In the 90s, what exactly would the attack vector have been? I don't imagine AOL would have wanted to steal people's credit cards. I find it odd that this was viewed as a concern for credit cards but not website logins.
A few years later it's much more about whether this is really going to take off, there's no doubt people can do it, but is there any desire? There's a BBC clip on Youtube from the era when Amazon is an exciting new business, it has a lot more different books in stock than any bricks and mortar store, but it doesn't have the enormous sales volumes compared to real world book stores yet, Bezos could just be another entrepreneur with an idea that sounds good - he isn't yet incredibly rich and so he also seems much less weird.
It's that easy to tap a phone line?
Mail order services will take credit card numbers over the phone verbally, right? Why was that considered safer?
To this day, if you open Twitter, Facebook Groups or Discord, you’ll find people complaining about Google forcing HTTPS down people’s throat.
Perhaps the dang (the moderator of Hacker News) knows…
Before that, all http links instead.
