In Brussels we are increasingly reaching a point where we can no longer talk to people face-to-face without technical hurdles and blockades. It’s clear why the Gang of Angry Elders are angry.

I simply entered a law office as a prospective customer. The door man said all visitors must register on the touchscreen tablet they had mounted on the desk, which made email and phone number a required field in order to advance to the next screen before submitting the registration. This is in Belgium, where the GDPR has a data minimisation protection in Article 5. You must surrender an email address (likely to a Microsoft user) as a precondition to sitting in the same room with someone.

Law offices, press offices, banks, and NGOs (some of which protect human rights) have put these security gatekeepers in their lobbies to prevent people talking to people. You ask to talk to someone and the response is always “do you have an appointment”? When the answer is “no”, they are helplessly incapable of making an appointment then and there. It’s a new level of human dysfunctionality.

Some Dexia branches have a very narrow time slot for people without appointments. You must get there early in hopes to get a queing position that does not get cut off at the end of the time slot.

The concept of a supplier that is subservient to the customer’s needs has been lost. It has flipped because too many boot-licking consumers are simply willing to be a doormat.

The persistence of CAPTCHAs proves this. If enough people were wise enough to refuse to solve CAPTCHAs, the CAPTCHAs would natrually be discontinued. But CAPTCHAs remain because too many boot-lickers are serving their corporate masters.

I’m working on a campaign against the use of Facebook by gov administrations. So far I have like 20 or so pages covering human rights violations by the gov when they impose the use of Facebook. But I have not yet written anything about addiction or mental health in this context.

I have never used Facebook myself, so I’m working somewhat blind. The question is whether Facebook is addictive and ultimately to what extent can it be faulted for mental health issues. I mean, of course it’s addictive to some extent, as is just about everything and anything. But the question is whether it can reasonably be argued that when a government pushes the use of Facebook onto people, is the gov significantly undermining people’s human right to living in good health? Or is that a far-fetched or crazy enough that it would actually dilute the campaign against gov-forced use of FB?

geteilt von: https://slrpnk.net/post/23278154

Smartphones are making us unhealthy, miserable, antisocial, and less free. If we can’t yet nationalize the attention economy, maybe it’s time to abolish its primary tool — before it finishes abolishing us.

I’ve pulled the plug on the Internet. After a few months of being offline, these are my findings:

• Love DAB radio; even in a region with only one English station, it’s enough to get my news. Very grateful for BBC!
• Great to exercise the power of boycott and say “fuck you” to shitty ISPs. In the US, most ISPs support the republicans. And most ISPs worldwide do not accept cash payments (thus support the oppression of forced-banking).
• Very grateful for some¹ public libraries with truly open and anonymous wi-fi. (¹ some is stressed b/c sadly most public libraries outsource Internet to shitty big corps and are elitist enough to deny wi-fi to those who lack a GSM subscription [i.e. those who most need wi-fi], and some libs also block egress Tor [indeed they are naïve about how liability and accountability works])
• Web enshitification has less of an impact when just getting the web in small doses as a periodic library visit.
• No more wasting time doom scrolling.
• Money saving. Broadband costs are unreasonable in most parts of the world.
• Sending postal mail instead of e-mail is liberating, as it cuts Microsoft out of the loop (almost all businesses and gov offices use MS email). Also fun to typeset letters in LaTeX.
• ArgosTranslate enables offline people to machine-translate documents. This is great for privacy anyway, because it’s a bad idea to trust the cloud with translating personal docs you get in the mail.

Shortcomings:

• Severe lack of offline apps. In the 90s and 2000s when many people had spotty access, apps were more accommodating of that. There are no Mastodon, Lemmy, or Kbin apps to facilitate offline reading and writing, and periodic syncing.
• Most websites are now designed to assume everyone has 24/7 access. Coupled with an unhealthy and short-sighted hostility toward bots, webpages are rich with JS. They are a shit-show to download and tend not to make content easily fetchable for later consumption.
• Can be tedious to find open hotspots outside of libraries where you can make enough noise to make a VOIP call. (UPDATE: fortunately hospitals tend to have open wi-fi access and generally no noise constraints. Some libraries have a lobby where VOIP calls can be made)

I could really use a way to synchronize posts and messages (XMPP, Lemmy, Mastodon, e-mail) with a smartphone, and then to synchronize the phone with a PC. This would really cut down on having to lug a laptop around. An Android app would serve the most people, but it’d perhaps be easier to implement on a linux-based phone like PostmarketOS.

Advice if you want to try unplugging, in baby steps

A non-stop broadband contract with continuous billing setup is designed to be inconvenient to stop. Perhaps there is a threat of startup costs if you want to return to their service, and pains of returning equipment. Bear in mind they are exploiting your auto-pilot comfort by giving startup discounts to new customers but not to their loyal boot-lickers. You can probably save money if you’re willing to bounce around to other providers anyway.

Find a cheap prepaid mobile data package and make your phone a hotspot. Or if you are more advanced get an LTE USB modem that plugs into a router that supports a GSM uplink. “Cheap” in this case does not mean cheap per meg -- it means cheaper per month if you can greatly reduce your consumption by doing things like killing the graphics on your web browser. If you have enough discipline you can get by on ~5gb/month for probably around $5—10. It’s enough for basic comms.

When your 5gb (or whatever) of mobile data runs out, don’t topup right away. See how long you can hold out. Use the library wifi. I would have a week of offline time after my data runs out before topping up. Then each cycle that timespan grew. Now I have been offline for months.

Prepaid mobile broadband is a good middle step because you are not pushed to stay on an auto-pilot plan. It’s actually the opposite.. you have the inconvenience of topping up each time you need to continue your access, which is perfect for a progression into offlineness.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.sdf.org/post/36391484

Broadcast TV has their shit together, at least in the US. You can setup MythTV to fetch TV schedules without Internet access. It can grab the schedules from the broadcast signals. You can also subscribe to Internet services that give TV scheduling far into the future, but that’s a non-gratis frill. The in-band scheduling info goes a few days out which is good enough.

Radio listeners are screwed on this. FM and DAB+ both have no scheduling info. And worse, there is no Internet service that produces an aggregated radio schedule. You must find websites hosted by each radio station individually and navigate in their shitty user interfaces. Sometimes the programs are too vague to be useful.

Apparently it was completely overlooked in the drafting of the DAB specs. In principle, a clever broadcaster could embed schedule info into the album art using stegonography, or stego on the audio content, but then no appliances would decode such hacks.

I have no idea if satellite radio is on the ball. I think satellite radio is a US-specific option as DAB is nearly non-existent in the US. Vice-versa in Europe.

As someone who has pulled the plug on the residential Internet, I cling to the radio more than most. If DAB would were to include metadata and if there were a DAB-capable PC card, it would be great to have a MythTV-like setup to record radio programs. As it stands, we are driven to do a lot of channel surfing, which is worse on DAB than on FM because of the 2½ second delay with each channel change to decode a chunk of data (so surfing 10 channels has 25 seconds of silent timewaste).

I’m sure radio broadcasters would get more market share if DARs (digital audio recorders) were a thing. That sort of utility might even enable more people to be willing to experiment with unplugging from the Internet.

Update

The scheduling info is in fact part of a standard called SPI:

https://lemmy.sdf.org/post/36391484/20629029

It’s just that device makers are not bothering to implement it, apparently.

Tl;dr: deliver snail-mail by hand

Most corporations and gov agencies have outsourced email service to a highly unethical corporation (Microsoft). Every time you send an email to a recipient who uses MS for email service, you feed profitable data to a surveillance advertiser who snoops on email payloads for profit. You also reveal to the recipient your email address which they can use to feed profitable data to the surveillance advertiser beyond your control for an indefinite time.

It’s baffling how many people think this is a good idea.

As a Microsoft boycotter, I have naturally reverted back to old-fashioned snail mail. If the recipient is in my city, I personally hand-deliver the letter to their mailbox. Costs me nearly nothing. The recipient who is typically a gov agency or corporation is generally forced to respond using the national postal service (as I withhold email addresses from the correspondence). And rightfully so. It’s an extra perk that they pay a built-in postage penalty for poorly choosing their email provider.

This has been working well for me¹. I spend nothing if the recipient is in cycling range, and the recipient helps fund the national postal service when they respond using an option that is increasingly under the threat of mass digitization by privacy adversaries (MS and Google). Case in point: Denmark ends postal service this year, so it’s already too late there.

To verify whether the recipient’s email traverses a surveillance advertiser:

torsocks dig @8.20.247.20 -t mx -q "$domain" +noclass +nocomments +nostats +short +tcp +nosearch

where $domain is the domain portion of their email address. This command will check whether their vanity address is Microsoft or Google in disguise -- which is usually the case. It will usually output “yada yada outlook yada yada” to indicate Microsoft.

If you live remotely, can’t cycle, etc, then stop being cheap and buy stamps. They are cheaper than your Internet subscription which leaves you feeding surveillance advertisers.

¹ Exceptionally, one recipient went to the trouble of collecting my email address from a 3rd party without my consent in order to respond to my snail mail via email hosted by their surveillance advertiser. They naturally received an instant GDPR Article 17 request to erase my email address at that point along with a notice that they violated Article 5 (data minimisation).

cross-posted from: https://slrpnk.net/post/12108012

The EU guarantees most people a right to open a “basic”¹ bank account. Superficially that sounds good, but of course having a right to open a bank account implies that you can then be expected to have an account. It’s an enabler for the #warOnCash. The right to a bank account is a masquerade of freedom from which oppression manifests.

Anyway, you have to ask: do you really have a “right” to open a basic bank account if the procedure for opening the account is inherently exclusive? That is, if a bank only offers a basic account to people who are online, doesn’t a problem arise when this right to an account then leads to an assumption that everyone has an account?

Some banks take the requirement to offer basic accounts seriously by making the application a static PDF which can also be obtained on paper form. So the only thing you need is a pen (to open the account and presumably to use it). But it’s bizarre some banks put the application for their basic account exclusively in an interactive online format. Are offline people just getting “lucky” if a bank happens to offer a basic account application on paper?

¹ “basic” is not just common language here. It refers to a specific type of account that fulfills specific legal criteria.

It used to be that you could insert a coin into a washing machine and it would simply work. Now some Danish and German apartment owners have decided it’s a good idea to remove the cash payment option. So you have to visit a website and top-up your laundry account before using the laundry room.

Is this wise?

Points of failure with traditional coin-fed systems:

1. your coin gets stuck
2. you don’t have the right denomination of coins

Points of failure with this KYC cashless gung-ho digital transformation system:

1. your internet service goes down
2. the internet service of the laundry room goes down
3. the website is incompatible with your browser
4. the website forces 3rd party JavaScript that’s either broken or you don’t trust it
5. you cannot (or will not) solve CAPTCHA
6. the website rejects your IP address because it is a shared IP
7. the payment processor rejects your IP address because it is a shared IP
8. the bank rejects your IP address because it is a shared IP
9. the payment processor is Paypal and you do not want to share sensitive financial data with 600 corporations
10. the accepted payment forms do not match your payment cards
11. the accepted payment form matches, but your card is still rejected anyway for one of many undisclosed reasons:
    • your card is on the same network but foreign cards are refused
    • the payment processor does not like your IP address
    • the copy of your ID doc on file with the bank expired, and the bank’s way of telling you is to freeze your card
    • it’s one of these new online-only bank cards with no CVV code printed on the card so to get your CVV code you must install their app from Google’s Playstore (this expands into 20+ more points of failure)
12. your bank account is literally below the top-up minimum because you only have cash and your cashless bank does not accept cash deposits; so you cannot do laundry until you get a paycheck or arrange for an electronic transfer from a foreign bank at the cost of an extortionate exchange rate
13. you cannot open a bank account because Danish banks refuse to serve people who do not yet have their CPR number (a process that takes at least 1 month).
14. you are unbanked because of one of 24 reasons that Bruce Schneier does not know about
15. the internet works when you start the wash load, but fails sometime during the program so you cannot use the dryers; in which case you suddenly have to run out and buy hanging mechanisms as your wet clothes sit.
16. (edit) the app of your bank and/or the laundry service demands a newer phone OS than you have, and your phone maker quit offering updates.

In my case, I was hit with point of failure number 11. Payment processors never tell you why your payment is refused. They either give a uselessly vague error, or the web UI just refuses to move forward with no error, or the error is an intentional lie. Because e.g. if your payment is refused you are presumed to be a criminal unworthy of being informed.

Danish apartment management’s response to complaints: We are not obligated to serve you. Read the terms of your lease. There is a coin-operated laundromat 1km away.

Question: are we all being forced into this shitty cashless situation in order to ease the hunt for criminals?

I’ve noticed that if you try to contact corp or gov offices the old fashioned way, they simply ignore you. They want to force you to use email or solve a CAPTCHA. The fix I have in mind is a tweak on this idea:

https://sopuli.xyz/post/12919557

but the first contact you make with an office need not even be GDPR¹ related. If you contact a gov or corp for any purpose and they ignore it, your next request can and should include an access request for records on how they handled your initial correspondence.

¹ GDPR isn’t the only game in town. Brazil and California supposedly have some privacy law similar to the GDPR which I assume includes a right of access. Hence why they were also mentioned in the title.

#fuckEmail

I just had to send a msg to a gov office.

Email has been generally broken¹ the past couple decades. I prefer fax. It’s more reliable and I choose what I want to disclose to the recipient. Even in cases where part of the fax transmission routes over email, it’s still more reliable than pure email because those fax→email gateways are managed by recipients to ensure all-or-nothing (all faxes are delivered or none of them). Fax is immune to shenanigans like “mail server X accepts mail from Y but not Z”.

When I tried to send the fax, the fax machine did not answer. So I voice called the office. They said “we unplugged our fax machine”. WTF! So I said please plug it back in because I’m trying to send a fax. So a bit later I tried again and it worked.

Folks, we are losing fax because most of the population does not grasp the privacy compromise with email, and the compromise of netneutrality and reliability. If I am the only person in the world who keeps fax in use, fax will die fast because it’s easy to marginalise 1 person.

So here’s a disturbing development. Suppose you pay cash to settle a debt or to pay for something in advance, where you are not walking out of the store with a product. You obviously want a receipt on the spot proving that you handed cash over. This option is ending.

It’s fair enough that France wants to put a stop to people receiving paper receipts they don’t want, which then litter the street. But it’s not just an environmental move; there is a #forcedDigitalTransformation / #warOnCash element to this. From the article:

In Belgium: since 2014, merchants can choose to provide a paper or digital receipt to their customers, if they¹ request it.

What if I don’t agree to share an email address with a creditor? What if the creditor uses Google or Microsoft for email service, and I boycott those companies? Boycotting means not sharing any data with them (because the data is profitable). IIUC, the Belgian creditor can say “accept our Microsoft-emailed receipt or fuck off.” If you don’t carry a smartphone that is subscribed to a data plan, and trust a smartphone with email transactions, then you cannot see that you’ve received the email before you leave after paying cash. Even if you do have a data plan and are trusting enough to use a smartphone for email, and you trust all parties handling the email, there is always a chance the sender’s mail server is graylisted, which means the email could take a day to reach you. Not to mention countless opportunities for the email to fail or get lost.

It’s such a fucked up idea to let merchants choose. If it’s a point of sale, then no problem… I can simply walk if they refuse a paper receipt (though even that’s dicey because I’ve seen merchants refuse instant returns after they’ve put your money in the cash register).

But what about creditors? If you owe a debt and the transaction fails because they won’t give you a paper receipt and you won’t agree to info sharing with a surveillance advertiser, then you can be treated as a delinquent debtor.

Google, Facebook, Amazon, and Microsoft must be celebrating these e-receipts because they have been working quite hard to track people’s offline commerce.

It’s obviously an encroachment of the data minimisation principle under the GDPR. More data is being collected than necessary.

¹ This is really shitty wording. Who is /they/? If it’s the customer, that’s fine. But in that case, why did the sentence start with “merchants can choose…”? Surely it can only mean merchants have the choice if they make a request to regulators.

cross-posted from: https://sopuli.xyz/post/10440580

The source of this article is in a walled garden that disrespects our privacy so I will not cite it. But here’s the text, posted here in the free world for all people to access:

The menace of “the War on Cash” is making steady headway across the board.

And that’s whether it concerns big-time international policy-makers pushing for total digitization of financial assets – or individual examples that showcase just how serious this threat is.

Here’s one such case: Elizabeth Dasburg and two others were denied the right to use cash to pay entry fee to the Fort Pulaski National Monument in Georgia, managed by the National Park Service.

It’s turned into, “parks, but no recreation” – because the victims of this violation of US law regulating the use of domestic currency have now opted for litigation.

Plain and simple, Dasburg and the two others believe it is still illegal in the US to refuse to accept the country’s legal tender. Or is it? That’s the question the US District Court for the District of Columbia will have to spell out.

Judging by the filing, the Fort Pulaski employees were equally indoctrinated against accepting cash, as they were trying to be helpful. The visitors were first told in no uncertain terms that only cards are accepted.

We obtained a copy of the complaint for you here.

And then, if – say they had no cards (that they might not want to use them doesn’t seem to have been a consideration) – they were instructed to go to a grocery chain like Walmart and buy a gift card.

However bizarrely and unnecessarily complicated this might sound – all the more ironic, because it appears the “explanation” for this policy is that cards are more “convenient” – that’s what Fort Pulaski wanted.

Cards. Of any sort. Things that can be tracked and tied to a person, in other words.

“By forcing people to use credit cards or digital wallets, under the guise of convenience, the National Park Service becomes a player in the surveillance state, undermining park visitors’ privacy right,” Children’s Health Defense (CHD) General Counsel Mack Rosenberg commented on the case – and the state of affairs.

CDH has decided to put its money where its mouth is and support the defendants’ case financially.

The National Park Service is said to have been working on cashless-only payment options for some years, the scheme now in effect in to close to 30 national parks, historic sites and monuments.

While those behind such things are always happy to present themselves as champions of “equality and diversity,” the reality looks quite different.

“Only half of low-income households have access to a credit card, according to a March 2022 Federal Reserve Bank of New York report,” CHD President Laura Bono said in a letter to the Park and Service CEO.

1. The right to be unplugged includes the right to be free from banks as banks increasingly force customers online. There is also a #WarOnCash underway. So even if you make the ethically absent minded decision to pay for your food electronically, the least you can do is pay the tip in cash. (the war on cash is war on privacy)
2. Electronic tips are also subject to siphoning off by banks. When you tip by card, you also tip Visa, Mastercard, or whatever scumbag credit network is in play because their fee is a percentage of the whole transaction. The electronic transaction may be free to you but it’s not free to the business. I don’t know if the restaurant pays the whole fee and transfers 100% of the tip to the server, or if the server shares the hit. But if this is not McDonalds but some small local business, it’s better to give the full amount to the business anyway.
3. Data protection: when you tip electronically, that creates a record not just attached to you but to the server. If you respect /their/ privacy by way of data minimization, you tip in cash.
4. Environmental protection: banks are lousy for the environment. (ref: Banking on Climate Chaos, bank blacklist and Wired article)
5. Terminal tipping is a swindle (esp. in Europe). Tipping is not only optional in the most pure meaning of the word (not expected), but tipping amounts are lower in Europe meant purely to indicate service quality. Even a tip of €1 is a complement. But terminals suggest American proportions (e.g. 20%). It’s a scam. I think I’ve only seen this in tourist traps. The ownership is happy to make their staff happy by pushing a tip request in a way that deceives the public into thinking it’s out of their hands.. that the technology is asking for the tip. This fucked up scam is training restaurant patrons to overtip w.r.t. the culture (a culture that the locals don’t want to drift into Americanism). In the US it’s not exactly a swindle, but you have less control over the amount nonetheless. Sure most people like the math-free convenience but IMO that does not justify it. And certainly the ~15—25% amounts are excessive when there was no table service.
6. Sometimes servers pool their tips to then tip a portion to the kitchen staff who did well enough to make the servers look good. Cash tips make that go smoothly. I was once in a rare situation where I needed to pay by card and I also wanted cash back. The server explained to me they do not give cash back because of that tip pooling that they do, saying that sometimes they do not get enough cash tips to properly treat the kitchen staff.

cross-posted from: https://sopuli.xyz/post/6076984

Belgian municipalities have started forcing people to use web browsers to interact with public services. That’s right. It’s no longer possible to reach a variety of public services in an analog way in some Belgian regions. And for people willing to wrestle with the information systems being imposed, it also means cash payment is now impossible when a service requires a fee. The government is steam-rolling over elderly people who struggle with how to use technology along with those who only embrace inclusive privacy-respecting technology. These groups are apparently small enough to be marginalized without government reps worrying about lost votes.

Hypothetically, what would happen if some Amish villages existed in Belgium? I ask because what’s being imposed would strongly go against their religion. Would the right to practice religion carry enough weight to compel the government to maintain an offline option even if it’s a small group of Amish? If yes, would that option likely be extended to everyone, or exclusive to the Amish?