There are some surviving national circuits like PagoBancomat (as the sibling comment from Scrollone) and Dankort (Denmark) and girocard (Germany). My personal impression is that they are slowly going out of fashion in favor of visa/mastercard only (probably because they can’t offer better prices than them).
I don’t see a solution to the duopoly, apart from lobbying politicians to support this national payment infrastructure. Especially in recent times I can also see how some governments might not want to rely entirely on two US companies for running their entire economy, so something might move on that side, so there’s hope on that side.
The EU has already been moving on this front in the last years by forcing the banks to provide programming interfaces to initiate bank payments, and that’s why you can now see more and more options to “pay by bank” online in EU. These online payments generally skip card circuits and run over normal SEPA bank transfers.
More info here on the last part: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Payment_Services_Directive
I really don’t get all this attention to focus prevention. I personally can’t remember the last time I had a window popping up without it being something I want and expect. IMHO It looks like a theorethical attack vector (steal focus right when typing a password), but in practice I’ve never heard of it happening, not even on windows were focus stealing is fully allowed and expected.
If I had any app stealing focus randomly, the app would be nuked out of existance in no time.
I did experience though focus stealing prevention breaking apps (for example the open folder dialog in vscode not appearing in the front). It also breaks some interruptions that I really really want, like the evolution calendar notification window popping up on top of everything telling me I really should be in a meeting right now (and no, a slowly fading notification on the corner of the second screen I’m not looking at right now won’t work)
A big thank you to the authot of grand theft focus for bringing a bit of sanity back.