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How do we pay for parking?

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41–50 of 347 posts

Re: How do we pay for parking?

#41
post #23
post #5

Modern parking lots always seem ripe for physical phishing, whats stopping someone from sticking up a couple of QR codes that link to a fraudulent payment page or some other malware? This is one of those things that tech really didn't "fix" and now I have to select from one of 20 apps instead of just paying with cash or even a credit card.

I have, on multiple occasions (in Austin, >10 years ago), paid for parking to an "attendant" at a lot I know is free. Those guys will just have your car towed — the whole scam just hangs together: the towing company charges you for the storage & processing, but not the nominal fee; the attendant gets cash. Win-win-lose.

In my city, in the rougher parts it used to be somewhat normal to pay someone to "look after your car", of course you were paying them not to vandalise it while you were away! Especially popular on football days when parking near the stadium.

It was only a couple of pounds or so. I haven't been to these parts of town for years so I have no idea if this practice still goes on.

Re: How do we pay for parking?

#42

Much of the value in "tech" is basically treating people like shit at scale. In this example, when a lot attendant was needed, they could only be so unhelpful. Now we don't need to pay them, can push their work onto customers, and simply magically drop any "problem" customers. Same with all this shit. Huge companies exist solely to prevent a human from getting human support, and many more extend the concept to "scale…

[deleted]

Re: How do we pay for parking?

#43
post #5

Modern parking lots always seem ripe for physical phishing, whats stopping someone from sticking up a couple of QR codes that link to a fraudulent payment page or some other malware? This is one of those things that tech really didn't "fix" and now I have to select from one of 20 apps instead of just paying with cash or even a credit card.

> This is one of those things that tech really didn't "fix"

It solved a very real problem of surveillance/advertising and skimming a little cream off the top in the process

Re: How do we pay for parking?

#49

A software engineer friend has a common refrain for situations like this: “all software is terrible.” It is only a very slight exaggeration.

Yep.

The other day I just wanted to update a dependency in my Python project and now it’s crashing in CI (doesnt locally) due to a missing C header file. No amount of git clean allowed me to reproduce it locally (using venvs). It used to work fine before. I just gave up for now. The article summarises my feelings perfectly.

Re: How do we pay for parking?

#50

[flagged]

Or for actual computer users who want to avoid Android like the plague it is (also iOS).

Between this (I've basically given up parking on the streets ever again, I'm now forced to always go for actual parkings) and banks, it is indeed hell.

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