Oh man... I love that Stripe is finally coming to Europe.
BUT seriously (going on a disappointed rant here): Belgium & the Netherlands get into private beta and Germany gets nothing? I mean: Come on. BE + NL together have 27m people - Germany has some 80m AND a world-class economy. I don't want to bash on our neighbors (God knows we've done that one or two times in the past), I just want me some Stripe.
I know that the delay is probably because of some ridiculous red tape in Germany. :-(
tl;dr: Please absolve us from PayMill & the Samwer brother
No idea but one thing Germany is famous for is the low adoption of credit cards vs direct debit (ELV) etc - more so than most European countries. German's tend to find it a deal breaker (locally) if you are a payment gateway that only supports credit cards. So that could be one reason why but just a guess.
n.b. we were talking about DIRECT DEBIT (which is something else entirely from debit cards).
You basically allow a company to directly withdraw money from your bank account (assuming sufficient funds on the account)
As much as I can understand you being upset that Chrome shows a warning for your site, I don't think that the approach they are using is unreasonable.
I'd take bets that those criteria show a correlation to phishy sites. Especially if you combine those metrics together.
Is it perfect? No. Does it produce false positives? Yes. Is it beneficial on average? I think so.
PS: Since you have found the relevant file in the open source project (or 'kiddie playground' - as you like to call it), why don't you supply a superior implementation with less "foolish" measures?
My point is that with an browser (similar to an OS), they cannot take things lightly and flag things left and right based on "heuristics". With great power comes great responsibility.
My point is that if you are going to design a system to identify bad websites it better be fail safe otherwise it is going to cause a lot of hurt.
The message shown in the browser for a phishing warning is the same as when a website has an invalid SSL certificate.
The first is vaguely accurate, the latter is 100% accurate and no one is going to argue if the warning is needed. Both show the mind chilling warning no sane user will click through.
I am more interested in removing the phishing filter than in writing a phishing filter.
Anyways, with a 'closed' server component also in the mix, what option is there to provide any implementation.
IMHO, I think that doing things for the 'benefit of most' will lead to eroded freedoms for all over time.
PS: 'Supply a better implementation' is not an answer to writing poor code and hoisting on the world.
You are trivializing the underlying issue here. If the same thing happened in a physical world it will be a high profile public defamation case.
Browser is the window through people sees the world. That’s the reality we live in. In our target market, Google chrome holds 40% market share. Because of its stupid categorization, in one stroke Google harmed our reputation and the reputation of companies we serve. It is not a simple browser compatibility issue. Google chrome is telling the world our software is phishing software while we are not. What is the recourse here?
We don’t care what Chrome’s algorithms are. But the results are not factual and it harms our business. "One cannot escape saying hey that is our algorithm. We don’t do evil…" Remember.
Believe me, I am empathetic to the pain this is causing you. I can understand the anger you are feeling.
But I don't think that I am trivializing things. The fact is, that phishing sites are causing a real pain (as in millions of dollars lost by the victims, hundreds of thousands of computers becoming zombies, etc).
All major browsers are trying to mitigate these risks by implementing phishing & malware filters.
None of these implementations are perfect (you probably know a bit or two about bugs in software development).
But on average these filters have a positive ROI - especially for the target market (which is Joe WebUser and sadly NOT your company - or mine for that matter). The costs of a false positive ("I'll go & find that information on another site") far outweigh the costs of a false negative ("I put my login+password into this legitimate looking website and now I can no longer access PayPal").
In my experience over the last few weeks, younger Germans (my age, 30 years & younger) are blissfully ignorant ("I don't have anything to hide" - sounds familiar ?) to the impact of the government spying on its citizen.
24 years are a long time & that part of history is not as well-ingrained in the collective memory as the Holocaust. :-(
Its always struck me as odd that Germans seem to be so hot on privacy but seem fine with having mandatory ID cards and with the police being able to demand you show it.
One might argue that ID cards actually preserve privacy. In order to give some company or person proof of my identity, I just have to show them my ID card. This transfers less personal information to them than a driver's license, birth certificate, etc. State-issued ID cards are usually much harder to falsify than those, too. Therfore, rarely something else beside them is needed for identification. Therefore, identity theft is more or less a non-issue in Germany.
He seems to be happy with the police having access to everyones id card data and appearing to have no oversite to see if the Police are abusing the power of asking people to present your id card or "papers please".
As far as I'm aware (correct me if I'm wrong), there is an ID card or a functional equivalent thereof in most if not all countries, as the ability to verify someone's identity is pretty much a requirement for a modern society. Whether it's an actual "ID card" or a passport, birth certificate, driver's license, social security number, whatever doesn't really matter IMO.
As for having to reveal/prove my identity to the police: I could do without that, but I consider it mostly a non-issue. In practice it happens rarely, and if it does the police officers tend to be pretty friendly and reasonable. Case in point, one of the two or three times this has happend to me in my life, my ID was invalid as it had expired several months before. They were basically like "Well you better get a new one soon, m'kay?" and then sent me on my way. YMMV of course.
The big difference though between the ID card thing and privacy violations by spying is that the spying happens behind people's backs, and they may never know how broadly their rights are violated until one day the gathered information is used against them. There can be no effective oversight and that's why it must not be allowed to happen in the first place.
If on the other hand the police started abusing their authority – acting like dicks, grabbing people en masse to check their IDs on every street corner, it would be immediately obvious to everyone and could presumably be corrected (by vote, protest, civil disobedience, etc).
> In practice it happens rarely, and if it does the police officers tend to be pretty friendly and reasonable. Case in point, one of the two or three times this has happend to me in my life, my ID was invalid as it had expired several months before. They were basically like "Well you better get a new one soon, m'kay?" and then sent me on my way. YMMV of course.
Well remember, when we discuss government programs the only valid point of discussion is what could possibly go wrong in the hands of a despot, not how the program is applied in practice. ;)
> The big difference though between the ID card thing and privacy violations by spying is that the spying happens behind people's backs, and they may never know how broadly their rights are violated until one day the gathered information is used against them.
That has always been true in the U.S. though. Just look at the NFL tight end Aaron Hernandez, who was arrested on murder charges yesterday. During his arraignment the prosecution managed to produce a horrifying assortment of evidence against Hernandez, after only a week's worth of police work (all fully legal and with proper oversight).
The only effective difference was that in this case the government did not retain the records by themselves, but subpoena'd them from the companies as needed.
The government could still theoretically switch to doing this too. PRISM is a good example, but there's no technical reason why the NSA couldn't just require the phone and Internet companies to store all the data that the NSA would anyways, and access it on demand.
I guess what I'm trying to say is that the things "spying on us behind are backs" are the things we've built onto the Internet. The Internet Never Forgets and that works to the government's advantage as much as it does ours.
Yes but in the UK having a passport is not required. And a short while ago on on here some one living in Germany commented that it was funny how it was the Non Ethnic Germans that got stopped a lot more.
> [...] it was the Non Ethnic Germans that got stopped a lot more.
That's probably true to some extent. I imagine though that the situation is similar in other countries, and the problem is racism in itself. It's sad, but it has nothing to with the ID requirement.
Just look at the US; they may not require an ID, but it sure does not seem to stop their police from physically abusing anyone who looks at them the wrong way. Or in rare cases, literally beating up or even murdering someone just because they're black/mexican/whatever.
(Disclaimer: I've never been to the US. American pop culture may have distorted my view on the American police. :)
That one's easy: wiretapping is painted as an evil commie thing (in fact it's widely seen as the second key reason why the eastern system was bad, lead closely by shooting people at the wall and followed at great distance by smaller cars), while IDs were as real in the west as they were in the east. Also, while people in the east had real problems with a wiretapping organization completely out of control, them not having IDs would have hardly made any difference. One could easily argue that making a difference between those two things is based on some solid experience and therefore isn't odd at all.
Both german states were running like virtualized OS instances hosted by occupation. Under those conditions one would probably give an ID-less system about as little consideration as a liberal reimplementation of the second amendment. When that changed nobody felt much like messing with the proven western system envied so much by those in the east.
The idea that you could be required to identify yourself is probably what seems strange to them. In (at least) several US states the police can require you to identify yourself, but telling them your name is all that is required. Americans have an aversion to "papers please", because for decades that is one of the things that we felt distinguished ourselves from certain other countries.
Quite that is why the UK drooped ID cards after WW2 rather surprised that other countries which had much more bad experience with "papers please" in WW2 did not do the same.
Visiting the US for a while, I recall being yelled at by an inland border patrol guard in Texas for having the temerity to keep my passport in my trunk. Saying my name was definitely not all that was required.
Land near the borders (particularly the southern border) is treated differently (very poorly, as you unfortunately learned). Texas is not even the worse in that regard, as hard as that may be to believe. Arizona takes that shameful crown: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arizona_SB_1070
"But pushing citizens to use Linux is NOT government business"
Not sure where you are from, but in Europe/UK local governments do get involved in promoting what might be described as lifestyle choices. E.g. smoking cessation, getting more exercise, healthy eating, making recycled furniture available cheap to poor people by establishing and promoting 'social enterprises' as we call them in the uk.
I see the free CDs as that really, just saying 'there is an alternative to chucking your old PC away, just try this and see if it is enough for you'. Not so much pushing linux from any political/anti-microsoft position, just saying you don't have to spend (more) money.
Yes. Less waste, and in theory users will be given more secure and up to date software experience, which should provide safety and confidence for online shopping, for more tasty taxable purchases.
+1 for environment
+1 for Capitalism
EDIT: last +1 for education, and employment. No need to get a new fancy computer to do your homework or write a CV.
UK: big push to get 'open government' going and my local council has a big advertising campaign getting people to use their web pages. Not always online, some services mainly call centre based.
Yes, of course. My local government spends quite a lot on marketing and publicising the social enterprises I mentioned in grandparent post.
A few thousand CDs won't cost that much. Canonical themselves supply Ubuntu CDs for £80 per 100. I'd imagine it gets a lot cheaper per 1000.
You can pay £900 to advertise a job in our local paper, and that is for a 10cm two column advert with two insertions. I had to pay £100 to move a piano not so long ago (specialist private mover).
Of course not, but CDs are incredibly cheap if produced in great numbers. And as a German I can only agree with keithpeter. It's perfectly normal for local government to spend tax-money outside of "classic" duties to promote a public issue. Especially something with an environmental background.
Something else you should keep in mind is, that Munich is pushing towards electronic bureaucracy, which would require access to a PC by everyone.
Perfectly normal is an observation of frequency of occurrence, and one I won't dispute. "hiddenfeatures" was complaining that this was (to paraphrase with words from your observation) "perfectly normal", which he found odd in that his tax money was promoting this, when he didn't see this as a government function.
"keithpeter" referenced that in Europe/UK (and I will confirm that various jurisdictions in the US of A do so as well) local governments promote all sorts of pet social projects. At this point "keithpeter" referenced free CDs.
That's when I pointed out the CDs were not free to produce which was "hiddenfeatures" point about tax money going to promote a product.
Now, I'm not sure where "hiddenfeatures" is from, but I am from the US of A, and things like this do happen here as well, and some people don't like it for a variety of reasons. Constitutionalists, for instance can't find Linux promotion in any of the original Articles, nor in any Amendments.
For me anytime I see even small amounts of money spent I compare it to what I've been taxed for the year and calculate how much of my money went to support the program. If its less than I have been taxed, I can claim to have completely funded the program, if it's more, then I can calculate how many years I had to work to completely fund this a program. If it's far more than I can be taxed in a lifetime, I try to calculate how many people like me will have all of their lifetime tax money poured into said program.
> "For me anytime I see even small amounts of money spent I compare it to what I've been taxed for the year and calculate how much of my money went to support the program."
Does your analysis include any estimate of corresponding benefits, specifically reduction in costs down the line?
Yes, I calculate benefits when I spend my money. When the government spends my money I ask why, if its because the government will then spend less of my money on something else, I ask why is the government doing the other thing to begin with.
I'm pretty sure blood won't run in the streets and mass murderers won't roam with impunity if we don't install Linux on our old boxes.
I'm all for the government being limited to fewer things, so the political will has less to argue about, and we can all get back to talking about the weather and arguing about religion.
> But pushing citizens to use Linux is NOT government business
Why not? The goverment standardizes everything else, from screws to seat belts to yogurts, why not stop the crazy update-planned-obsolescence cycle pushed by commercial entities and agree on a "standard UI" for normal people?
The amount of unnecessary changes in UIs has become unbearably crazy. And since those changes are forced from all sides, there is no way to vote with your wallet.
Whoever wants to constantly relearn the same stuff over and over and over, and today relearn the Ribbon, tomorrow Metro, and so on, is free to do it. But normal, everyday folks should not have to deal with this shit. Computers are supposed to be boring, everyday tools to accomplish everyday tasks, not fashion statements.
If the commercial world is not willing or able to keep computers useful tools, the goverment has to step in and slow down the amount of changes and prevent the giant waste of tediously gathered know-how.
Safety standards ARE often set by the government, but more general standards mostly are not.
By the way, the position you're arguing for is literally the opposite of innovation. Imagine if, after Apple unveiled the iPhone, the government had discouraged its adoption because it removed people's hard-won knowledge of using Motorola flip phones. I guess Motorola would have been happy!
That is exactly the WRONG question. Government power & influence needs to be restricted to the bare minimum necessary - for the security(!) of its citizen.
We can all clearly see what extensive government power leads to. Just wait for the HN front page to be flooded again with reports about Snowden/PRISM.
There are certain tasks that should be put in the hands of the government (ensuring the rule of law, national defense, making sure free elections happen) and others that have a good ROI (education / healthcare).
But beyond that, it is just more power to the wrong institution.
Going completely 1984 here: Today they distribute Linux, tomorrow they distribute Linux with a Rootkit pre-installed.
Regarding UI changes: Boy... I hate those. 20 years of Moore's law have left us with incredibly powerful computers and we manage to waste all that raw power, those billions of CPU cycles per second on fancy UI. You are completely right - from a technical, educated standpoint.
BUT, that's not how the human brain works. For your average consumer the rule of thumb is "if it looks fresh, it is fresh". Plain & simple. They don't "get" that NTFS now supports transactions and that atomicity in file operations is like the holy grail and just completely awesome - but "Oh boy! That start button with lights up when I move the mouse over it!!!!"
Tell you what: Microsoft has that shit figured out - at least with every other version ;-)
I'm not sure that we want to short-circuit competition in the industry with one of the highest rates of innovation over the past 20 years. If we had followed this strategy, we'd all still be using Windows 3.1.
> Whoever wants to constantly relearn the same stuff over and over and over, and today relearn the Ribbon, tomorrow Metro, and so on, is free to do it. But normal, everyday folks should not have to deal with this shit
I like and use Linux. But I wouldn't say that it is great at providing a stable user interface. Things keep changing in in as many arbitrary ways as it does with Windows, perhaps even more.
The intention of the city is not to push its citizens to use Linux. They just want you to install Linux instead of disposing your old PC because it's not capable of running a newer version of Windows than XP.
An indirect benefit is teaching the younger generation to be more proficient with linux.
Many of these old PCs can be used as hand-me-downs for young kids. Some of these kids will eventually work for the city and contribute to existing infrastructure. Also, let's not forget economies of scale (ie. labor, ecosystem, etc) to further reduce costs.
As I was reminded in another comment many Atom based 1Gb netbooks were sold with XP and a 160Gb hard drive. Such a machine can run ubuntustudio well, and allow a young person to do quite a lot with audio, images and some low-fi video.
It is terrible. Yesterday I had to go long ways to help a friend install skype on w8. The thing pushed her towards the metro version and microsoft account.
So i had to find a direct link to desktop installer. Every non IT user I have seen hates 8. Most of the ITs too.
I would have probably said (with some imprecision):
Electrical circuits either carry a current (binary 1) or they don't (binary 0). [Ignoring the fact that you could also measure the AMOUNT of current carried here] Because of this underlying limitation in electrics you need to make do with just a binary system in computers.
Depending on the amount of time remaining I would either go into more depth or point him towards "Code: The Hidden Language of Computer Hardware and Software" by Charles Petzold (http://amzn.com/0735611319)
