Finland, Denmark, Norway, Sweden, and Estonia are soon enabling offline debit card payments for at least seven days without network connectivity. The change covers payments for essential goods in physical trade, such as food, medicine, and fuel. Each country has made - or is in the process of making - the required changes to their related regulations to enable it.

The motivation for this change is to enable payments even in exceptional situations such as network disruptions due to sabotage or conflict. TL;DR: You can pay for essentials even if Russia cuts the cables.

Plans for this change were announced in May 2025: https://www.reuters.com/business/finance/nordics-estonia-plan-offline-card-payment-back-up-if-internet-cut-2025-05-07/

#resilience #preparedness #infrastructure #payments #banking

"MCP is Dead; Long Live MCP!"

> individual usage of coding agents looks very different from organizational adoption of coding agents where there is an emphasis on visibility, telemetry, security, quality, and being able to operationalize and maintain agent-coded systems by a team of varying degrees of skill and experience.

https://chrlschn.dev/blog/2026/03/mcp-is-dead-long-live-mcp/

The #Tor network reached consensus method 35 today. This means Happy Families is officially in production! 😎

Yesterday, we saw 12004 relays in the network, 6124 of them have the legacy family system enabled, and 2576 already have Happy Families deployed!

Great work so far by the Relay Operator community! 🎉