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Just using open source software isn't radical any more. Europe needs to dig deeper

1 month 1 week ago
Companies must realize they can be more than pure consumers, and public sector ought to go beyond 'promotion'

Feature  It is 2025. Linux will turn 34 and the Free Software Foundation (FSF) 40. For the EU and Europe at large, which is famously experimental with government deployments of open source tech, behind initiatives to promote open licensing, and whose governments promote equal opportunity for FOSS vendors in public tendering, it's a crunch point.…

Udo Seidel

German Remote-Driving Firm Hopes To Make Private Car Ownership Redundant

1 month 1 week ago
votsalo writes: A German company, Vay, offers a rental car service where the cars are driven by a remote driver to the customer, who then takes over driving the car. At the end of the rental, a remote driver takes over again to take the car away. The trained remote drivers sit in a driving station, with a steering wheel, foot pedals, screens, headphones, and even tactile feedback for things like bumps on the road. Vay says the rental rate cost would be "about half of what a current car-sharing service costs." If he is talking about car-rental services that deliver cars to customers by on-site drivers, like this defunct San Francisco car rental company, then the claim about half the cost seems right. Vay's founder used Las Vegas as a testing ground for the service and expects to launch in Germany soon. Las Vegas "had the necessary legal framework already in place," said von der Ohe, a graduate of computer science and entrepreneurship from Stanford. "It fitted on to three pages. Germany's ran to many more, but we've worked closely with the authorities here to make sure we can fulfil everything that's required of us, from technical to safety concerns. Now that the legislative landscape is in place, we're raring to go."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

BeauHD

Error'd: Pickup Sticklers

1 month 1 week ago

An Anonymous quality analyst and audiophile accounted "As a returning customer at napalmrecords.com I was forced to update my Billing Address. Fine. Sure. But what if my *House number* is a very big number? More than 10 "symbols"? Fortunately, 0xDEADBEEF for House number and J****** for First Name both passed validation."

And then he proved it, by screenshot:

 

Richard P. found a flubstitution failure mocking "I'm always on the lookout for new and interesting Lego sets. I definitely don't have {{product.name}} in my collection!"

 

"I guess short-named siblings aren't allowed for this security question," pointed out Mark T.

 

Finally, my favorite category of Error'd -- the security snafu. Tim R. reported this one, saying "Sainsbury/Argos in the UK doesn't want just anybody picking up the item I've ordered online and paid for, so they require not one, not two, but 3 pieces of information when I come to collect it. There's surely no way any interloper could possibly find out all 3, unless they were all sent in the same email obviously." Personally, my threat model for my grocery pickups is pretty permissive, but Tim cares.

 

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Lyle Seaman