Another headstone in the google graveyard. This one doesn't make any sense to me, either, unless there are weird regulatory issues they want to avoid since it seemed like a very popular registrar. Or maybe they just didn't want to staff any limited customer support team.
I'm also confused, it's a paid product! If it wasn't making enough money, why didn't they just raise the price? It already wasn't the cheapest name registrar, so I don't think people were selecting it solely based on cost (I went with it because of the free 100 email aliases included, but others liked the clean layout and simplicity compared to some other options.)
I get why they kill free things that don't make them money, but it seems very strange with a paid product, especially when, as others have said, they have GCP, which will presumably require a third party registrar in the future.
It's not a traditional "paid product" where you can reduce cost, increase efficiency and/or take advantage of economy of scale. There are foxed ICANN fees per domain, most registrar add a markup on that, sell ownership data, auction popular expired domains, squat good names, etc. Google Domains (and Cloudflare) main spiel is they sell domains at cost as they make their money else where. It was intentionally a business that was never meant to make money.
It wasn't "the cheapest registrar" because they didn't offer "signup deals", just like cloudflare. Other cheaper registrar offer a signup deal for $1 or $2 a domain (subtext: renews for $24 dollars the next year)
This is one of my pet peeves of GDPR! Your nephew and IP Octet cases are very extreme edge cases that we shouldn't build policy around if there are major drawbacks to including them. It's bad there is ostensibly no compliant way to count anonymized unique users in Europe under the current framework.
I don't think there is any way to reliably count unique users without collecting an inappropriate level o f personal data. Even tracking unique devices requires significantly undermining privacy.
This simply isn't data companies should be allowed to collect without meaningful consent.
A half-baked idea I had while reading the article was to use bloom filters:
User visits the site. On the backend, check if their IP+UA is in the bloom filter or not. If not, increase the unique visitor counter and add them to the filter.
Perhaps the filter would need to be preseeded with dummy data to protect the privacy of the first few visitors.
This is effectively what the “GDPR compliant” providers mentioned in the article are already doing, namely, a one-way hash of the IP+UA. One of the points of the article is that this is non compliant, since you need to transmit the IP+UA to do this calculation to begin with.
But do they store individual IP+UA hashes, or do they mush them together in a bloom filter or a HyperLogLog data structure?
In the first case, it could be argued they still store personally identifiable information (for a limited time, but still). In the second case I think it would be harder to argue the probabilistic data structure with lots of hashes mushed together still constitute personally identifiable information.
> One of the points of the article is that this is non compliant, since you need to transmit the IP+UA to do this calculation to begin with.
IP + UA gets transmitted to the first-party server already. They already have it. The question becomes – is it OK to anonymize this PII we already received for one purpose (serving the web page), to use it for another purpose also (counting unique visitors).
> IP + UA gets transmitted to the first-party server already. They already have it. The question becomes – is it OK to anonymize this PII we already received for one purpose (serving the web page), to use it for another purpose also (counting unique visitors).
Maybe I'm missing your point, but in the situation we're talking about (so-called "GDPR compliant" analytics), if I set up one of these services on my website, the user's IP+UA are transmitted to a 3rd party, for the sole purpose of analytics including counting unique visitors. My understanding is that this is quite different in the eyes of the GDPR from the question you posed, and is almost always not going to be compliant.
I was thinking about the article author's case where they were looking at options for implementing unique user tracking for themselves, on their own server.
The people actually building the buildings (developers) are, generally, different than the people renting out buildings (landlords). Developers profit when more units are built, landlords are hurt with increased competition.
Also, recent California law was changed so that the maximum allowable annual rent increase is ~10% (still rough if you are hit with that, but better than 30%).
Regardless of relative value, in most cases it is cheaper to just demolish and rebuild office space than gut + renovate. SROs/boarding house cases make a little more economic sense for these conversions but are more unpopular uses.
I mean, think about the layout of the average office space: hundreds of small rooms with big open spaces in the center and large, common bathrooms. The plumbing is the biggest problem to fix, because all of it is buried in walls and extremely difficult to retrofit for individual kitchen + bathrooms space.
I guess I'm no civil engineer/architect but I would have thought you could simply tear down all the interior bits and be left with the concrete and steel and just rebuild the layout and attach the plumbing/electrical to the main lines/conduits for those purposes?
But yeah maybe the spec of an office floor of people shitting and cooking is a lot different than a floor of residential homes?
There's also different building code for residential vs commercial buildings. Things like fire suppression systems and stuff. Regardless, it's not that it isn't possible at all, it's that it's prohibitively expensive in a lot of cases.
Especially once you get big enough to require a retention policy and have to delete your years of knowledge repository! Better off documenting separately from the start.
As much as the HN crowd dislikes to hear it, the biggest gaming console in the world is the smartphone. PC Gaming is almost as big as the entire console market, bigger than any individual platform. Any publisher-focused antitruster would have microsoft leaning very hard into those facts.
That's the point, though. I could make a non-crypto based money transfer software that does not store sender or recipient information in the db. That too would make it impossible for that software comply with the law. Or the authors sculpture example.
Just because the nature of the software makes it impossible to comply with particular laws doesn't make it good or bad. You need to make a value judgement if the regulation itself is valuable.
A new small apartment in San Francisco cannot be built for less than $800k these days, so coming in a $333k per resident is not too surprising to me in a similar high-cost city with a building with a ton of amenities.
An apartment for $800K is understandable. A small bedroom @ $333K is not.
If they already own the building, it is only construction costs whereas buying an apartment is possibly extortionate land or property prices from the current owner, which is purely demand-driven.
Looking at the blueprint, it seems like 7 of the 9 floors will be solely suites. I assume one floor will be dining hall which I wouldn't count as an amenity, which means only 1 of the 9 floors actually has amenities beside the small common space each suite has.
As a mediocre armchair accountant, I'm interested in how to read their P&L since so much of the loss is depreciated clothing, which they presumably continue to rent out even after they mark down the value of the clothes.
Presumably a dress has a much higher LTV in future implied subscription income then its inherent accounting liquidation value.
I'm not one of their customers, but my understanding is that they're all about renting out high fashion and near-high fashion. These dresses have a short lifespan that has nothing to do with their physical integrity. I doubt they have much value to RTR more than two or three years after they are acquired.
Today I learned. Thanks for the info! You know they say the best way to get information is to be wrong on the internet. Someone will come fix you up pretty fast.
>They do more rental of “work” or “simple night out” clothing than they do higher formality clothing.
I can understand renting something for date night, but why would anyone would rent clothes just to go into the office? Is the HN/programmer bubble messing with my perception of what's normal?
> but why would anyone would rent clothes just to go into the office?
I’m going to take a guess and assume you don’t wear the gender of clothing that they target?
> Is the HN/programmer bubble messing with my perception of what's normal?
Or maybe that’s the issue. Either way, many women who work in an office want a freshly changing attire that they can conveniently have with a monthly subscription.
Like I’d probably wear a button up shirt and slacks more often if I:
1) had fresh new looks sent regularly
2) that I never had to wash or dry clean
3) and usually don’t have to iron (although that wasn’t full proof with RTR’s delivery)
What are you basing those numbers on? The RTR subscription plans definitely don’t cost $200/day (closer to that for a month). Even if you were doing RTR classic rentals instead, it would be around half that price.
Yeah, particularly when it's real-world "off the rack" garments rather than couture items. Most fashionable items will still look good 5-10 years later.
I haven’t rented anything from them in several years but I know they used to sell the worn items at the end of the season or sometimes the end of the next season. They were really great deals, too. I would imagine they still sell the items at the end of their expected rental life though I’m not sure whether they sell directly to customers anymore. It wouldn’t surprise me if they had figured out a way to sell the older items in bulk.
