I can only speak about Germany. Here the technical safety and exhaust check are mandatory every two years. The exhaust check is relative to what the manufacturer specified when they first started selling the car. No one is getting their car taken away because technology improved but you can‘t let your car degrade (or modify it) so it becomes more dirty.
> This one bit me recently when I bought a package of budget light fixtures (in Canada, from amazon.ca) and then my licensed electrician informed me that he wouldn't be able to install them as they didn't have a CE mark.
The CE mark signifies compliance with European Union standards and regulations. Why would you expect Amazon Canada to care about that?
IIUC Chinese manufacturers often put the "CE" mark on things that haven't been certified, and rationalize it as the mark meaning "China Export"
I have never heard of a case of a homeowner's insurance claim being denied based on imrpoper DIY work. One of the main points of insurance is to protect you against your own negligence.
Still, I would make the same decision and steer clear of such lighting fixtures!
CE conformity is a self-declaration by the manufacturer, so essentially the honor system, not an actual certification program like TüV. Items without a CE mark cannot legally be imported or sold in the EU, but there is little enforcement.
Ah yes, I'd looked this up before but then forgotten it. My original comment would be better stated as "Chinese manufacturers often put the 'CE' mark on things they haven't designed to conform to the guidelines, and have no intention of standing behind the liability for ..."
The replacement ones that the electrician selected were only slightly more expensive and I was able to clean up the look of them with 3d printed shrouds:
I've really got to get back into 3D printing. I was building a Voron back when it would have been like serial number 20. Got it to the point where I was printing its own parts (using stub parts made of plywood and whatnot). Life happened, I disassembled it to move, and I've still got the frame sitting around plastic-wrapped for the past ten years.
I wasn't even thinking LED fixtures. For LED fixtures with built in power electronics, I would definitely want the product to be NRTL recognized.
I was late to the 3d printing game and in part that was just not wanting it to become a junk factory of disposable toys and fidgets. I've definitely printed a bit of that kind of thing but overall I've been pleased with the number of small household fixups that it's been possible to do using it.
Just last night for example my microwave oven stopped registering that the door was closed, and within a few tries I was able to print a replacement for the latch bracket that had broken off. At any previous time in my life that would have been either a whole new door or replacing the entire unit.
For sure, I've got a list of "household fixups" to print when I finally do get around to rebuilding the thing.
Just a note of caution about the microwave though. I don't know what bracket broke off your microwave, but usually the door switch is a safety mechanism to make sure the door cannot be open while the magnetron is on.. Make sure a new 3D printed bracket isn't able to break off and cause the safety switch to remain on!
Oh yeah, I'm well aware. The PLA bracket is non-structural and only supports the original latch piece.
That said, I was alarmed to see online lots of people who were also replacing the latch itself with printed parts. That sketches me out a lot more, though I guess it could be fine with PETG or ABS.
It was used correctly. What CAs wanted to sell wasn't something browsers wanted to support, and EV was the compromise. It just happens that what EV meant wasn't that useful irl.
What's the alternative, showing the company's unique registration ID?
CAs invented EVs because the wanted to sell something which could make them more money than DVs. The fact that company names aren't unique means that the whole concept was fundamentally flawed from the start: there is no identifier which is both human-readable and guaranteed to uniquely identify an entity. They wanted to sell something which can't exist. The closest thing we have got is... domain names.
The alternative would have been to have the CA use human judgement when approving EV certificates and reject applications from organizations whose names shadowed better-known firms, or to only accept applications from a select set of organizations (like, say, banks). But either of those possibilities would have increased the cost of the program and limited the pool of applicants, so CAs chose the cheap, easy path which led to EV certificates becoming meaningless.
How many CAs do you think there are? How many countries do you think they operate in?
Maybe we could augment the old EV cert indicator with a flag icon, but now there's yet another thing that users have to pay attention to. Maybe the CA/Browser Forum could run a clearinghouse for company names, but apart from trivial examples, there might very well be legitimate cases of two companies with the same name in the same country, just in different industries. Now do we augment the indicator with an industry icon too? Then the company changes its name, or forms a subsidiary relationship, or what have you. Now do we need to put "Meta (formerly Facebook)" or "Facebook (division of Meta)" etc. in the name?
There's just so many problems with the EV cert approach at Internet scale and they're largely beyond solvable with current infrastructure and end-user expectations.
How do you decide when a company is "well-known"? What's going to happen when there are two well-known companies with the same name or a very similar name? What if a well-known company in country A expands to country B, where a well-known company with that name (but active in a different industry) already exists? How are you going to deal with subsidiaries which are both legally and organizationally separate? Who gets to keep the EV when a company spins off a division but both parts retain the same name?
"Use human judgement" might work for trivial examples of fraud, but it quickly breaks down once you try applying it to the real world. Besides, how are you going to apply the same "human judgement" across hundreds of employees at dozens of CAs? If anything, you're just begging to get sued by large corporations whose complex situation fell on the wrong side of your human judgement.
The problem is that people wrongly believe that company names are unique. In reality you're just some paperwork and a token registration fee away from a name clash.
If anything, it's a disadvantage. People are going to be less cautious about things like the website's domain name if they see a familiar-sounding company name in that green bar. "stripe-payment.com" instead of "stripe.com"? Well, the EV says "Stripe, Inc.", so surely you're on the right website and it is totally safe to enter your credentials...
In many countries, company names are unique to that country. And combined with country TLDs controlled by the nation-state itself, it'd be possible for at least barclays.co.uk to be provably owned by the UK bank itself when a EV cert is presented by the domain.
In the US though, every state has it's own registry, and names overlap without the power of trademark protection applying to markets your company is not in.
Are company names even unique within the UK? Sure, there can be only one bank named Barclays because of trademark laws, but can't there be a company in a different sector with the same name? Like Apple the computer business vs Apple the record company?
Or don't you have small local businesses (restaurants, pubs, stores) with duplicate names as long as they're in different locations? I know here in Flanders we have, for example, tens if not more places called "Café Onder den toren" (roughly translated as "Pub beneath the tower"). Do all local businesses in the UK have different names?
That's not exactly a great example, is it? "Barclay" even has a disambiguation page on Wikipedia, because it's a reasonably common Scottish surname.
For example, there used to be a Scottish company constructing steam locomotives which traded under the "Barclays & Co" name - because it was founded by one Andrew Barclay. There's also the Barclay Academy secondary school, and a Bentley dealer which until recently operated as Jack Barclay Ltd.
And that's just the UK ones! Barclays operates internationally, which means they want "barclays.com", so suddenly there's also Barclay-the-record-label, Barclay-the-cigarette-brand, Barclay-the-liquor-brand, Barclay College, golf tournament The Barclays, Barclays Center (whose naming rights were bought by the bank, but they of course want their own completely distinct website), Barclay Theatre, three Barclay Hotels.
Of course there's also all the stuff under "Barkley", "Barkly", "Berkley", and probably a dozen other variations just waiting to be used to scam dyslexic Barclays custumers.
Barclays used to operate under Barclays Bank PLC. IMO, if disambiguation was problematic online they would have reverted back to that name.
You bring up good points, but I don't think that company naming has to be 100% proof against confusion, it's just one more helpful thing for consumers to identify whom they are doing business with.
In the case of close names like "Barkley", if they're doing banking, there is probably a trademark case against if they actually use it to confuse customers.
Many (most) companies don’t even manage to split their application across multiple cloud regions with the same provider. Doing it across providers is an order of magnitude harder.
I have one memory departing from the low cost carrier terminal at Schönefeld. The toilets were broken and the security was saying in broken English to the passengers "this is what you wanted, it's your own fault". I'm not even interested in checking how that miserable place looks right now.
I regularly fly from Munich, indeed more often than from Berlin, and occasionally from Frankfurt. This doesn’t really help me understand what makes it “one of the worst in the EU”.
