Apparently they not only create the website, but also claim the Google Maps listing using the website and then go on to extort the restaurants for $$$ to add their correct contact details on the listing.
These are ccTLDs, though, ICANN is out of the picture there, they have no authority after delegation. It's the fault of DENIC, the German ccTLD local operator. DENIC is a German entity, they are very much within reach of regulators.
(That's also the reason why foreign ccTLDs of, eh, semi-stable countries, e.g. .so domains, are risky - should the local operator start to lose it at some point, no-one can help you, neither ICANN nor IANA)
The domain registry isn't even relevant here - the authorities can go directly after Liferando - who are doing business in Germany - no matter what TLD or other medium they use for their fraud.
Judging from their handling of the American-dominated search, email and cloud shenanigans to the EU's detriment already, the EU probably can't even conceive that the infrastructure giants like PCH even need to be threatened yet. They are very slow on the uptake.
The lack of competence is downstream of a lack of vision. Fix it and the competence will come. Don't fix it and every attempt to imbue competence will fail.
Domain ownership should be progressively taxed. House ownership too for that matter. With houses it's easy to prevent tax evasion by splitting the ownership between multiple entities (because companies shouldn't own housing), but it would be almost impossible with domains...
> Domain ownership should be progressively taxed. House ownership too for that matter. With houses it's easy to prevent tax evasion by splitting the ownership between multiple entities (because companies shouldn't own housing), but it would be almost impossible with domains...
Taxes aren't the answer for everything. And they are already taxed in the EU, it's called VAT.
Emphasis on progressively. Tax is just a placeholder word, we can call it fee if that helps and just burn the money if you don't trust anyone to handle it well. Your first domain is $10/year, your 1000th domain could be $100k/year.
> Emphasis on progressively. Tax is just a placeholder word, we can call it fee if that helps and just burn the money if you don't trust anyone to handle it well. Your first domain is $10/year, your 1000th domain could be $100k/year.
More taxes isn't the solution to every problem, that's reasoning is absurd. Who's going to force every country to apply a tax on domain names? Which government? That whole idea is stupid.
I said as much in my original comment. It's not possible. But it would solve the problem of domain squatting. But it won't, because it's not possible to implement.
That's like saying that you never own your car because you have to put fuel in it for it to run, or need to have it registered / tested, or you need a licence to be able to operate it.
If you redefine "own" to mean whatever suits you, yes, you're right.
You "own" the property because people agreed on that people can "own" land. Same people agreed on tax ownership. Like they agreed on other kind of taxes.
Renters end up paying the property tax as well. Sure, the landlord handles the money at some point, but there’s a solid argument that the tax is ultimately paid by the user rather than the owner.
That's true of all taxes. It doesn't mean there shouldn't be any taxes. We should also be able to agree that taxing wealth is preferable to taxing income, at least morally, because hard work should pay a little bit more, and simply owning things should pay a little bit less.
I'm simply arguing that work is taxed too much in comparison to wealth. I am not saying taxes should go up even more in general, necessarily.
I'm sorry to be this blunt, but this is a stupid argument. You already "renting" your plot of land from the government. Without government, your home has no protection at all and you own nothing.
I have no idea where you live. As a European, I think that what you just said, is batshit insane.
I trust, and I have to trust, that my government acts (mostly) in my interest. If I stop doing that, I'm at war with my own government and I leave the "moral territory" of democracy. Nothing good can come out of that.
You have chosen to put yourself in a position where either you think the government acts in your interest or you have to be at war with your government. The answer lies somewhere in between.
that’s not true, or requires being dim towards the economic reality.
The UK is a great example of how progressive taxation hasn’t really worked out - our former PM paid about 20% while earning millions while someone earning £100k can be hit with 60%[1]
These ‘great ideas’ require economically illiterate proponents to pass muster.
DENIC (who controls .de) has its own (very... German) dispute system: https://www.denic.de/en/service/dispute that they would rather you use. It requires mailing a form to request information, then mailing a form to send a dispute (don't be fooled by the web forms or PDFs, those are just tools to generate the documents you need to print, sign, and send).
ICANN's procedures are all nice and dandy if all three parties involved are in the USA, but when it comes to international disputes (in this case the Dutch company registering the domains and the German business being impersonated), things can get pretty complex and expensive real fast.
Land hoarding should be illegal too. But it's especially egregious when it comes to domain names, as you're paying fortunes to rent imaginary strings of characters, made scarce for absolutely no reason since we have an infinite supply of them.
We don't have an infinite supply of the abc.com domain, there's just the one. That's the whole point of DNS, to provide unicity across the whole network.
The "Chunk your binaries" point is spot on. Creating a huge binary blob that contains everything makes it hard to work with in constrained environments.
Also, +1 for "Document your format". More like "Document everything". Future you will thank you for it for sure.
DataGrip would be perfect if it had a community edition. As someone who connects to a database only two or three times a week, I’m not willing to pay for it.
I wonder about people’s development workflows. If you are using a tool like this, how much time are you spending in the command-line (where all such tools can be interfaced)? Are most tools used wrapped in some layer like this?
There’s a lot of developers that are scared of the command-line. Truth is you don’t really need these IDEs if you truly know SQL and your database, writing queries isn’t difficult. Keeping a file with common queries isn’t hard either. But most developers just keep a very shallow pool of knowledge and lean into ORMs etc.
I'm using CLIs like A LOT, but still would be happy to get _good_ autocomplete for SQL.
`psql` is pretty bad at it and in `\e` you will just end up in an editor, which will probably don't know about your schema.
I've tried many tools, but seems like I like DataGrip (or databases in PyCharm Professional) the most, so I use EAP from time to time, when I'm going to write a lot of SQL.
Hm, is there a psql extension to augment the CLI and provide better autocomplete, maybe even interface with LLM? And then it just stores whatever metadata (like queries you want to save) in its own tables...
I’m really surprised that some rabid rustacean or something hasn’t written an entirely new and aesthetic CLI replacement for psql with all the modern comforts. Autocomplete menus, graphic icons, colors, etc…
I am very comfortable in the command line and still work with databases in IDEA. It gives you:
— autocompletion for everything — table/function names, types; very helpful on projects with hundreds to thousands of tables
— navigation ("jump to referenced table", "find foreign keys to this column", etc)
— data export in two dozen formats (configurable)
— exactly the same UI for working with 30 database engines (or however many it supports, I'm too lazy to count). Especially helpful with databases that have atrocious CLI clients, like Oracle.
— a nice tree-structured view of your database; or you can generate a (possibly vector) diagram for the rare case when that helps
— high quality autoformatter that works for every SQL dialect it supports, and in the same way
— minor things like the ability to extract a subquery with a couple of key presses, or rename a table alias
Probably something else I'm forgetting.
Saving a couple of keystrokes when writing SQL has little to do with it.
I've done both, and this was not my experience. Nowadays, they're much more similar than different, but 10 years or so ago, "easy" was defined by if you knew Java or Objective-C. Android, like most Java, required a lot of code to do simple things (public static void main...), and tons of XML to make the app support so many devices. Objective-C had good boiler plate thanks to Apple and NeXT before it using the frameworks for years.
Now, SwiftUI and Compose are effectively cousins, as are Kotlin and Swift. Both App Stores have their quirks. Publishing is part of both workflows. It's really not harder for one or the other, it's just administrivia.
What prerequisites are you thinking of? Nowadays, all you need is a Mac, download Xcode, and go. You can't do /everything/ if that's as far as you go, but if all you wanted to do was flesh out an idea, that would get you started. And how's that's any different than getting a computer, installing Android Simulator, and starting a new project?
