And yet, just across the ditch ..

$35k in NZ for the base electric model: https://www.fiat.co.nz/en/offers/500e.html

And Facebook & Instagram were plastered with ads for the 500e last time I visited.

This. Exactly the same response where I worked.

I'm not sure how much money they'll actually get from this.

The (50,000 employee) company I worked for had very slow IT processes at the time, but when the licensing changed they treated it like a critical security vulnerability because of the amount of money involved: they very quickly migrated their software packages to include non-Oracle OpenJDK builds & rolled out an update to uninstall Oracle java from all PCs. And all server owners were given a deadline to migrate or start paying recovery costs.

I imagined it'd be smaller organisations which would've sat on this issue.

Europe has GDPR, so you're not legally allowed to collect data unless it's necessary for the actual service you're providing your customer, and you're not allowed to use data for anything else once you've collected it for the purpose you stated.

Having said that, your customer will always have to prove who they are, how they acquired funds, and where funds are going. This is to prevent bribery & corruption, money laundering, terrorist financing, tax evasion etc.

I was working as a software developer for an EU investment bank when the EU implemented GDPR, and the amount of paperwork required to collect and hold personal data meant we destroyed a ton of data & documentation and rewrote a lot of software. And every spreadsheet containing personal data or which was used more than once had to be recorded in an EUC register with signed commitments about GDPR compliance. Even if data wasn't strictly forbidden by GDPR we'd be very wary asking for any information which could theoretically be misused to discriminate against protected classes.

The NZ Privacy Act 2020 looks broadly similar in intent to the GDPR, so I imagine there'd be the same disinclination to collect information which can't be proven necessary to perform the requested service or satisfy regulatory requirements.

I have several NZ insurance policies and they had no interest in transaction history. Same with my mortgage. I sent bank statements, but only as proof of address.

Only my credit card application wanted to drill into my spending, which is not unexpected considering it's unsecured lending. For sure I'd rather approve the API access than try to find where I can download (& probably pay extortionate fees) for copies of historic statements

And working in finance (in UK & Europe), they generally collect and keep as little data as is necessary anyhow - personal data is a pain to safely manage these days, and I'm always keen to be responsible for as little of it as possible.

It sounds similar to the UK's open banking system. https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/business/517885/open-banking-how-to-opt-in-and-out-of-the-new-payment-system

I use UK open banking often. I'm always asked to approve the specific access requested, and this takes place at my bank's website or app. This could be permission to take an amount of money; or for apps which manage multiple accounts (e.g. Emma) this could be all historical transactions; or my accountant uses an open banking service provider (Armalytix) to request transactions for an explicit date range. So far, touch wood, there's always been an alternative - for example I can use open banking to send my transactions to my accountant or I can manually download a CSV statement from my bank and upload it into their portal.

Or, from the 99PI podcast a month ago...

https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/towers-of-silence/

Same thing happened to me in January (Fendalton). Broke the quarter window, bent the panel, and made a mess tearing the ignition out.

Seems to be a pretty safe crime: police didn't bother coming out to look & just gave me a reference number for my insurance.

You'll lose your no-claims bonus.

Totally OK way of doing it. You basically manually implemented the protocol APIPA uses to allocate 169.254 addresses.

In addition to the excellent https://sci-hub.se suggestion...

I can find the paper for free 90% of the time by googling the authors and visiting their personal page on their university's website.

Nope. The annual prices went up already

I occasionally have to download and run old versions in a VM to build poorly supported software.

E.g. step 1 of the build instructions here...

Install the following packages in an ubuntu - 14.04.6 LTS machine