So I had no refrain in closing my Barclays account and moving all the money into the newly created account. All of my utilities were more than happy to do so, except for ThamesWater that refused to let me set up the debit online. Turns out they were the only ones with a clue.

Indeed, when in January the first debit was supposed to land, instead of seeing the debit on the statement, I saw a BACS credit of the same amount. I contacted my ISP (Hyperoptic, with the awesome customer support) to verify if something failed on their side, but they didn’t see anything amiss for them. When even Netflix showed up the same way, and both of the transaction showed up an “entry reversal” of the same amount, I knew something was off with the bank and contacted them, originally to no avail.

Indeed, a few more debits showed up the same way, so I have been waiting for the shoe to drop, which it did at the end of January, when Fineco sent me an email (or actually, a ticket, it even has a ticket number!) telling me that they processed the debits as a one-off, but to cancel them because they won’t do this again. This was professional of them, particularly as this way it does not hit my credit score at all, but it still is a major pain in the neck.

My first hope was to be able to just use Revolut to pay the direct debits, since they are all relatively low amounts, which fit my usual auto top-up strategy. When you look at the Revolut information page with your account details for GBP, the text says explicitly «Use this personal UK current account to get salary and to pay bills», which brought me hope, and indeed the Payment UK’s checker also confirmed that it supposedly accepts Bacs Direct Debit. But when I checked with the in-app chat support, I was told that, no Revolut does not support direct debits, which makes that phrase extremely misleading. At least TransferWise explicitly denies supporting Direct Debit in the sort code checker, kudos to them.

The next problem with Fineco is not actually their fault, but is still due to them not having the “full features” of a UK high street bank. I got contacted by Dexters, the real estate company that among other things manages my apartment and collects my rent. While they told me the money arrived all good when I moved to Fineco (I asked them explicitly), they sent me a scary and threatening email (after failing to reach me on the phone, I was going to be charged excessively high roaming charges to answer an unknown number)… because £12 were missing from my payment. The email exchange wasn’t particularly productive (I sent them a photo of the payment confirmation, they told me «[they] received a large sum of money[sic] however it is £12.00 that is outstanding on the account.» So I called them on Monday, and they managed to confirm that it was actually £6 missing in December, and another £6 missing in January.

Throwing this around with colleague, and then discussing with a more reasonable person from Dexters on the phone, we came to figure out that Barclays (as the bank used by Dexters to receive the rent) is charging them £6 to receive these transfers because they are “international” — despite the fact that they are indeed local, it appears Barclays apply that fee for any transfer received over the SWIFT network rather than through the Faster Payments system used by most of the other UK banks. I didn’t want to keep arguing with Dexters over the fact that it’s their bank charging them the fee, I paid the extra £12, and decided to switch the rent payment over to the new account as well. I really dislike Barclays.

I’ll post later this month on the following attempts with other bank accounts. For now I decided that I’ll keep getting my salary into Fineco, and keep a running balance on the “high street” account for the direct debits, and the rent. Right now for my only GBP credit card (American Express) I still pay the balance off Fineco via debit card payment anyway, because the credit limit they gave me is quite limited for my usual spending, particularly now that I can actually charge that card when booking flights on BA without having to spend extra money in fees.

Barclays and the single factor authentication

In my previous post on the topic I have barely touched on one of the important reasons why I did not like Barclays at all. The reason for that was that I still had money into my account with them, and I wanted to make sure that was taken care of before lamenting further on the state of their security. As I managed to close my account now, I should go on and discuss this further, even though I have touched upon the major topics of this.

Barclays online banking system relies heavily on what I would define as “single factor authentication”.

Usually, you define authentication factors as things you have or things you know. In the case of Barclays, the only thing they effectively rely upon is “access to the debit card”. Okay, technically you could say that by itself it’s a two-factor system, as it requires access to the debit card and to its PIN. And since the EMV-CAP protocol they use for this factor executes directly on the chipcard, it is not susceptible to the usual PIN-stripping attacks as most card fraud with chip-and-pin cards uses.

But this does not count for much when the PIN of the card they issued me was 7766 — and to lament of that is why I waited to close the account and give them back the card. It seems like there’s a pattern of banks issuing “easy to remember” 4-digit PINs: XYYX, XXYY, etc. One of my previous (again, cancelled) cards had a PIN terribly easy to remember for a computerist, at least not for the average person though: 0016.

Side note: I have read someone suggesting to badly scribbled a wrong PIN on the back of a card as a theft prevention. Though I like that idea, I’m just afraid the banks won’t like it anyway. Also it would take some work to make the scribble being easily misunderstood for different digits so that they can try the three times needed to block it.

You access Barclays online banking account through the use of the Identify method provided by CAP, which means you put the card into the reader, provide the PIN, and you get an 8-digits identifier that can be used to login on the website. Since I’m no expert of how CAP works internally, I will only venture a guess that this is similar to a counter-based OTP, as the card has no access to a real-time clock, and there is no challenge provided for this information.

This account access sounds secure, but it’s really not any more secure than an username and password, at least when it comes to dealing with phishing. You may think that producing a façade that shows the full Barclays login, and proxies the responses in real time is a lot of work, but the phishing tools are known for being flexible, and they don’t really need to reproduce the whole website, just the parts they care about getting data from. The rest can easily be proxied as it is without any further change, of course.

So what can we do once you can fool someone into logging in to the bank? Well, you can’t really do much, as most of the actions require further CAP confirmation: wires, new standing orders, and so on so forth. You can, though, get a lot of information about the victim, including enough proofs of address or identity that you can really mess with their life. It also makes it possible to cancel things like standing orders to pay for rent, which would be quite messy to deal with for most people — although most of the phishing is not done for the purpose of messing with people, and more to get their money.

As I said, for sending money you need to have access to the CAP codes. That includes having access not only to the device itself, but also the card and the PIN. To execute those transactions, Barclays will ask you to sign a transaction by providing the CAP device with the account number and the amount to wire. This is good and it’s pretty hard to tamper with, hopefully (I do not make any guarantee on the implementation of CAP), so even if you’re acting through a proxy-phishing site, your wires are probably safe.

I say probably, because the way the challenge-response is implemented, only the 8-digits account number is used during the signature. If the phishers are attacking a victim that they studied for long enough, which may be the case when attacking businesses, you could know which account they pay every month manually, and set up an account with the same number at a different bank (different sort code). The signature would be valid for both.

To be fair to Barclays, implementing the CAP fully, the way they did here, is actually more secure than what Ulster Bank (and I assume the rest of RBS Group) does, with an opaque “challenge” token. While this may encode more information, the fact that it’s opaque means there is no way for the user to know whether what they are signing is indeed what they meant to.

Now, these mitigations are actually good. They require continuous access to the card on request, and that makes it very hard for phishing to just keep using the site in the background after the user logged in. But they still rely on effectively a single factor. If someone gets a hold of the card and the PIN (and we know at least some people will write the real one on the back of the card), then it’s game over: it’s like the locks on my flat’s door: two independent locks… except they use the same key. Sure, it’s a waste of time to pick both, so it increases the chances a neighbour would walk in on wannabe burglars trying to open the apartment door. But there’s a single key, I can’t just use two separate keychains to make sure a thief would only grab one of the two, and if anyone gets it from me, well, it’s game over.

Of course Barclays knows that this is not enough, so they include a risk engine. If something in the transactions don’t comply with their profile of your activity, it’s considered risky and they require an additional verification. This verification happens to be in form of text messages. I will not suggest that the problem with these is with GSM-layer attacks, as that is still not (yet) in the hands of the type of criminals aiming at personal bank accounts, but there is at the very least the risk that a thieve would get a handle of my bag with both my card and my phone, so the only “factors” that are still in my head, rather than tied to the physical objects, are the (provided) PIN of the card, and the PIN of the phone.

This profile fitting is actually the main reason why I got frustrated with Barclays: since I had just opened the account, most of the transactions were all “exceptional”, and that is extremely annoying. This was compounded by the fact that my phone provider didn’t even let me receive SMS from the office, due to lack of coverage (now fixed), and the fact that at least for wires, the Barclays UI does not warn you to check your phone!

There is also the problem with the way Barclays handle these “exceptional transactions”: debit card transactions are out-and-out rejected. The Verified by Visa screen tells you to check your phone, but the phone will only ask you if it was your transaction or not, and after you confirm it is, it’ll ask you to “retry in a couple of minutes” — retrying too quickly will lead to the transactions being blocked by the processor directly, with a temporary card lock. The wire transfer one will unblock the execution of the wire, which is good, but it can also push the wire to after the cut-off time for non-“Faster Payments” wires.

Update (2017-12-30): since I did not make this very clear, I have added a note about this at the bottom of my new post, about the fact hat confirming these transactions only need you to spoof the sender, since the content and destination of the text message to send are known (it only has to say “Y”, and it’s always to the same service number). So this validation should not really count as a second factor authentication for a skilled attacker.

These are all the reasons for which I abandoned Barclays as fast as I could. Some of those are actually decent mitigation strategies, but the fact that they do not really increase security, while increasing inconvenience, makes me doubt the validity of their concerns and threat models.

New, new gamestation

Full disclosure: the following posts has a significantly higher amount of Amazon Affiliates links than usual. That’s because I am talking about the hardware I just bought, and this post counts just as much as an update on my hardware as a recommendation on the stuff I bought, I have not gotten hacked or bought out by anyone.

As I noted in my previous quick update, my gamestation went missing in the move. I would even go as far as to say that it was stolen, but I have no way to prove whether it was stolen by the movers or during the move. This meant that I needed to get a new computer for my photo editing hobby, which meant more money spent, and still no news from the insurance. But oh well.

As for two years ago, I wanted to post here the current hardware setup I have. You’ll notice a number of similarities with the previous configuration, because I decided to stick as much as possible to what I had before, that worked.

  • CPU: Intel Core i7 7820X, which still has a nice 3.6GHz base clock, and has more cores than I had before.
  • Motherboard: MSI X299 SLI PLUS. You may remember that I had problems with the ASUS motherboard.
  • Memory: 8×Crucial 16GB DDR4.
  • Case: Fractal Design Define S, as I really like the designs of Fractal Design (pun not intended), and I do not need the full cage or the optical disk bays for sure this time around.
  • CPU cooler: NZXT Kraken X52, because the 280mm version appears to be more aimed towards extreme overclockers than my normal usage; this way I had more leeway on how to mount the radiator in.
  • SSD: 2×Crucial MX300 M.2 SATA. While I liked the Samsung 850 EVO, the performance of the MX300 appear to be effectively the same, and this allowed me to get the M2 version, leaving more space if I need to extend this further.
  • HDD: Toshiba X300 5TB because there is still need for spinning rust to archive data that is “at rest”.
  • GPU: Zotac GeForce GTX 1080Ti 11GB, because since I’m spending money I may just as well buy a top of the line card and be done with it.
  • PSU: Corsair RM850i, for the first time in years betraying beQuiet! as they didn’t have anything in stock at the time I ordered this.

This is the configuration in the chassis, but that ended up not being enough. In particular, because of my own stupidity, I ended up having to replace my beloved Dell U2711 monitor. I really like my UltraSharp, but earlier this year I ended up damaging the DisplayPort input on it — friends don’t let friends use DisplayPort with hooks on them! Get those without for extra safety, particularly if you have monitor arms or standing desks! Because of this I have been using a DVI-D DualLink cable instead. Unfortunately my new videocard (and most new videocard I could see) do not have DVI ports anymore, preferring instead multiple DisplayPort and (not even always) HDMI output. The UltraSharp, unfortunately, does not support 2560×1440 output over HDMI, and the DisplayPort-to-DVI adapter in the box is only for SingleLink DVI, which is not fast enough for that resolution either. DualLink DVI adapters exist, but for the most part they are “active” converters that require a power supply and more cables, and are not cheap (I have seen a “cheap” one for £150!)

I ended up buying a new monitor too, and I settled for the BenQ BL2711U, a 27 inches, 4k, 10-bit monitor “for designers” that boasts a 100% sRGB coverage. This is not my first BenQ monitor; a few months ago I bought a BenQ BL2420PT, a 24 inches monitor “for designers” that I use for both my XPS and for my work laptop, switching one and the other as needed over USB-C, and I have been pretty happy with it altogether.

Unfortunately the monitor came with DisplayPort cables with hooks, once again, so at first I decided to connect it over HDMI instead. And that was a big mistake, for multiple reasons. The first is that calibrating it with the ColorMunki was showing a huge gap between the colours uncalibrated and calibrated. The second was that, when I went to look into it, I could not enable 10-bit (10 bpc) mode in the NVIDIA display settings.

Repeat after me: if you want to use a BL-series BenQ monitor for photography you should connect it using DisplayPort.

The two problems were solved after switching to DisplayPort (temporarily with hooks, and ordered a proper cable already): 10bpc mode is not available over HDMI when using 4k resolution and 60Hz. HDMI 2 can do 4k and 10-bit (HDR) but only at lower framerate, which makes it fine for watching HDR movies and streaming, but not good for photo editing. The problem with the calibration was the same problem I noticed, but couldn’t be bothered figuring out how to fix, on my laptops: some of the gray highlighting of text would not actually be visible. For whatever reason, BenQ’s “designer” monitors ship with the HDMI colour range set to limited (16-235) rather than full (0-255). Why did they do that? I have no idea. Indeed switching the monitor to sRGB mode, full range, made the calibration effectively unnecessary (I still calibrated it out of nitpickery), and switching to DisplayPort removes the whole question on whether it should use limited or full range.

While the BenQ monitors have fairly decent integrated speakers, which make it unnecessary to have a soundbar for hearing system notifications or chatting with my mother, that is not the greatest option to play games on. So I ended up getting a pair of Bose Companion 2 speakers which are more than enough for what I need to use them for.

Now I have an overly powerful computer, and a very nice looking monitor. How do I connect them to the Internet? Well, here’s the problem: the Hyperoptic socket is in the living room, way too far from my computer to be useful. I could have just put a random WiFi adapter on it, but I also needed a new router anyway, since the box with my fairly new Linksys also got lost in the moving process.

So upon suggestion from a friend, and a recommendation from Troy Hunt I ended up getting a UAP-AC-PRO for the living room, and a UAP-AC-LITE for the home office, topped it with an EdgeRouter X (the recommendation of which was rescinded afterwards, but it seems to do its job for now), and set them as a bridge between the two locations. I think I should write down networking notes later, but Troy did that already so why bother?

So at the end of this whole thing I spent way more money on hardware than I planned to, I got myself a very new nice computer, and I have way too many extra cables than I need, plus the whole set of odds and ends of the old computer, router and scanner that are no longer useful (I still have the antennas for the router, and the power supply for the scanner). And I’m still short of the document scanner, which is a bit of a pain because I now have a collection of documents that need scanning. I could use the office’s scanners, but those don’t run OCR for the documents, and I have not seen anything decent to apply OCR to PDFs after the fact, I’m open to suggestions as I’m not sure I’m keen on ending up buying something like the EPSON DS-310 just for the duplex scanning and the OCR software.

UK Banking, Attempt 2: Fineco Bank

So after a fairly negative experience with Barclays I have been quickly looking for alternatives. Two acquaintances who don’t know each other both suggested me to look into Fineco, which is an Italian bank also operating in the United Kingdom. As you can tell from their website, their focus is on trading and traders, but turns out they also make a fairly decent bank in and by themselves.

Indeed, opening the account with Fineco has been fairly straightforward: a few online forms, uploading documents to their identity verification system (very similar to what Revolut does, except using an Italian company that I already knew and was a customer of), and then sending £1 from a bank account that is already opened in your name. I found the forms also technically well-designed, particularly the fact that all the “I agree to” checkboxes automatically trigger JavaScript downloads of PDFs with the terms agreed, whether you clicked to read the agreement or not — I guess it’s a «No excuse, you have a copy of this» protection on their side, but it also made it very easy to archive all the needed information together with everything else I keep.

I should note here that it looks like Fineco’s target audience is Italian expats in the UK explicitly. It is common for most services to “special case” their local country as the first entry in the country drop-down, and then add the rest in alphabetical order. In the case of Fineco, the drop-down started with United Kingdom and Italy for all the options.

One of the good thing about this bank being focused so much on trading is that the account is by default a multicurrency one, similar to TransferWise Borderless Account. Indeed, in addition to the primary Sterling account, Fineco sets you up right away with accounts in Euro, Swiss Francs, and US Dollars, all connected to the same login. And in addition to this, they offer you the choice between a Sterling debit card, an Euro credit card, or both (for a reasonable fee of £10/yr). The two debit cards that are connected to the respective currency accounts (and no card is available for Francs or Dollars), and there are no foreign transaction fees for the two. While Revolut mostly took care of my foreign transaction fees, it’s always good to have a local debit card with a much higher availability, particularly as ATM access for Revolut has a relatively low monthly limit.

One of the interesting details of these currency accounts is that they all have Italian IBAN and BIC (with a separate SWIFT routing number, of its parent group UniCredit). For the main Sterling account, UK-style Sort Code and Account Number are available, which make it a proper local account.

This is actually very useful for me: for the past four years I have been keeping my old Italian account open, despite it costing me a fair bit of money just in service, because I have been paying the utilities for my mother’s house. And despite SEPA Direct Debit having been introduced over two years ago, the utilities I contacted failed to let me debit a foreign (Irish) account. Since I left Ireland, and the UK is not a Euro country, I was afraid I would have to keep my Italian account open even longer, but this actually solved the problem: for Italian utilities, the account is a perfectly valid Italian account, as for the most part they don’t even validate the billing address.

An aside: Vodafone Italy and Wind 3 Italy are still attached to my Tesco credit card, which Tesco Bank assures me I can keep using as long as I direct debit it into an Euro account anywhere. They even changed my mailing address to my new apartment in London. Those two companies insist that they only ever accept Italian credit cards, but they accepted my Irish credit card just fine before; in the case of Vodafone, they have an explicit whitelist of the BIN (for whatever reason), while Wind couldn’t get a hold of the concept that the card is Irish at all. Oh well.

Speaking of direct debits and odd combinations, while I should have now managed to switch all the utilities, including the council tax, to direct debit on this new account, I had some trouble doing the setup with Thameswater, the water provider in my area. If I tried setting up the direct debit online, it would report Fineco’s sort code (30-02-48) as invalid. The Sort Code Checker provided by the category association says it’s valid and it works for everything beside the cheque and credit clearing (which is unneeded). I ended up having to call them and ask them to override the warning, but they have not sent me confirmation that they managed. This appears to be a common “feature” of Thameswater — oh and by the way their paper form to request the direct debit was a 404 response on their website. Sigh.

The UI of the bank (and of their app) is much more information-dense than any other bank I’ve ever used. It’s not a surprise when you consider that they their target audience is investors and traders. It does work well for me, but I can see how this would not be the most pleasing interface for most home users. The only feature I have been unable to find yet in the interface is how to set up standing orders – I contacted them this weekend and will see what they say – so for the moment I just set up a few months worth of rent as scheduled payments, which work just as fine for the moment.

The Android app supports fingerprint authentication (unlike Barclay’s) and does not come with its own NFC payment system. Unfortunately the debit cards also appear not to be enabled for Android Pay, which is a bit of a shame. They also don’t leverage the app to send notifications, but they do send free SMS for new offline1 transactions happening on the debit card, which is great.

All in all, I may have found the bank I was looking for. It’s not a “cuddly” bank, but it appears to have what I need and it appears to work for my needs. With a bit of luck it will mean by Q1 I’ll be done with all the other bank accounts in both Ireland and Italy, and finally it’ll be simpler to keep an eye onto how much money I have and how much of it is spent around the place (although GnuCash does help a bit there). I’ll keep you all posted if this changes.

  1. Confusingly enough, a transaction happening over the Internet is an “offline” transaction. The online/offline is referred to the chip for chip’n’pin cards. If the chip is connected to a terminal that is in turn connected to the bank, that’s an online transaction. Otherwise it’s offline. If you read or type the number manually, it’s also offline.
    [return]

UK Banking, Attempt 1: Barclays

You may remember that back in August, I tried opening a NatWest account while not living in the UK yet, and hit a stonewall of an impossible declaration being required by the NatWest employees. I gave up on setting up a remote account, and waited to open one once I got in the country. Since the Northern Irish account seemed to be good for all I needed to do (spoiler: it wasn’t), I decided to wait for the Barclays representative to show up on my official starting date, and set up a “Premier” account with them.

The procedure, that sounded very “special” beforehand, turned out to just be a “Here is how you fill in the forms on the website”. Then, instead of sending you to a local branch to get your documents copied and stamped (something that appears to be very common in the British Isles), they had three people doing the stamping on a pre-made copy of the passport. Not particularly special, but at least practical, right?

Except they also said it would take a few day for the card, but over a week to have access the online banking as they need to “send me more stuff”. The forms were filled in on Monday, set up by Tuesday, and the card arrived on Wednesday, with the PIN following on Thursday. At that point I guessed that what else they told me to wait for was a simple EMV CAP device (I did not realise that the Wikipedia page had a Barclays device as an example, until I looked to link it over here), and decided to not wait, instead signing up for the online banking using my Ulster Bank CAP device, which worked perfectly fine.

On the Friday I also tried installing the Barclays app on my phone. As you probably all noticed by now, looking for a new app from the Play Store is risky, particularly when banking is involved, so I wanted to get a link to it from their website. Turns out that the Barclays website includes a link to the Apple App Store page for their app, but not for the Google Play one. Instead, the Play Store badge image is not clickable. Instead the option they give you is to provide your phone number and they will send you a link to the app as a text message. When I tried doing so, I got an error message suggesting to check my connection.

The reason for the error became apparent with developer tools open: the request to send the SMS is sent to a separate app running on a different hostname. And that host has a different certificate than their main website, which at that point was expired for at least four days! Indeed, since then, the certificate has been replaced with a new one, an EV certificate signed by Entrust, rather than Symantec as they had before. I do find it slightly disconcerting that they have no monitoring on the validity of the certificates for all of their websites, as a bank. But let’s move on.

The online banking relies heavily on “PINSentry” (that is, CAP) but doing so it makes it fairly easy to set up most things, from standing orders to transfers and changes of address. Changing address to my new apartment was quite straightforward, and it all seemed good. The mobile app on the other hand was less useful at first. The main problem is that the app will refuse to do much for the first ten days, because they “set it up” for you. I assume this is a security feature to avoid someone to get access to your account and have the app execute the transactions instead of the website. Unfortunately it also means that the app is useless if your phone dies and you need to get a new one.

Speaking of the mobile app, Barclays supports Apple Pay, but they don’t support Android Pay, probably because they don’t have to. On Android, you can have a replacement app to provide NFC payment support, and so they decided to use their banking app for the payments as well. Unfortunately the one time I tried using it, it kept throwing errors, and asked me to login, with network connection. I don’t think I’ll use this again and will rather look for a bank that supports Android Pay in the future.

Up to here everything sounds peachy, right? The card arrived, it worked, although I only used it a handful times, to buy stuff at IKEA and to buy plane tickets where Revolut would push an extra £5 due to it running on the credit card circuit1, rather than the debit card one.

Then the time came for me to buy a new computer, because of the one ““lost”” by the movers. Since Black Friday was around the corner, and with it my trip to Italy, I decided to wait for that and see if anything at all would come discounted. And indeed Crucial (Micron) had a discount on their SSDs, which is what I ended up ordering. Unfortunately, my first try to order ended up facing a Verified by Visa screen that, instead of trying to get more authentication factors for myself, just went on to tell me the transaction failed, and to check my phone for messages.

Indeed, my phone received two text messages: one telling me that a text message would be sent to confirm a transaction, and one asking me whether the transaction was intentional or not. After confirming it was me doing the transaction, I was responded to try the transaction again in a few minutes. Which I did, but even if this went through the Verified by Visa screen, PayPal refused the payment altogether. Trying to order directly through Crucial without using PayPal managed to get my order through… except it was cancelled half an hour later because Crucial could not confirm the details of the card.

At this point I tried topping up my Revolut account with the same card, and… it didn’t go well either. I tried calling them then, and they could only tell me that the problem was not theirs, and that they couldn’t even see the requests from Revolut, and they didn’t stop any other transactions, giving the fault to the vendor. The vendor of course blamed the bank, and so I got stuck in between.

Upon suggestion from Revolut on Twitter, I tried topping up by UK bank transfer. At first I got some silly “security questions” about the transfer (“Are you making this transfer to buy some goods? Is someone on the phone instructing you to make this payment?” and so on), but when it supposedly completed, I couldn’t see it in the list of transactions, and trying again would lead to a “technical problem” message. Calling the bank again has been even more frustrating because the call dropped once, and as usual the IVR asked me three times for my date of birth and never managed to recognize it. It wasn’t until I left the office, angry and disappointed, that the SMS arrived telling me to confirm if it was really me requesting the transfer…

The end result looked like Barclays put a stricter risk engine in place for Black Friday which has been causing my payments to not go through, particularly not from the office. Trying later in the evening from my apartment (which has a much more clear UK-based geolocation) allowed the orders to go through. You could say that this is for my own protection but I do find this particularly bothersome for one reason in particular: they have an app!

They could have just as easily sent a push notification to my phone to confirm or refuse the transaction, instead of requiring me to be able to receive text messages (which is not a given, as coverage is not perfect particularly in a city like London), in addition to me knowing my access code, having my bank card with me, and knowing its PIN.

At the end of the day I decided that Barclays is not the bank for me, and applied to open an account with Fineco which is Italian and appears to have Italian expats in the UK as their target market. Will keep you posted about it.

  1. But I found out just the other day that the new virtual cards from Revolut are actually VISA Electron, rather than MasterCard. This makes a difference for many airlines as VISA Electron are often considered debit cards, due to the “Electronic Use Only” limitation. I got myself a second virtual card for that and will see how that goes next time I book a flight.
    [return]

A quick London update

It’s now nearly two months since I last posted something and I guess I should at least break the silence to say that I’m well and alive. Although right now I’m spending a week in Italy – to see friends and family here, and take care of some remaining paperwork – my transfer to London completed and I’m now living on the outskirts of the City.

I was almost writing “completed successfully”, but “success” is hard to measure. As I said in the post where I announced my move, a lot of the reason for me to leave Dublin was the lack of friends and a social circle, so you could say that the only way to measure success is seeing if I manage to build such a social circle in the new city (and country), and that will take a while of course.

In addition to this, more than a few things are not quite going in my favour. For instance, the removal companies that arranged and delivered my move managed to screw up, and two of my boxes are missing, which coincidentally were the ones with the most valuable goods: my gamestation, the router and the professional document scanner. And I’m still waiting to hear from the insurance to see that they at least pay the (depreciated) value of the goods so I can get part of my money back on the new computer I’m trying to buy.

I say I’m trying to buy it, because I spent most of this past Friday fighting with my bank trying to have them let me make payments out of my account, possibly because their risk engine was turned up to eleven due to Black Friday, and it took me a significant amount of time to get in a position to actually dispose of my own money. You can bet that the first thing I’m doing after I’m back from this trip is finding a new bank.

Oh yes and somehow it looks like the company that owns and manages the building my apartment is in, is having a spat with the electricity provider. Last week every tenant in the building received a note from e-on (which is not my provider) saying that they are applying for a warrant to disconnect the landlord’s power supply.

So yeah expect more rants as soon as I manage to settle down, I have drafts.