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Showing posts from May, 2022

Kraken compliance, gross negligence by everyone in handling confidential documents, and general systems collapse

 I'm a full-time compliance officer, proving my own innocence.  At any time there are usually four or so open compliance cases with various firms.  It's the limiting factor in my life.  There is no upper limit on the amount of time, which is to say, life, it can consume. Today, the new compliance case opened is from Kraken: Date: Fri, 06 May 2022 09:42:34 +0000 From: "REMOVED (Kraken Support)" <support@kraken.com> To: Kraken User <REMOVED> Subject: Kraken Support: Regarding your recent transaction(s) Reply-To: Kraken Support <support@kraken.com>   ----------------------------------------------   Vincent, May 6, 2022, 2:42 PDT   Hello Tom,   REMOVED here from the Kraken funding team.   As part of the normal compliance routine on transactional activities, our banking partner is requesting a Proof of Source of Funds of your income.   Please provide the following information:   1) Your current employment/income situation, if possible please include the n

Storage King error

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 This is what happens when you try to generate a quote on storageking.co.uk: The form was submitted from Storage King's own page.

airbnb error page

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  Here's an error from airbnb. Note the cheesy denial that anything has failed.  "Let's try that again".  Oh, everything sounds fine.  I mean, I don't have a house booked, and I'm one hour of hard admin into trying to have a house booked, but nothing's really gone wrong, it's just let's try that again. Followed by "There is something wrong with your Host's calendar".  At this point they are not my Host, and it looks like they're not going to be my Host.  They are someone who listed something on your web site, and the booking failed, so "your Host" is rather a stretch.  But this putative Host, it is their fault.  There is something wrong with their calendar.  Whatever is wrong with "Host"'s calendar, sounds like it was impossible to detect before I went through the payment process.  At the point where I don't know if payment's been taken from my card or not, there is now "something wrong with yo

MDI, including tabs, should be done at window manager level

This is obvious, right? Multiple Document Interfaces, including tabbing like in browsers, should be a window manager function, not a per-application function.  So, why isn't it?  Anywhere, at all? Meanwhile, the world moves even further away from the correct layering.  Craplications like chromium now do their own window decorations and controls.  Some GNOME things don't even seem to be X windows any more.  WTF is going on?

lufthansa.com: compounded incompetence

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I tried to change my account settings for lufthansa / milesandmore, so my default address was correct.  This was a main link near the top-right of the screen when logged in.  The result: An error page, presumably a 404.  But even error pages now can't just be error pages, they have to be EU-cookie-directive-ised "cookie settings" pages first, and then error pages next.

lufthansa.com unable to sell plane tickets

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Joining the same set as TAP Air Portugal and easyjet, Lufthansa are now unable to sell plane tickets via their web site: followed by this on the second attempt: Yes, really.  Presumably that 504 is in an iframe to the card provider's site.  From some perspective, that may mean it's not Lufthansa's fault. Imagine having to explain this to an alien.  The payment network, with the cards with the 16 digits and the payments being pulled by merchants, and then authorised very unreliably and badly by "card providers", despite every card having a chip that would allow better payment authorisation, the sheer unreliability of the whole thing.  But also: iframes, and the mish mash of happenstance around web non-standards, and that this, of all things, is what ended up being used for "ecommerce", except it doesn't work, at all, any of it.

dd-ing a 250G SSD drive takes ~ 7h10m

 With two 250G SSDs attached via USB3, the following took between 7h and 8h: # dd if=/dev/sdc of=/dev/sdd 488397168+0 records in 488397168+0 records out 250059350016 bytes (250 GB, 233 GiB) copied, 25271.1 s, 9.9 MB/s

review: Holiday Inn Zurich Messe (scam warning)

Your reviewer stayed at Holiday Inn, Zurich Messe (scammers) in early February this year. Your reviewer asked the price at the front desk.  The hotel employee reported something like 225 CHF plus local tax.  Why Eurotards feel unable to quote exact and all-inclusive prices is beyond the scope of this review. The hotel employee then pushed a card terminal at your reviewer, but the amount on the screen was around 290 CHF.  Local tax is normally just a couple of francs.  So your reviewer asked: is the local tax really 60 CHF or so?  No, local tax was tiny. They eventually admitted they'd made a mistake, sort of, in a Swiss way, which means not really admitting they made a mistake.  Logically, one might expect a retry of the card procedure, but this time with the correct amount.  That's not what happened.  The Zurich Messe (scammers), instead, pushed a document at your reviewer, and asked him to sign it.  It was agreement to AGBs, meaning general terms and conditions.  At this poin