when you link out to another website, that tells google that the site is probably kind of important. The more links you have, especially from important high traffic domains like bbc.com, the more likely it is that your site will rank for search terms. This is how it works by default.
Because lots of the web involves users being the content creators (comment sections and whatnot), Google created a "nofollow" tag that basically nullifies the above effect.
If you go to an article on bbc.com and post a comment with a link, I'm 99% certain without checking that it will have the nofollow link attached. It'd hurt bbc's own rankings as well as make their comments section unusable if not because it'd be spammed to hell by SEO people. So what you want is for your link to appear in the article or main body of content where they wont apply the nofollow tag usually (particularly if you pay for it), and google will think your site is hot shit.
Property ownership is public information that can be verified with the town.
Furthermore, I didn't see any reason to jump to such conclusions given in the article. These people seem like professional swindlers so they could have presented false documents when signing the lease.
Most false documents can generally be detected by reference checks, particularly if it includes a credit check. The landlords in the article did not sound like they'd bothered.
Property ownership is not trivial to check: not only does the registrar vary by location, with varying availabilities of information, but who is to say that person X asking airbnb to do / not do something is the X on the title? Further, lots of rental property is owned by a LLC/trust/corporation. Of course you can determine who is authorized to speak for the aforementioned LLC, but it's not an api request away.
These people sound like professional swindlers, you can buy someone's identity on the darknet for a couple hundred dollars at the most. They almost certainly filled out the rental application using someone else's information. That was implied in TFA.
Property ownership is very trivial to check. Calling city/town hall when a property is listed is not an unreasonable task for a multi-million dollar company, more like the bare minimum due diligence. If they can manage to send out professional photographers they can manage basic ownership verification.
You skipped entirely over trusts. Property managers are regularly not named members of an LLC. To wit, I'm a manager of an apartment building that I (quite unfortunately) don't have any ownership interest in. Building a state-by-state, or county-by-county lookup system; verifying person X is authorized to make decisions for a property; then detecting updates is decidedly non-trivial. You can skip googling since I already know the answer: there's very limited information available in many states on corporations. See eg Delaware. Other states don't require updates, or require updates only on very long periods. Many small LLCs simply skip even required annual updates. There's also complications such as the address used by the building and even the postal service is quite possibly not the recorded address. In 2015, [1] claims there were 550k property listings in the US alone. None of this can't be done, but trivial it isn't. I happen to know much of this because I used to work on address information.
Here's the deal: Tenants have rights because it's extremely easy for slumlords to take advantage of tenants - the power is completely in the landlord's hands without regulations. Poor tenant protections often leads to very serious negative externalities to society as a whole. History is filled with examples.
Unfortunately, tenants do take advantage of landlord-tenant laws sometimes, and that is terrible. Savvy swindlers can use the system to their advantage.
Being hard to recover money from individuals has absolutely nothing to do with landlord-tenant law and everything to do with the fact most individual people don't have tens of thousands of dollars sitting around to pay legal judgements. You'd have these sorts of issues anytime you sue someone else for anything. Best case scenario is that the person who you are suing has the proper liability insurance that will pay the judgement for them. (Liability is included with homeowners insurance and renters insurance but doesn't usually cover intentional actions)
I'm sure many of them will try to sue later on but that's not an overnight process, it can take years for a lawsuit to make it's way through court. Plus the property owners don't even fully know what their full losses are yet, it's way too soon, the dust hasn't settled. $20,000 is too much for small claims court so it's going to be a big production. Furthermore, these scumbags are the type of people to say "LOL" to a legal judgement instead of paying it. That means more time in court to get wage and bank account garnishments (if they are even working). If they don't have the $20,000+ or a well paying job or assets then the judgement is worth as much as the paper it is written on, you can't get blood from a stone. If you get a wage garnishment you may collect your $20,000 in 10 years if you're lucky.
(Ignoring the fact it's a several months process to even evict a tenant in many states in the first place.)
You can't let AirBnB off the hook here, they have the moral, if not legal, responsibility to prevent the most egregious abuses of their platform.
In this case 'SPG Member Exclusive' means 'a rate exclusively for SPG Members.' you're an SPG Member if you signed up for their loyalty program and got a member number.
For most hotel chains if you join the loyalty programs then when you log in and book directly you get the member price which is usually $10-20/night lower.
That is not how insurance works, or rather, people don't just insure against malice perpetuated by untrusted actors.
Example: Say I rent out my house and an electrical fire breaks out. Insurance company says "you were using the premises for commercial purposes at the time of loss and your policy does not cover commercial activity. We won't cover the fire damage." This is a very real possibility you'd find yourself in unless you specifically bought commercial/landlord insurance.
Sure, food recalls happen all the time. However, they are selling as a subscription service- they know what packets they shipped you. If there's a recall they should email you, snail mail you, and automatically issue you a refund on your credit card. WiFi is beyond overkill.
I'll say this -- and I'm in the "this is a stupid fucking product" camp -- but I think sending updates to your appliances to keep you from using bad food is actually the right way to go.
I barely read half my mail, snail or electronic. The chances I'm going to see and read and act on a "your food is bad!!!" email (assuming it doesn't get eaten by some filter) before I eat the food in question is low, low low. Some device getting the message and physically stopping me is really the only way to be sure.
Kidding aside, this is too simple of a problem to solve. Serious contamination isn't a part of 1st world daily life, because we have excellent news and regulations (so far). Rotten food is easy to detect, and even some of the stuff we consider rotten would probably not make us sick.
It's all a shiny coat of wax on a non-problem, just like bottled water and gingivitis.
They could even do this without preventing the machine from squeezing improperly-ordained-by-DRM bags.
"If we recognize the bag, and it's recalled, we'll stop you—or at least yell at you. If you use someone else's bag you're on your own, but we won't stop you."
Surely they were capable of having this thought. That they didn't or chose to ignore it hints at ulterior motives—most obvious is overcharging for the bags, since not buying them makes you the proud owner of a $400 paperweight.
But a prediction: almost everyone who attempts to block consumers from consuming bad food with technology will do it to overcharge for the food. Safety will be the excuse, not the purpose.
Oh yeah, it's a shitty move to use that as your excuse.
If your goal is reducing food poisoning through TECHNOLOGY! and CONNECTIVITY! to better inform consumers if their food has been recalled, you'd be better off developing food packaging that could eg change color when the food is recalled - a big giant red skull and crossbones appearing on my food packages would probably keep me from accidentally eating bad food. That would both be a challenging engineering project (since it'd have to be cheap, food-safe, and ideally biodegradable), and work for a far wider range of foods and ingredients.
