Younger drinkers in England and Wales will be able to prove their age with a digital ID starting this week as new laws give pubs, off-licences, nightclubs and restaurants the right to use biometric scanning technology to check customers are over 18.
Customers will be able to download software that scans their faces into their own phone to generate a QR code proving their age based on a stored proof of age. Other tech under consideration as part of the government push to digitise age verification for alcohol sales include a device which scans the veins in a drinker’s finger to verify their age. That system has not yet been approved for use.
You released on May 18th only in the Mac app store with no other marketing and decided to withdraw on August 7th, i.e. less than 3 months later. What were you honestly expecting to happen? Did you really think that there was some pent-up unmet demand for your app? What compelling advantage(s) did it offer? Who did you think would be looking for it and how did you think they might evaluate options?
This is like an 'experiment' where you hold out an apple and drop it. Pretty obvious foregone conclusion. Did you do a control, e.g. release the same app on Homebrew with similar marketing? Release another app and market it? You have not explicitly stated what you were attempting to show- it seems to be your personal sentiment that MAS does your marketing for you without considering other possibilities.
I am not defending the current situation but I am not aware of any case where anyone in the UK has gone to jail for piracy. Invariably what actually happens in such cases is:
1. See headline 'movie pirate goes to prison' which implies a link between the activity and the event
2. Actually read article based on industry press release and learn that the defendant was actually convicted for counterfeiting because they were running a business selling set-top boxes with preinstalled unauthorised streaming software or running their own third party unauthorised streaming service with paid subscriptions or something.
There have both been fraud, which I find is more often the case recently along with money laundering. However, one of the Woodward brothers was charged and convicted with distributing copyrighted material, hence piracy.
LONDON, April 21 (Reuters) - Microsoft must face a mass lawsuit alleging it overcharged thousands of British businesses to use Windows Server software on cloud computing services provided by Amazon, Google and Alibaba, a London tribunal ruled on Tuesday.
The article is basically making the point that deploying bits of runtime code, even something as simple as a single purpose cloud function, is unnecessary and makes work. The examples of using StepFunctions (declarative code) and “direct integrations” are given, the latter being the least effort to maintain, but in reality it also hides declarative code inside (e.g. VTL to change the shape of payloads).
The benefit is mainly removing the need to deal with runtimes.
Appears that our author was present whilst either he gave a talk with no questions or a tame interviewer asked Werner soft questions with no follow-ups. Absolutely no pushback or challenge to anything he's reported as saying. Nothing along the lines of 'I keep reading AWS customers describing the quality of support and support staff declining over the last year or so. This seems to correlate closely with AWS push to full time RTO. How do you respond to this data?'
> a few days ago, i had the surreal experience of joining a private fireside chat with werner vogels, the cto of amazon, during startup summit 2025 in florianópolis. it's one thing to follow his talks online – it's another to be in the same room, listening to him unpack two decades of lessons from building some of the most critical infrastructure on the internet.
It seems he does indeed tell us that he was a listener in a small-audience conversation that Vogels had.
Younger drinkers in England and Wales will be able to prove their age with a digital ID starting this week as new laws give pubs, off-licences, nightclubs and restaurants the right to use biometric scanning technology to check customers are over 18.
Customers will be able to download software that scans their faces into their own phone to generate a QR code proving their age based on a stored proof of age. Other tech under consideration as part of the government push to digitise age verification for alcohol sales include a device which scans the veins in a drinker’s finger to verify their age. That system has not yet been approved for use.
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