That sounds absolutely insane. Doesn't Google have any way to dispute the business ownership? Can I take over any business on the maps by just registering a domain that contains the business name?
It is absolutely insane that organizations are weaponizing this.
> Doesn't Google have any way to dispute the business ownership?
I can only speak for the US and it’s been a few years since I’ve done it, but yes Google does have a way. You can report an issue, and “claim” a business. Google will literally send a postcard with a unique ID to the registered physical address, and whoever gets that postcard can take ownership.
> Can I take over any business on the maps by just registering a domain that contains the business name?
Absolutely not (at least legally I assume). It’s probably trademark infringement and potentially fraud to misrepresent that business, and also Google has other methods to verify ownership (see above).
> You can report an issue, and “claim” a business. Google will literally send a postcard with a unique ID to the registered physical address, and whoever gets that postcard can take ownership.
When you say "registered address", do you mean the actual business registered address (as in on Companies House in the UK, for example) or the address which was used to register the business with Google? Because if it's the latter, I think I see a problem ...
The "address" in question here is the location on Google Maps. I managed a few locations for a business and verified them this way. Google would frequently ignore our own posted opening/closing hours and phone numbers in favour of whatever some random user provided under "Suggest an Edit". Horrible system, and support requests just ended up at some Google contractor's inbox in India, where they request to have video calls at 3AM ET to verify our identity (again).
> Because if it's the latter, I think I see a problem ...
Believe it or not, someone spent at least a few hours thinking about this.
The address is physical address that a customer would go to when they look up the business on the map. If it's a restaurant, it's the address that has the tables and food and drinks.
It certainly sounds like they would be sending it to the address provided by the scammer. The issue is their system assumes the first person to interact with it is trustworthy: gives a real phone number and address. If that first contact with Google was MITM'd, they seem to have no way to develop an un-compromised relationship with the real entity.
In Germany, everybody and their siblings usually ask for a recent copy of the trade certificate of registration--it actually is quite annoying. Google could do the same.
I don't think it does. The postcard should go to the place where the customers go, so for a restaurant its the place with the tables and the food and stuff.
If the address is different than the address of the shop-owner, then how would a user who uses google maps get to the shop? And why wouldn't the shop owner just create a new, correct listing?
> Can I take over any business on the maps by just registering a domain that contains the business name?
yes, as long as the business doesn't have that already. And that's the point - many small restaurants, takeaways etc simply don't have a website because they think they don't need one, until they're fucked by Lieferando.
They're following the usual VC pattern: it's more profitable to ask for forgiveness instead of approval.
Plus, many restaurant owners are immigrants, and undocumented/underpaid labor is blooming as well. The last thing they want is to attract the eyes of the government.
I googled the name as I was unfamiliar with it, but immediately recognized the orange logo in search results.
Their entire business model seems to be centered around extorting businesses. I stopped giving them money after they inaccurately posted that a certain restaurant delivers to my location and got a phonecall from the place that this was the case so I agreed to pay extra to fulfill the order anyway, because Lieferando certainly wouldn't take responsibility.
Nowadays I use them only for discovery, but call the place directly or use the webpage if the business provides online ordering.
It appears that their initial value proposition to businesses was substituting delivery services so that restaurants could scale that up without hiring more staff. Of course enshittification made that service worse than just walking/driving/taking public transport there.
A year or two ago when I was doing some searching in Maps for trails to hike in Hawaii, I noticed that if a trail didn't have an "official" website i.e. pointing to a local government page, in several cases a certain photographer had put his website into that spot. And later I discovered he had done this not only in Hawaii but several trails in Utah as well. It would not surprise me if he's hit up hundreds of trails for free advertising via Google's lack of vetting.
I reported it, of course, (as someone else mentioned, Suggest an Edit) and they got changed, but I haven't checked to see if he changed them back.
Your pictures give insight into such a small world, individual freaking transistors on a CPU chip! Reading textbooks and wiki is one thing, but seeing silicon spliced up and photographed up close is another. Very interesting read, and very well presented too, thank you.
Chips seem to be around 25mm sq, and the smallest features around 10nm.
If you scaled up so the smallest feature is one mm then the chip would be around 2.5km square. (over 1.5 miles on each side)
If the smallest feature was about the width of human hair then divide the above by 100.
Oh man, I loved that game as a kid. I did not have internet back then, but I didn’t care - I spent hours playing against bots. I still remember the voice taunts and callouts (“I slaughtered that guy!”) and creative maps like ctf_face. Then there were the built in gameplay mods like insta-gib and low gravity, fun guns like Redeemer - kept me glued to the screen for hours. I did not understand why people are playing CS at the computer clubs - UT was a much better and bigger game!
Thanks for a trip down the memory lane. Good, simple times.
"I did not understand why people are playing CS at the computer clubs..."
I was the same. UT was so much fun - bouncing flak cannon shrapnel round corners! But my LAN group all wanted to play CS or that UT mod that was similar (Tactical Ops?).
I don't think I knew too much about computers or gaming at that age to figure all that out. I just played the base mode.
My introduction to programming was thru a different game (Subspace VIE, a MMO on dialup back in the 90s later community-remade as Continuum) when squad had a login page at a domain. I really wondered how example.com/?login worked and that led me to where I am today.
No that I know, but not insulting people just because you feel "edgy" doesn't mean you're making people "revered and protected" either. It's called decency.
You're describing an iPhone. I've switched from Android to SE2 in 2020, and bought 15 last year on release day to get the type-c charging. I feel it ticks most of your boxes:
* excellent battery life - can't complain about it. I'm not streaming YouTube on 5G on the phone, and I've found out that it can last about two days per charge with light use - messenger apps, phone calls, emails. YMMV of course.
* a great OLED screen - it's bright & crisp. I haven't seen a better screen in person yet.
* a great camera - it's a very good camera IMO. Takes good shots of people and nature and shoots impressive videos of music shows in dark basements.
* durable/rugged - not sure about 15, but my SE2 was abused and dropped. The metal sides were dinged, the screen had a few nasty scratches, but the phone held up together very well.
* fast enough to feel snappy and not laggy - iOS is much nicer and snappier that any of the Android phones (HTC Desire S, Galaxy Note II, Xperia Z3, Xiaomi Mi6) I've had.
* don't want to buy a brand-new $1000 phone every year or two - I think iPhones do last a few years, given the fact that my wife uses 13 and has zero desire (or reasons, really) to upgrade.
The only requirement the iPhone doesn't fit is the storage - Apple charges an absurd price for storage upgrades on all of their devices. I went with the cheapest option and pay for a large iCloud subscription, and it seems to work well - the photo and file sync between the phone, Macbook & even my Windows machine is seamless and quick.
It also feels nice to give my money to a company that doesn't shove ads down my throat. Apple are not saints, they collect a lot of data and telemetry that I'm not a fan of, but at least they are not a corporation that is built on advertising.
It's not an option: I can't block ads on it with uBO and Firefox. Also, I can't connect it by USB to my Linux machine and download photos. You also forgot about the expandable storage. The lack of headphone jack also sucks.
>It also feels nice to give my money to a company that doesn't shove ads down my throat.
That's funny, because you're giving money to a company that actively wants to prevent you from blocking ads on, for instance YouTube, by restricting your app and browser choices. Meanwhile I can install any app I want on my Android phone, including apps Google won't allow on the Play store such as SmartTube.
They did? I missed that. It hasn’t lasted even ten years, has it?
I remember reading the Domains announcement and thought to myself - “you have to be a fool to trust Google to host your domains long-term”. Feels good to be right, but I feel bad for everyone who jumped on the bandwagon. I cant imagine trusting Google products to last those days.
The entire consumer registrar industry is untrustworthy. I can't think of a worse category of online services, ranked by security and sleazebaggery, with the possible exception of the VPN market.
It was useful because it integrated super nicely into workspace account administration. Unfortunately all the issues have been painfully predictable and the rollout has been bad.
Empirical evidence. I've tried some fake brick sets, most of them were obviously not as good. The QC is worse for sure, but it's the little things - sometimes it's weight, sometimes it's texture, sometimes it's color that is slightly "off".
Those "other bricks" are quite useful when you want something that Lego won't produce. For example gimp figurine for your Pulp Fiction diorama.
I don't think that LEGO is better. They also have slightly off color, non fitting parts. Especially the "glass" parts are worse than Cada or BlueBrixx, but I'm not trying to convince anyone.
I think that everyone can pick whatever liked. However, the term "fake LEGO" is a bit weird, because the other manufacturers also have well designed parts LEGO does not provide...
In my 2016 Mazda 3 the physical selector is superb - rotating it scrolls through on-screen CarPlay buttons, pressing it activates the highlighted item. Way less dangerous IMO than reaching to the screen, trying to touch it with some degree of precision.
You could buy non-Bell phones and even connect them to a functioning telephone network. The problem (and incentive for antitrust action) was Bell's business of charging users to connect to their proprietary and all-encompassing network. They created a situation where the only way to compete was to acquiesce with Bell's exploitative terms.
It's not illegal to be a monopoly, it's illegal to abuse monopoly power.
> You could buy non-Bell phones and even connect them to a functioning telephone network.
First, that is simply a lie. Until the Carterfone decision it was, in fact, illegal to attach a non-Bell phone to the network.
Second, Apple has a smaller market share (especially in Europe!) than Android, so it is very hard to see how someone could, in good faith, argue that Apple is a monopoly.
Third, Apple is doing nothing to prevent you from buying an Android phone. If you don't like the walled garden, the gate is not locked. You can simply leave.
> Until the Carterfone decision it was, in fact, illegal to attach a non-Bell phone to the network.
...and the Carterfone decision was long overdue. The entire antitrust legislation against Ma Bell was protracted a half century because, much like Apple, they had armies of lobbyists stationed around the nation. Suffice to say we made the right call on Carterfone, and Bell made the wrong decision by resenting it.
> so it is very hard to see how someone could, in good faith, argue that Apple is a monopoly.
A natural monopoly, maybe. But the Wabash Case demonstrates that a privately-owned common carrier platform can be subject to antitrust law without owning the majority of the rail. The European DMA explicitly goes the extra mile to implicate Apple not as a monopoly, but as a "gatekeeper" with specific fair-play obligations. To them, it wouldn't even matter anyways.
> Apple is doing nothing to prevent you from buying an Android phone.
Ah, the "innovation" clause. This isn't about Android, because Android phones don't run Apple software. Apple has deliberately designed their ecosystem to funnel back into one exploitative internal market that they are solely responsible for. Android phones are an alternative, but irrelevant in a conversation about App Store alternatives.
Mottos like that live their own life. Take google’s “dont be evil” - people remember that, and see all the evil shit google does now, of course they are going to recall the motto and laugh at the irony. Whatever Sergey meant when he coined the phrase is irrelevant imo.
