I ordered two paperback books from Amazon Warehouse; they sell returned or slightly damaged items at a discount. I often buy used or returned books, and I don't mind a battered cover, creases, or occasional markings. What I take offence at here is the randomness of the seller's description of the books' condition. I have a huge stack of books waiting to be read, so these purchases aren't impulsive or time-critical; I want a good deal. The condition is the main qualifier for judging that. (With Warehouse deals, the description text has always been a very generic categorization and says nothing about the actual faults.)
Look at this book, designated used, very good:
Though all pages are readable, I think that's pretty much the worst condition to sell a contemporary, non-antique paperback. The big kink in the book's spine complicates the turning of pages, and long-term might even threaten the stability of the binding. Tiny bits of paper will flake off the "bite marks" all along while reading.
Compare that with another paperback, purchased shortly thereafter: Designated used, acceptable, it looks close to new! It definitely hasn't been read (the spine doesn't show any signs of opening it), and the only fault is some light wear at the corners of the cover (which would have happened once it's picked up for reading, anyway).
I contemplated sending back the first one, but it would have been a hassle not worth the low price (a few Euros) and effort (handling and transportation costs), and I guess Amazon would then have just sold it back to the next unsuspecting customer (hopefully with a more qualified rating, though). So I kept it, but it further eroded my trust in the otherwise reputable seller. I had experienced similar incidents already, but this time it's been so blatantly wrong that I felt compelled to write about it. When I started buying from Warehouse (many years ago), I really valued them for their good deals, and felt that they frequently overstated the problems, and I was very satisfied. That's why I'm so sad that apparently the consistency of their ratings has taken such a hit.
At the Learntec '24, a Chinese company (apparently partially state-owned and linked to surveillance technology linked to Uyghurs) presented smart displays and boards on an impressive booth. What struck me and my colleagues was their logo, however. For selling in the West, this didn't feature any Chinese ideograms, but the typical designer's play with Roman characters. I do think that the designer had a far-Eastern background, though, and that the practice of composing Kanji characters out of and around smaller radicals had too much of an unfortunate influence here.
All the people I've asked read the company logo as alhua; although the a is embedded inside a blown-up d character, for Western eyes the proportions of those lines are too different, and this is rather recognized as a lowercase l, with a (silent) swoosh attached to it (like the @ that can be seen as an a with a circle around it). Roman characters read strictly left-to-right; we don't have any rules for characters contained inside another one. So even if the circle + l is recognized as a disfigured d, it would be unclear if the order is a-d or d-a.
It might have worked a bit better if the following characters were less regular and more disfigured and ill-shaped. That would have primed the reader that this is a very "stylish" logo, with its characters "hidden" inside, and maybe caused a mental switch from "reading" to "solving a riddle". I see this as an unfortunate L10N fail that highlights the cultural differences; at least, they got some free publicity out of it!
13-Mar-2024 Watching Tagesschau, Germany's main prime time news, and what do I see? A full Google Cloud private key (the -----BEGIN PRIVATE KEY----- really stands out), including project information, in a news report. I'm not sure whether this is a real key, or just a dummy, but it's a very bad idea to show this on national TV. Actually, the developers should have filtered / obfuscated that part from the script or log output to begin with.
At least it's not the usual ping output or mutliple-terminal-windows-with-htop-running that TV crews seem to like so much to illustrate hackingcoding stuff…
In the normal HD stream, the raw text can already be read (with some effort), considering that higher-quality versions may be available and the quality might be improved by sampling all frames, this is a real security risk.
Knowledge about digital security still isn't pervasive enough in a society that still mostly functions through analog faxes and email at best.