daveoc64

Many banks and card issuers are using SMS for 2FA in Europe.

As a European, the idea of paying to receive a call or text is alien to me, but I understand it happens in the USA.

I'm pretty sure it's illegal for an EU network to charge for receiving a standard SMS or MMS - even while roaming.

I can therefore receive an SMS OTP in any country and won't pay a penny.

Looking at the comments here, the UK is incredibly cheap for car insurance compared to the USA.

Some of the monthly prices mentioned in the US are similar to an annual price in the UK, and a lot more is covered on a UK policy.

You can register a Nectar card (giving name/postal address/email address/phone number/date of birth), but I'm not sure how much verification of these things they do.

I am not sure, but I think you might need to register to redeem points.

Like Tesco, Sainsbury's has prices that are exclusive to Nectar card holders.

They also have some personalised prices, where you get targeted special prices if you have a Nectar card.

Not using a Nectar card in Sainsbury's will mean paying more.

The system originally worked on an overnight batch processing basis.

Each store would have a local copy of the card balances - but only for cards that had been used in that store in the past 12 months.

The first day you scanned your card in a store, you could only collect points (not redeem them).

By the next morning, your card would be included in the local database and you could redeem points - with the vulnerability that each store had its own database, and therefore you could redeem the points in multiple stores.

I thought this had been improved in recent years, but maybe not.

My mother's Nectar card was stolen by the cashier in Sainsbury's about 12 years ago.

The cashier was taking cards with a high points balance (she had the equivalent of over £100 on the card), and swapping them with a new, unregistered card.

We reported it to the store and they could see this happening on CCTV, so the cashier was fired. They gave my mother a Sainsbury's gift card for the monetary value stolen, plus a goodwill gesture.

Personally, my lesson learned from all of this is to spend loyalty points/rewards ASAP. While there are some "double up" offers every year that reward saving up, these are less common than they used to be. I think Sainsbury's ran a trial last year where only some people could use the "double up" promotion.

It's been reported that Google has been preparing an iOS version of Chrome using the Blink browser engine for a while - as they had assumed this would eventually be allowed.

Some apps provide genuinely useful notifications (like shipping updates), but also send spammy notifications that are just ads.

In the UK, most of the supermarkets now sell "wonky" fruit and veg - it may look less appealing, but it's safe to eat and cheaper.

The core of the .NET runtime is cross-platform.

You do have the option to use platform-specific APIs or frameworks, which will make your app only work on that platform.

In the case of this app, it doesn't use anything platform-specific, so it could run on Windows, Linux and macOS.

In terms of Microsoft products, I think they have a bit of an understanding with Microsoft* that they won't host any Microsoft OSes newer than the Windows XP betas.

Microsoft probably doesn't see much threat from people downloading a copy of Windows 98 to run in a VM.

*Based on a past takedown request: https://forum.winworldpc.com/discussion/9882/rule-do-not-req...

I have an LG Washer/Dryer with smart functions.

As others have said, the notifications are useful, but you can also track the wash/dry cycle and see what it's done so far, what is left and the estimated remaining time.

I like it because the smart features are optional and are genuinely useful.

I think it would be difficult to truly list all of the actors in a particular film, let alone establish when they all died.

Do extras count? Many of them aren't going to be listed in the credits.

Perhaps you could only count those actors listed in the credits at the end of the film and nobody else?

> I don't understand what youtube is gaining from this, there are so many stories like that.

As others have noted, the Content ID system is in place to show that YouTube is proactively trying to do something about piracy - this makes the movie studios and record labels less likely to sue Google.

> Also I don't understand why competitors are not really picking up.

Video hosting and streaming on the scale of YouTube is expensive and probably can't be profitable.

YouTube allows anyone to upload an unlimited amount of 4K video, make it available to everyone in the world - all free of charge. Advertising revenue won't cover everything, and of course, quite a few people are blocking ads.

Services like Vimeo compete to some extent, but they acknowledge the expenses involved, so only cater for niche market segments. Things like PeerTube offer an alternative model, using peer to peer bandwidth to keep the costs down - but the federated nature of it makes it less likely to catch on in the mainstream like YouTube has.

Just clicking on some of these at random, it's depressing the garbage that people are exposed to by accounts that have somehow gained their trust.

A lot of it isn't even political, it's just lazy clickbait.

Companies word it carefully, like Spotify Premium:

"Enjoy ad-free music listening".

They still get paid to promote particular artists/songs to you on the home page.

Amazon leaves stuff on my porch most days in the UK.

I have been using Kagi for a few months now and generally enjoy it, but I do think it's biased towards returning results from sites in the US, despite having "United Kingdom" selected in the search criteria.

I think Google UK handled this better.

It's a paid service, so you need to authenticate to use it.

You're a paying customer, not the product.

What you've said is correct, but it doesn't stop the attack vector described.

If the question to Apple or Google is "who received a notification from Signal at 17:15 UTC?" then even if the notification is “hey, something happened, call the service and check for updates”, you've got your answer.

Apple doesn't support any third-party push platforms, and they are restricted on Android to preserve battery life.

Title amended!

I don't think the scams use links.

They post bank account details for the customer to send a payment to.

Manually typing a link may not seem suspicious to many customers anyway.

Edit: Looks like the scam may involve credit/debit cards and links. The messages may be sent to customers via email, and the links are clickable that way. Not sure if that's an email client thing or if Booking.com makes them clickable in HTML.

It's better than nothing!

As others have said, requiring two-factor authentication would go a long way to stopping this.

Nothing in the report or what you have quoted is misleading.

They may be able to get a refund from their bank, but this may depend on their bank's policy and how negligent the customer was.

They will have gone through security on their bank's app or website, which will have warned them about common scams like this and told them to check that what they are doing is legitimate.

https://www.psr.org.uk/our-work/app-scams/

I am assuming this is an "Approved Push Payment" scam where people are transferring money from their bank account directly to the fraudster, rather than by using a credit or debit card. If the payments were by card then a chargeback should be easy to file.

>I’ve never seen a legitimate use case for disabling autocomplete

The main one is going to be any kind of web system where the user is typing in other people's details.

Search fields can also be a bit annoying - I've seen Firefox autocomplete entries in search fields that make no sense.

For example, Firefox suggests my postal code as a search term here on HN.

Spotify's home page is full of ads - even for premium users.

https://artists.spotify.com/en/showcase

So many people rave about the support A&A provides, but I don't really understand why support is so important to people.

Isn't a stable connection more important?