Lunchtime News Wednesday 13th October 2021

News

Health pass - Today Wednesday 13th October, the Council of Ministers will decide on the extension of the health pass in France with the possibility of the bill being extended until July 31st 2022, it was scheduled to end on November 15th. The council will also look at toughening fines for fraud concerning the health pass with up to 5 year of imprisonment and a fine of 75,000 euros.

French tax authorities - In the coming days, the French tax authorities will launch an experiment in 9 departments with Google to track down undeclared swimming pools or verandas. The aim is to use software capable of automatically detecting an undeclared swimming pool or house extension on aerial images. For this, tax officials will use free access images, which has aerial views of the entire territory. And the software will scan the images and compare them automatically, plot by plot, with the land and tax declarations. A similar experiment launched in the Alpes-Maritimes had found 3,000 undeclared swimming pools in just a few weeks. For the moment, it is an experiment which concerns 9 departments: the Alpes Maritimes, the Bouches-du-Rhône, the Ardèche, the Rhône, the Haute-Savoie, the Vendée, the Maine-et-Loire, the Var and Morbihan. The next step could be drones hovering over properties to detect fraud. In France, it is (for now) prohibited. In recent months, the tax authorities have also been able to use information published on Facebook or Instagram. Twitter, Youtube or Leboncoin.

French host OVHCloud computer failure - Many websites have been inaccessible this morning after a failure at the French host OVHCloud. In a tweet the founder of OVHCloud said that "a bad router configuration caused the [network] to go down”. The major computer failure in an OVHCloud data center prevented Internet users from accessing many sites on this morning. "Following a human error during the reconfiguration of the network" on a datacenter located in Vint Hill, Virginia (eastern United States). The maintenance operation took place between 9am and 10:30am allowing a return to normal.

First French actor to sign contract with Netflix - Omar Sy has become the first French actor to sign a contract with the Netflix platform. The star actor of the series "Lupine" will be both producer and actor in future projects of the platform. It was the film “Intouchables” that made him known ten years ago in the United States, but it is undoubtedly also down to another success, the series Lupine, which has led to the signing of this unprecedented contract with Netflix.

 

 

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