* https://tech.michaelaltfield.net/2020/01/02/buskill-laptop-k...
The above article front-paged on Hacker News, and I got a lot of people asking me how they could buy one and use it in on Windows and MacOS. Over the past year, many people have contributed in porting it to those platforms (I originally just designed it for myself, and I use Linux).
The BusKill project is not owned by me. All our work is open-source, and it's owned by the community. As such, I don't put just my name on it because it's not just my work. But if you dig around, you do see my name pop-up in a few places.
The list of contributors can be found on our documentation's "Attribution" section.
* https://docs.buskill.in/buskill-app/en/stable/attribution.ht...
The main website is mostly just a landing page, blog, and a store so people can buy with cryptocurrencies and Tor since CrowdSupply doesn't run an Onion Service and doesn't accept crypto payments.
Not everyone who has contributed to the BusKill project is still active, but some of us are. You can find our names & photos at the bottom of the Crowd Supply campaign page:
* https://www.crowdsupply.com/alt-shift/buskill
Contact information is provided on the website. There's a link to it in the Footer* and on the GitHub page. Not sure how I can make that more clear:
> Where personal data relating to a data subject are collected from the data subject, the controller shall, at the time when personal data are obtained, provide the data subject with all of the following information:
> (a) the identity and the contact details of the controller and, where applicable, of the controller’s representative;
Usually, these contact details are in the privacy policy.
It's certainly unusual for a website to omit this, and in most cases I wouldn't buy from a site where it's missing. In this particular case, maybe it's less strange.
However, I still wouldn't order without knowing from where the package will be sent. Something from Estonia arrives here without any import taxes, something from outside the EU can do (the CrowdSupply site says they handle VAT), but can also attract high processing fees.
https://gdpr-info.eu/art-13-gdpr/
(Note I'm not interested in buying a BusKill; I'm just procrastinating.)
It certainly added cost to the final product, but I figured it was more fair & transparent to everyone to set shipping to $0 internationally (I hate it when you finally make it to payment and only then learn shipping is $20 :/).
I'm not sure it's even possible to have a valid contract with an unknown party...
The provided information on this website is not enough to do legally binding business (at least in some parts of Europe, it's not only Germany).
As far as I understand German law is very flexible about what constitutes a valid legally binding contract.
§312f for example defines that customers must receive "a copy of a contractual document signed by the contracting parties in such a way that their identity is identifiable" (translated via DeepL).
A simple mail address is not an identity in German law, especially not when doing business with B2C as you always have a 14 day period to cancel your order (except for downloads and various, special products).
edit: If you want to cancel, you must be able to do so via (offline) mail, too.
Though a couple of relevant regulations state this should not be done, and no site is going to send away a potential customer by saying “we don't want to follow your laws/regulations so can't do business with you” when they can instead just get away with just ignoring, or in the case of sites run from elsewhere in the world claim to have no no knowledge of, those regulations.
Many local US-based TV news/newspaper sites do this albeit with a slightly more opaque message. And customer still mostly fits because these sites are ad-supported (usually with a mix of local/non-local ads.
Just a website with no contact information, no names, adresses, business registration, whatever?
As far as I can see, this could very likely be a scam of some sort, because anybody who's into doing "real", honest, business would be fine with giving his name and address.
I’d feel fine deciding if I feel fine.
That’s also why I have a credit card. I can get scammed and not be out $100.
No contact information (as in "who runs this?") is provided on the site. Privacy policy is not GDPR compliant (no contact information provided), no names, nothing.
This might be fine for a personal blog, but for doing business this is (at least for me) a no-go.