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Only in Germany: An API with opening hours

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21–30 of 77 posts

Re: Only in Germany: An API with opening hours

#21
reminds me of mbank.pl - a polish _internet only_ bank which accepts money transfer orders only from 0800 - 1800 hours and not on weekends.

no, they don't save the order to execute it the next morning. they just print an error message and you have to enter your transfer order during opening hours.

Re: Only in Germany: An API with opening hours

#22

My friend thought it would be novel to give his personal portfolio site opening hours (with a nice "sorry we're closed!" notification). It was very cool, except GoogleBot only came crawling in the middle of the night.

He could always check for the UserAgent :)

Re: Only in Germany: An API with opening hours

#23
post #7
post #3

Nope. not only in Germany. Here is Israel we have more than one site that "close" for the Sabbath. It's moderately interesting to see how religion and the internet co exist.

Yep. Some governmental institutions such as the Israeli Social Security have their websites up during Sabbath (Saturday), but do not accept payments. Supposedly, because just having the server up does not require any manual labor, but accepting a payments constitutes trade, which is forbidden during Sabbath. (Nevermind the fact that an institution which entire purpose is to assist those in need is the most non-access…

IE 6?

Re: Only in Germany: An API with opening hours

#24
post #4

To be fair, this might not even have to do with germany, as it queries other countries' VAT registries online, many of which are down for maintainance many hours a day. The weird thing is that, even though there is a system for VAT id interconnectivity (VIES) , there is no central database of numbers. [ http://ec.europa.eu/taxation_customs/vies/ ]

Do you have any information why these databases are down for such a long time, every day? I can't see a really good technical reason for that right now.

Re: Only in Germany: An API with opening hours

#26
As the examples mentioned here show, opening hours are not altogether uncommon on the web.

Here is another example from Germany: Certain TV shows are deemed not appropriate for kids of a certain age. This results in all broadcasters only being allowed to show them on TV at certain times. If a TV show is, for example, not appropriate for kids younger than twelve it can only be shown between 8pm and 6am.

The consortium of public broadcasters puts much of their content online, including TV shows with age limits. You can only watch those at certain times. Here is an example: http://mediathek.daserste.de/sendungen_a-z/602916_tatort/746... (the video should be blocked for another four hours and forty minutes after this link has been posted).

I’m not sure why the public broadcasters do that. The private broadcasters don’t seem to but maybe they just don’t put any content with age limits online.

Re: Only in Germany: An API with opening hours

#27

It's not an altogether unreasonable approach to security. It doesn't sit particularly well with geeks, but for complex systems with a high risk of fraud there's a great deal of damage-limitation to be found in only processing transactions when they can be manually monitored. Heuristic intrusion detection is still relatively poor. For a government-to-business service, the overwhelming majority of legitimate transactio…

Right. It'd be nice if everything was 24/7, but we have all manner of systems here in Japan that are only open during certain business hours, and for that matter in the US, too.

The online interface to the Delaware Division of Corporations, for example, only processes certain filings during business hours.

Computer software can be pretty good at flagging activity that falls outside certain parameters, but it still isn't generally good at figuring out what the do about that.

Re: Only in Germany: An API with opening hours

#28

It's not an altogether unreasonable approach to security. It doesn't sit particularly well with geeks, but for complex systems with a high risk of fraud there's a great deal of damage-limitation to be found in only processing transactions when they can be manually monitored. Heuristic intrusion detection is still relatively poor. For a government-to-business service, the overwhelming majority of legitimate transactio…

Being a German, I can hardly imagine security being the reason - I rather think it's bureaucracy and/or a complete misunderstanding of how computers work.

Public services either close much earlier, or are 24/7.

Re: Only in Germany: An API with opening hours

#29
post #26

As the examples mentioned here show, opening hours are not altogether uncommon on the web. Here is another example from Germany: Certain TV shows are deemed not appropriate for kids of a certain age. This results in all broadcasters only being allowed to show them on TV at certain times. If a TV show is, for example, not appropriate for kids younger than twelve it can only be shown between 8pm and 6am. The consortium…

Nice, didn't know I can watch those online.

Unfortunately, only between 2am and 12am, because not the entire world is in the CET timezone. 8-/

Re: Only in Germany: An API with opening hours

#30
post #21

reminds me of mbank.pl - a polish _internet only_ bank which accepts money transfer orders only from 0800 - 1800 hours and not on weekends. no, they don't save the order to execute it the next morning. they just print an error message and you have to enter your transfer order during opening hours.

wow, I didn't know they do that. In Czech republic this functionality works all the time, I wonder why they behave differently in these two countries.
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