Aussie living in the San Francisco Bay Area.
Coding since 1998.
.NET Foundation member. C# fan
https://d.sb/
Mastodon: @dan@d.sb

  • 7 Posts
  • 1.65K Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: June 14th, 2023

help-circle




  • For DNS challenges, I personally prefer using acme-dns. It’s a separate DNS server that only serves ACME DNS challenges. I felt a bit uneasy using an access token for my actual DNS host since it grants full read/write access to every record. acme-dns reduces the attack surface.

    Let’s Encrypt follows CNAMEs and supports IPv6-only DNS servers, so you could just run acme-dns on a spare IPv6 address (assuming your internet provider has a static IPv6 range, or you have a VPS with IPv6).




  • Australia: Consumer protection laws are better than most other countries, even European countries. For example:

    • Products must last as long as a “reasonable consumer” would expect them to last, regardless of the warranty period. For example, at least 5-10 years for large appliances.
    • If there’s a “major failure” any time during that period (a big problem with the product, if it stops working, if it differs from the description, is missing advertised features, or you wouldn’t have bought it if you knew about the problem beforehand), the customer has a choice of whether they want to have the item repaired, replaced, or return it and get a refund. Customers can also ask for a partial refund based on loss of value.
    • The store you bought the item from must accept returns and warranty claims. They can’t tell you to go to the manufacturer.
    • For repairs, returns and replacements of large items (like appliances), the company must pick it up and drop it off for free.
    • It’s illegal for a store to not offer refunds (unless the items are second-hand).
    • Products must match descriptions in advertising, including what a sales person tells you. If a sales person tells you the product does something but it actually doesn’t, you can get a refund.
    • Businesses get fined for breaking these rules. A chain of computer stores had to pay a $200,000 fine for showing an illegal “no refunds” sign and forcing people to go to the manufacturer for warranty claims, and were later fined $750,000 for doing it again: https://www.accc.gov.au/media-release/msy-technology-ordered-to-pay-penalties-of-750000-for-consumer-guarantee-misrepresentations

    This applies for digital goods, too. As far as I know, Australia is the only country where you can get a refund from Steam for a major bug in a game regardless of how long you’ve owned the game for or how many hours you’ve played. Valve tried to avoid doing this and was fined $3 million: https://www.cnet.com/culture/entertainment/valve-to-pay-3-million-fine-for-misleading-australian-gamers/






  • Given the fact that that poem is 100 years old, I would have thought that English would have evolved to fix these issues by now. Oh well.

    We need a new language I guess. Maybe it’s time to switch to the most popular language in the works (in terms of number of native speakers): Mandarin Chinese.