What I’d love to see is the ability to use my own domain name, so that if that service ever goes under, I can set up a git service with the same paths and everyone relying on my software can continue to do so. It’s just hard to find the trust to invest in a completely new domain to host my projects under.
I think you should be able to do that if you run your own Tangled knot. I'd assume that you can host it under your domain which means your git service will remain even if Tangled itself is down or goes under.
How did people do it before AI? Spellchecks have existed forever. Also, people have the ability to improve, so if you offload all your work elsewhere, you will never improve.
It is interesting, how much money is being lost during this outage?
My significant other was just let go from their job as a scapegoat for an organizational error: 3 layers of failure - IC, manager, director, and the IC was let go. The error caused a 7 figure loss for the company that has 10 figures of revenue per year. The manager and director may not see any consequences, though the director will probably be forced out by end-of-year due to incompetence. The new executive has taken to firing employees much more eagerly than their predecessor, like some sort of Jack Welch acolyte.
Their firing has put a lot of things into perspective for me. Mostly, fuck "at-will" employment and its negative effect on the American social contract.
But also this "angry ranting" online that the original poster was referencing. Not everyone has the privilege to calmly respond to things that directly impact their livelihood.
Any engineered system where an individual can accidentally cause a 7 figure outage is poorly designed. And engineering leadership that decider to terminate an individual due to such failure (as long as there was no malicious actions) is completely clueless.
I'll keep you guys in mind if the lawsuit is successful and we're allowed to publicly speak about it. I believe it's a pretty compelling (and sympathetic) story that deserves to be told. But it's still far too soon for me to be shouting the name from the rooftops.
My SO was fired - this isn't a Google review where we were treated poorly at a restaurant.
I'd be curious what the statistics might actually be for people who are directly affected because their business is suffering vs. people affected because their employer's business is suffering.
most people's employers arent firing people over a few hours of github outage.
not to mention that any business which could potentially lose enough money that they would need to let go of developers from a github outage should probably already have some business continuity plans in place.
If its so critical why relying on it, and not having ie some mirror or some other way to handle any sort of outage like this. its not like Microsoft is your friend or good business partner, ever.
With every single of these enterprise 'cloud' offerings you are giving (almost) complete power over your business/project to somebody else who couldn't care less about your success or failure, you are simply irrelevant for them. I see it at work too, every time critical external systems go down whole bank stops still, just because few bucks were saved yearly on some on-prem servers.
Look at it this way, you are learning some important lesson today and finding great area of improvement for resiliency from now on.
Boomer opinion but trusting third parties to be critical infrastructure, especially with no SLA in sight, will always end in tears. "The cloud" is very convenient, but its providers will never care about your infrastructure or your customers as much as you will.
3P-maintained infrastructure is what makes civilizations work efficiently. We're not all digging our own wells, generating our own electricity, and burning or burying our own garbage.
Agreed. So is the issue really then that people were inadequately prepared with backup plans and now they're suffering the consequences?
It's not all that different from, say, an AWS region having a service impact. People would rather complain about AWS than prepare and utilize a well-tested recovery plan to shift to a standby region. Oftentimes there's no fallback plan because the business already considered it and decided it was too costly relative to the benefit, but when the incident happens, they still can't help but complain. Humans being humans.
Eeh, you always rely on someone else's infrastructure. Even if you are off cloud entirely and own your own datacenter, you still need peering/transit. You still need power (or at least fuel). You can't avoid depending on a DNS infrastructure.
People are already saying things like "We need a plan B in case we urgently need to deploy a fix to production, and GitHub Actions is unavailable again".
But in general, it's not feasible to do everything in house.
Boomer here as well, but I'd add that trusting your own org for critical infra usually also ends in tears. Most everything in IT involves failure, including in well designed systems designed by great engineers.
I worked for a few years in an exceedingly well capitalised place which ran everything in their own data centers, money no object, with a truck parked somewhere, ready to go, with a smaller version of our critical infra. We had a serious business-stopping outage once every 18 months or so, every time for fringe reasons one only learns about when trying to run a large data center. Its convenient to blame the cloud and pretend that self-hosting in private sector was so, so great with six nines.
+1 (as a millenial) ... especially given that setting up a git server for non-OSS company code isn't too much of a challenge really. also, no need to self-denigrate this reasonable opinion in preemptive obedience.
GitHub is way more than just a git repo host. It manages code reviews, merge (pull) requests, and has an entire CI/CD workflow engine in it. Replicating all that is a challenge that most orgs are not up to.
Agree. But also, it's affecting everyone equally, whether they have a free personal account or are part of an enterprise account with SLA. Understanding the practical value of an SLA is an interesting problem.
However, I'm also of the boomer opinion that you should get what you pay for. "Ranting online" about a service (you pay for) being unavailable is a reasonable reaction. It's not like they have a call center you can dial into for support ...
How did this become a boomer opinion? It is proved truth thousand times a day. Not that you shouldn't use third parties - but in this industry you can shrink this exposure to the minimum, and have plan B for anything else.
A lot of casual tech folks I know don't understand GitHub's role in CI/CD, and think it's "just" revision control storage. It's natural, since many people have no reason to know about systems like ghcr.io and npm registry if they're storing vibe-coded personal projects.
GitHub Enterprise Cloud has been chugging along with no issues. I hope your critical infrastructure isn't dependent on a free tier / service. And that you have a business continuity process in place.
"It's just money. It's made up. Pieces of paper with pictures on it so we don't have to kill each other just to get something to eat". Jeremy Irons in movie Margin Call
If you pay developers x money / day and one of their core tools is down for n hours during the day and they spend their money on HN instead that's pretty straight forward to calculate.
“lol just use a workaround” doesn’t work in an environment with hundreds or thousands of employees coupled with audit, security, and other legal requirements to ship software.
If you're actually bleeding money, you better believe you'll get permissions for a workaround, if you know what you're doing.
It all ties back to the OP, where the issue you've might not be as bad as you think. I have been in situations where we have dropped all procedures to push a hot fix because we were actively bleeding money, and in situations where you know there is an issue, and you let it be.
What an odd hill to die on. Maybe I just lost a $30M client because they wanted an issue fixed now. Maybe my company would get sued for violating their contractual obligations if someone went cowboy to bypass procedures.
Maybe I pay for a service and I want that service to work consistently during core business hours.
I couldn't get over the amount of time lost to commuting. Not saying that OP is living their life wrong or anything, to each their own of course, but I prefer working from home precisely because of how much more _life_ I get to live as a result. The time most people spend commuting, I spend going on hikes with my dog in a forest or working out. For those who lack social activities as a result of working from home I suggest making friends to go out with or join activities that are positively minded towards strangers chatting, like indoor bouldering, which is my workout of choice, and every workout session is always filled with great conversations and fun.
I would have agreed with this a few years ago but it's more nuanced than that.
Commute time is built-in decompression time that can be very valuable. For example we have small kids and it's just not going to happen that I am going to tell my wife on a given morning or evening "take care of them while I go on a hike" or whatever.
So on days they I decide to go to the office - I get about 2 hours (one hour each way) of reading time (or podcast time, if I were driving in) which realistically would not materialize any other way.
I think many dads that are my fellow commuters see the commute as a sort of sacred solo space that's hard to maintain otherwise (eg the unspoken etiquette is if you see someone you know on the train you don't sit next to them so they can have their peace and quiet)
I understand your point completely, as I used to feel the same way in the past. Then I realized it's just that being forced to do a commute for work makes it OK to potentially put extra load on your spouse, or to leave your kids with some other caretaker, but this doesn't have to be this way. It should be fine to take some time if you need it even if there's no job-related reason behind it.
So now both my wife and myself take time for ourselves to get that decompression time when needed.
haha, when the weather is really bad, the bathroom with the lights off and headphones is great. Growing up with a single bathroom, a multi-bathroom home is just amazing.
I do wonder if having a single bathroom as a child played any part in my reasonably good grasp of concurrency control though!
I am materially not a morning person. I will push until the last second in the morning to get ready. Forcing myself to wake up an hour earlier to drive in, get my coffee and let it percolate did wonders for my morning productivity. WFH lacks that so instead I got a dog which makes me get up at the ass crack but it's still not like a good mental workout of commuting in rush hour on i95 in a 80's sedan
Of course she should (at least a couple days a week).
And culture already seems to acknowledge and expect that. We have the trope of mom taking a long bubble bath, for example.
"Man time" is usually portrayed as something we allow begrudgingly, like when he goes to the pub with the guys, or to watch sports, or to play video games. I rarely see quiet personal time portrayed as something men need or deserve.
I have never seen anyone with an actual spouse/family look at their partner and relationship through this weird adversarial-gender-struggle lens implied in your question.
It's hilarious to think that my wife would begrudge me a commute (I have to go to work) just because I am able to see something positive in it - anymore than I would resent my wife for having gone part time at work and placing more economic "burden" on me.
What you and your perspective are missing is that real families have a shared goal (raise the family) and the difference people flex in to make it happen.
If my wife texts me that the kids are down and she's going to bed early - while I am stuck at the airport because a work flight is 7 hours delayed - I am happy for her, not seeing this as cause for some insane resentment.
> I have never seen anyone with an actual spouse/family look at their partner and relationship through this weird adversarial-gender-struggle lens implied in your question.
Then, you have never talked openly with women about their roles in society.
And, wow. Even the worst chauvinists admit some women feel they are put-upon in their marriages, but you claim these women are invisible.
Come on! Who is forcing whom here? Women traditionally bear many child-rearing duties and it's the "unemployed" spouse, whatever their sex, who stays at home to do household chores, and that's the way it is.
If anyone's forcing anyone, it's the employer and "the system" that conspire to force people into cars and onto the road for far too much of the workday. I didn't have children, but when I lived with family, friends, or significant other, I felt robbed. I felt robbed by my career because the commute was unpaid time, off-the-clock, where I was denied the time to be present, at home, with my loved ones, or doing chores, or hobbies. So, I was robbed; I wasn't forcing my girlfriend to cook or clean or be alone. I didn't have the agency to make that decision: it is made for me and all men like me.
When I drove a car, at least the commute was as fast as possible. When I ride public transit on a commute, the times become ungodly, and they truly eat away at your unpaid free time! At least public transit costs pennies compared to maintaining and driving a car!
Wives and mothers deserve some alone-time. It's incumbent on the husband to carve this out so that she doesn't burn out. It's incumbent on fathers to make time, quality time, for their children. But it's even more incumbent on these couples to earn money, do chores, and put in the work for raising their children. That's why we've got schools, because they step in and do the childcare, in loco parentis, and hopefully children have extended families that also participate in those duties.
> Commute time is built-in decompression time that can be very valuable.
That assumes you can meaningfully decompress. In a car, it's almost impossible (or at the very least, reckless) if you are the driver, and on most crowded stop-and-go routes even as a passenger. In any kind of public transit you have to deal with anything from rowdy children over beggars, drunks, thieves and other undesirables to keeping up with the latest construction BS and delays. Basically the only thing left is biking or walking, but that only works out on specific routes (i.e. well built sidewalks and separate, wide bike lanes)...
I found public transit commuting to be quite peaceful most days. The rowdy children happened infrequently enough that they were often a nice change of pace, and the "drunks and thieves and undesirables" simply didn't happen with a 9-5 commute. The worst part indeed was the random delays from construction, but on those days, car traffic was also crawling.
Maybe people have a different nervous system than I do but I find that people driving/stuck in traffic can easily enjoy a podcast and that driving takes no significant conscious effort most of the time.
> but I find that people driving/stuck in traffic can easily enjoy a podcast
Yeah... and this misconception "it's just stop and go" is a top contributor in accidents because people just don't take care about what is going on in front of them.
Sounds like your wife needs to be more accommodating or understanding. My spouse understands decompression time and enables it, despite me working remotely.
Yes, and somehow commuting week after week is so much better than having a conversation with your wife. It's not like the kids just stop existing when you're commuting. The solution is there, but it can't be used unless you're suffering.
I feel like many of the posts are like hypothetical "if I had a wife and kids this is what I would tell her" - hard to tell if any of these people are actual parents.
Got it - you are having a hypothetical conversation here.
It reminds me of the movie the 49 year old virgin where the title character is asked what breasts feel like and he guesses bags of sand. And of course because it's hypothecal to him he can't tell how ridiculous that actually is.
I did the math during COVID. I was putting in about 30% more hours when I had to go to an office, and all of them were unproductive. I wasn't being paid any extra to do that - which was especially unfair since I also had additional wear and tear on the car, lunches out, fancier clothes to buy, etc.
I may go back to the office someday if I'm forced to, but I won't do it for free. Companies need to compensate in office employees not just for the extra work, but for the expense.
Now I use some of those extra hours for the company, and some to work on my side projects. It's glorious. I'm both more productive at work and happier than I've ever been. I also don't get sick when all the cube-dwellers do a few times per year.
For me, I take the bus to work, so my commute time is spent on pleasant things like reading library books, or working through Chinese lessons on my phone, or just looking out the window, or occasionally chatting with other commuters. I actually enjoy my commute, it's some nice time set aside entirely for myself each day.
If I had to be stuck in a car for my commute, I'd definitely resent it.
Being in a disease-ridden tuna can that is often filled to the brim so you don't even get a seat is not exactly something that I would call pleasant. My friends who commute to work via public transport get sick multiple times per year, I don't.
I feel the same way about my bus commute. Strange tangent, but I also donate plasma once a month and it's perfect for reading a book because there's literally nothing else you can do for the 45 minutes or so that the donation takes.
Doing good, enforced reading time, plus free snacks. What's not to love? (other than the vein spiking, for some people).
I think the quality of a commute is very different depending on whether it's by car or by train, since you can actually read / write / program / draw on a train.
Obviously I'm still pretty glad when I get to work from home and sleep in a little and make some good coffee though.
I commuted into the city a few days a week for about 18 months quite a while back. I'd normally take the train unless I were doing something in the evening at which point the commuter rail timetable didn't work very well.
Yes, it was better than driving but still wasn't that great. I had to catch the train at about 6:30 AM. And it was still a good 3 hours on the train any given day. Wasn't really very relaxing and I never found it an environment conducive to getting real work done.
The point of a train commute isn’t to get more work done (that would be working extra hours for your employer). Instead it’s time for yourself to relax, away from work, family responsibilities, and all that. Find a good book, listen to some new music while not multitasking, daydream a bit, or get your HN fix.
I lived in the Toronto area for ~20 years. I could commute by car in anywhere form 1-1.5 hours each way, OR, drive 30 minutes to a train station and spend 5-10 minutes looking for parking, wait 10 minutes to board, take an hour to get downtown, then walk for 10-15 minutes, then do that in reverse, plus $18 dollars a day for a train ticket. So 4 hours a day by train or 2-3 hours a day by car.
> Not saying that OP is living their life wrong or anything, to each their own of course, but I prefer working from home precisely because of how much more _life_ I get to live as a result.
They have to find a job that allows them to do that, and such jobs are increasingly difficult to find.
Where I'm based, even though it might be the smallest startup that could save a good bit by getting rid of their office costs if they gave people WFH, they won't.
It’s not time lost to commuting. For some people, without the structure of a workday imposed by commuting, they devolve into doing other time-wasting activities. In fact the author said without this commute they would “be on my phone/on Reddit/read HN comments all day/etc.” From this light, a commute doesn’t cause any more time to be lost, but rather it restricts the amount of time lost to be the commute itself, rather than the entire workday. This is something I’m seen very often in people who are dissatisfied with WFH. They lose focus, lose the sense of time, and waste the entire day without the commute.
I've been in multiple car accidents this year, none of them my fault. Commuting might actually be the death of me, I can't express to a future employer how much I'm willing to trade just to not have to do it anymore. Doesn't help that I deal with some of the worst traffic in America...
During the course of my sorry career, beginning in college in fact, my minimum commute time was 20 minutes. I had some commutes that were much longer and complex.
Driving a motor vehicle was perhaps an opportunity for focus and solitude, but the act of driving itself is too active, too demanding, to be zen or deeply contemplative. The most I could do was rock out to a custom mixtape or the radio, and ignore my troubles.
One commute was across a treacherous mountain pass with switchbacks and deadly fog. I once deliberately caused an accident there on the highway. I once came six inches from wrapping myself and my Integra around a pine tree. I don't miss driving to work.
Later in life, when I was denied ownership of a vehicle, I commuted by public transit. This could be heaven or this could be hell. If there was a disturbance or complication on the bus, it was a daily trauma and I arrived at my destination as a triggered, frazzled, bundle of nerves. If the voyage was uneventful, I truly had a chance to space out, watch the scenery, and arrive relaxed and calm.
Nowadays, I'm more likely to use a taxi or a rideshare. Waymo is the calmest and most efficient transport for solitude and silence. But taxis travel very fast, and being rushed is not conducive to contemplation. So, I do try to mix in some public transit wherever possible, and during those times, I pray it's on the uneventful side.
Yeah, I'm more like you. I also agree with "to each their own" and like that we're so different that someone like the author enjoys going to an office and struggles with phone/device usage when working from home, and others like us prefer remote work.
To me, it's not just the commute. I actually prefer working from home. I enjoyed his description of Miyazaki greeting the ghosts though, I think I could work from an office if it was my studio, but I'd want it to be very close to my home.
Remote work also makes it possible for me to follow my natural "productivity cycle," which means I often get to work until late in the evening while still being able to have dinner with my family and then just have a short commute to my bedroom when they're (usually) already asleep. I did late-night (and even all-night) work too from offices when I was young, but it's one thing to do that in your very early 20s and with only your parents as family, than as an almost 50 with a spouse and kids.
As for enshittification defenses, besides having a family (including cats, used to have a dog too), having musical instruments within reach is great for when I need a quick break. Some breaks can also involve devices and still not be about dopamine, like when I reach out for my personal laptop to open renoise. Lately I've also taken up drawing a bit. I suck at it, but I still enjoy the activity.
I agree on the benefits of social activities. My workout of choice is weightlifting and I do have regulars that I talk to (plus for some exercises you really do need someone around if you want to safely get to your breaking point).
The one thing I miss from my youth days is social music playing. I hope I'll get back to that someday, but everybody's life is busy in different ways and, unlike getting together for coffee or beer, getting together to play music does require a bigger logistical effort and time budget. While I wait for the opportunity to arise, playing along to records is an OK way to get by.
To me this correlates more to them being bought by Microsoft, a company known for being seemingly incapable of creating quality software to the point that it's not even funny anymore, and also known for sloppifying all the products they touch.
I don't think so. GitHub was bought by Microsoft 8 years ago and people have only started complaining about its uptime in the last year or so - exactly correlating with the surge in LLM use.
It's not the whole story. The biggest change is actually the internal rules for how downtime was reported, it wasn't actually such a large change in the actual reliability then.
I don't think so. I've seen those complaints for more than a year.
I have an Ops background and I strongly suspect they were given a stupid timeline for the Azure migration.
I've got to believe Microsoft have decent Ops people but the management wanted to move faster than was reasonable and screwed it up. Move one thing at a time and double check it all works and you can do a migration like this.
I've lived through two acquisitions by the world-largest companies (and few more smaller ones). Here's my impression of what often happens in situations like this:
* There's a huge disconnect between the actual product and what was sold to the buyer. It could be that the product was a borderline fraud, or it could be that the product was actually much better quality than the expectation on the buyer's side, but the buyer isn't interested in most of the product.
* Fear spreads in the acquired company that their product will be discontinued or reshaped into something else.
* The pay is good, probably much better than before the company was bought.
* Many internal teams end up lacking real purpose and try to insert themselves into every new internal project only to obfuscate their irrelevance.
This leads to some pathological developments, where the teams previously working on acquired products start doing a lot of useless, for-show work. Internal initiatives sprout like mushrooms after a summer rain, but they are all plagued by very broad (and mostly irrelevant) team involvement, duplication of existing products / services, and fear of being discovered. And while there are plenty of such initiatives, their role is to be a superficial distraction. In reality, everyone is afraid to touch the old code or do any sensible integration because it could lead to blanket firing of a lot of people. The middle-management behavior becomes a sort of exchange of favors, where everyone is afraid that the other can blackmail them into losing their job, and so everyone is trying to be extra nice by offering a slice of a pie to another manager.
What this leads to, in reality, is insane inertia (often despite highly shortened software release cycles), astronomic amounts of unmitigated tech. debt, opacity in communication with management, persecution of those who genuinely want to improve the system.
Based on this, my prediction is that Github will not survive. Just like Skype didn't. Somehow or other, Microsoft will find a way to replace the product with... MS Outlook with a new skin.
Even on a large timeline there is just a lot of risk when migrating legacy infra to an entirely new system, especially if the original arch grew "organically" and has tones of edge cases.
I always figured these problems were directly related to the migration.
> people have only started complaining about its uptime in the last year or so
I'm sorry but this made me laugh out loud. That isn't true at all, this has been going on for years. This conversation[0] from six years ago has discussion about the outages starting to become much more frequent in December 2019. It has never gotten better in that time, it's just continually degraded.
Ok I should have said people have only started constantly complaining in the past year or so. Of course there was the odd complaint in the past, but now I see a thread about it at least ever month on HN, and loads of articles about migration off GitHub.
GitHub Actions was always a mess. Because it is a Microsoft product.
If you want to have a horrible time, try reading some of the runner code. It's early 2010s-style Windows-First, MSFT C# crud that has trouble not racing several threads to inconclusive status codes.
Yes. That was my impression too. Github Actions aren't a good product in many ways. It's also very complex and requires quite a bit more infrastructure than the rest of Github. Unfortunately, I don't think that the commercial side of the product would allow it to improve in the direction of better quality / uptime. It's cursed to be forever like MS Outlook: whenever it changes it's for the worse, even though it was never good.
I'm not sure if this is a joke or not, because it has all the signals of a joke, but it might be closer to true than I'd like to admit.
At my work, the average quality has gone up with "blindly trusting Opus". The failure modes are horrendous and the code is verbose as shit, but it still works better. Most "engineers" aren't very good at writing code.
It's true, Microsoft made github worse, but the more recent issues seem to have to do a lot more with Microsoft selling its soul to AI. Microsoft really appears to have gotten dumber as they became dependent on AI. Most recent example: they used to promote Win11 and 32GB RAM. Now they are down to 8GB silently ... this is quite hilarious. There are now so many side effects that you see degradation in so many other areas. Or the gaming industry: it is not quite dying but it is taking a huge hit with skyrocketing RAM prices. Consoles selling less is an example here. It's quite fascinating how deadly disruptive AI is now.
This really needs to have a lot more evidence that it’s because GitHub’s code is being written by AI vs them being bombarded by activity from all kinds of AI agents all over the world vs they were already on a trajectory of quality loss.
The 32GB issue is more about one internal factor: the wasteful reliance on Electron and other JS runtimes for UI, and two external factors: the very high price of RAM, and the increasing adoption of Linux.
So they will make Windows run on 8GB because people can't purchase cheap RAM anymore, and they want to stop people migrating to Linux.
This is not directly caused by AI slop, only indirectly through RAM prices.
It is? I haven’t carried my wallet around in years, because Apple Wallet does everything I need. Concert tickets, boarding passes, bank cards, public transport cards, etc. A physical wallet and cards in comparison feels like stone age technology.
And your battery goes empty, and you just lost everything. Or your phone falls to the ground and breaks.
And to add to payments, the store loyalty apps are the worst... Lidl over here has an app only (no physical loyalty card), and they should be hanged for developing that... first of all, you're waiting in line while a grandma takes her phone out of her purse, then unlock it, and of course android is not satisfied with her fingerprint right then but also wants a pin... then all apps, then scroll down to L, find LidlPlus app, tap on it... QR code? Nope, not yet! First you get a daily coupon wheel of fortune, tap, wait for it to spin, see what your award is... and if it's something that she just bought, she has to manually activate that coupon in the menu (again, tap, find, tap, tap back), and then click the card button to get the qr code to scan... it's literally minutes sometimes of just waiting, instead of scanning a simple qr code on a plastic card pulled from the wallet.
We even had one of our telcos break down (full internet loss, country wide), POS terminals not working at all, and there are actually people with zero cash with them, not even like 50 euros (for just-in-case (like this))... and then you have to wait for them to turn around, take their stuff back and go home hungry.
I'm not an American. In Estonia your ID is entirely digital, and I just show my e-Estonia government provided app to a scanner, which can scan my ID from there and verify it. Same with a drivers license. As long as I travel within EU I also don't need to carry a passport with me as a EU citizen.
Banks and card networks will only accept proprietary shitware as payment. Would you rather keep the malware confined to a separate processor chip or would you let it run on your phone?
In other words, would you like to have your physical card to be lost or stolen and someone paying with it? As small amounts don’t ask for a pin confirmation. Having my phone stolen is pretty much another level of attack.
> would you like to have your physical card to be lost or stolen and someone paying with it?
I don't really care, as I'm protected from fraud by the card issuer and regulations in my country.
> Having my phone stolen is pretty much another level of attack.
Stealing a wallet or a phone seems just about the same level of difficulty.
And you can trick an iPhone into believing you're a transit terminal and charge arbitrary amounts to real credit cards, without unlocking the phone. (And Apple thinks this is a feature.) The attack requires specialized hardware and physical access, but if you've stolen the phone, that's fine.
(Yes, I know, this article is about Android. But most people where I live have iPhones, even if I don't.)
Yes... that $25 if they manage to get even that before it is blocked I can live with. Loosing my phone, even if they can't do anything with it is a whole other scenario. Now I can't even get home.
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