August 10, 2019

Dutch Bunq client attacked over rainbow card

Filed under: General by Orangemaster @ 9:00 am

Bunq, a relatively new Dutch bank based in Amsterdam, recently had one of their clients attacked in India while trying to pay with the bank’s rainbow coloured bank card. Founder and CEO of Bunq Ali Niknam said he was shocked about this incident on social media.

The client ended up in the hospital. Comments on social media included making the card ‘less gay’, but then beating a person over a bank card, not even for money, is a violent crime. The gay rainbow flag doesn’t even use the same colours: it has six colours (missing one to make it a rainbow), while Bunq uses a few more different colours on its cards and 12 on its logo. Other companies including Apple have used and still use rainbow colours and that’s still not a reason to beat someone up, neither is being homophobic, if that was the case.

Nikham wrote a nice ‘message of love’ about the incident, something I cannot picture any other bank doing these days, so hats off to him (nope, 24oranges HQ is with another bank). Our Twitter timeline was full of folks from India denouncing this behaviour or explaining it away in shame, as it is criminal, violent behaviour. Over a piece of plastic.

(Link and photo: joop.bnnvara.nl)

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November 4, 2018

Indian party mistakenly uses pics of Dutch bridge

Filed under: Architecture,General,Weird by Orangemaster @ 2:22 pm

Yesterday evening, the official Twitter account of the Aam Aadmi Party, an Indian political party and currently the ruling party of the National Capital Territory of Delhi, posted a tweet saying, “Delhi! Here is your pride The Signature Bridge”, with a couple of pictures, one of which was of the Erasmus Bridge in Rotterdam – the one on the left shown here.

India Today fact checked the photos and corrected the situation quickly by posting a YouTube video, entitled “Illumination of the Erasmus Bridge in Rotterdam”, featuring the exact frame the AAP tweeted, at 0:27.

I’m wondering how nobody from the AAP noticed that they had a photo that didn’t match their own skyline or they just thought ‘the common man’, which is what the name of the party means apparently, wouldn’t notice. The bridge is said to be inaugurated on 5 November.

Tip: never underestimate your audience.

(Link: indiatoday.in)

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February 3, 2012

Dutch tax haven angers Portuguese

Filed under: General by Branko Collin @ 6:21 pm

A 2002 tax agreement between the Netherlands and Portugal has led 18 of the 20 largest Portuguese corporations to move their headquarters to the Netherlands.

This has led to 80% of all Portuguese investments being done in the Netherlands, De Pers reports.

The latest of these movers is Sociedade Francisco Manuel Dos Santos, owner of super market chain Pingo Doce (350 stores). The money drain in a time of crisis has led to calls for a boycott in Portugal.

The Portuguese government is now looking for ways to punish these companies for taking their tax payments elsewhere. De Pers has a tip based on what Brasil does: tax the tax flee-ers extra.

Dutch taxes for corporations are often low, and the Netherlands is the country with the most mutual tax agreements in the world.

The European Union has outlawed corporations that are not active in the country where they are legally located, but for some odd reason, the Dutch tax service sees no reason to check on companies that bring in a lot of money.

In 2009 TV show Zembla reported that these empty shell corporations pump 8,000 billion euro through the Netherlands, ten percent of all trade in the world.

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December 26, 2010

E-voting sceptic Rop Gonggrijp detained in India

Filed under: Technology by Branko Collin @ 7:04 pm

On December 12 Dutch hacker Rop Gonggrijp and his colleague Alex Halderman from the USA were held for twelve hours Delhi airport, the former writes on his blog.

Gonggrijp suspects this may have to do with the Indian Election Committee’s investigation into his and others’ involvement in a “conspiracy to destabilize India“, i.e. proving that India’s voting machines can easily be hacked for vote rigging.

According to Indian authorities, Gonggrijp was held because he should not have been issued a visa. Since he had one anyway, they decided to let him into the country after all.

The Netherlands abandoned voting machines for national elections in 2007 after Gonggrijp demonstrated that it is trivially easy to hack them.

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