activistPnk @ activistPnk @slrpnk.net

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2 yr. ago

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But enforcing certain security standards on public wifi so that random people can not see everything you are doing online is good.

There is a blind “for security reasons” excuse the industry likes to use to force people to chronically upgrade their hardware.. to boost sales. I try to stay immune to that bait.

The access point needs to protect itself -- full stop. An access point that oversteps their authority and becomes a nanny that dictates security practices on others without knowing their security posture and threat model to protect people from themselves can bounce. We don’t want their “help”.

In any case, the DB I am proposing is factual. Whether a fact in the DB is “good” or “bad” is for the users of the DB to decide. And either way, it’s useful.

And I would advise against going online with a device so old and unmaintained that it has issues with its SSL root certificate.

Can you give more details? If the certs have not expired, the device is able and willing to make a connection. If the certs fail due to age, the app makes the user aware of the problem (and in the case of OSMand it refuses to use the connection regardless of the user’s wishes). So what’s the issue?

Note the context is with captive portals. If someone thinks it’s a good idea to force a captive portal on a public LAN to get a simple “I agree” signal, why might that be sensible? AFAICT, it’s down to a clumbsy admin who did not think through the consequences of SSL on a captive portal. The captive portal is not in itself a useful resource for the user. It’s just an obsticle with the sole purpose of getting a signal that someone agrees to the text of a policy that is public anyway. Once the obsticle is out of the way, it’s the independent job of every resource to implement appropriate security for the task at hand, which in come cases may not involve SSL at all (e.g. accessing an onion server). But when the captive portal blocks someone due to (what I regard as clumbsyness), the apps the user would use are blocked regardless of how well they are secured.

(edit) Some captive portals collect personal info, where you must submit an email or phone number. SSL is probably unavoidable in those cases, but ideally the app would collect that info as well. We would want the DB to indicate that sharing personal data is a precondition to access.

It’s laissez-faire everywhere in this regard AFAIK. At a street market you can of course haggle because there is no policy or contract. Outside of that narrow context, cash payers are upcharged because they lack the protection being given to card payers. The most important transactions are for things like public transport, mass transit and utilities. There is no haggle.

Utilities suppliers are increasingly quitting cash acceptance entirely. So then cash payers are forced to pay their bills using the post office, who charges a fee. Mass transit services are providing online and kiosk transactions for card payers without fees, then forcing cash payers to get manual service from a human. Then they charge a fee rationalising that they need to pay the worker a wage.

All people with a right to live in the EU have a right to a free or reasonable priced bank account.

Not exactly. That’s just a façade in attempt to create the optical illusion of equality. The EU requires member states to support a “basic” bank account, but then the EU looks the other way when they reduce the account capabilities and charge fees. You pay much more for a basic account than for a retail account, and depending on the member state you also loose features and capabilities. Some member states block cash services on basic accounts -- thus making them useless in the context of this thread.

So in the end, Americans are still marginalised on the basis of nationality.

The assumption in the leaflet when they say they are protecting surcharges for using cash. They aren’t implying a right to charge more for using cash. Your inferring that.

It’s reality, not inference. Cash payers pay fees that card payers are exempt from.

The leaflet is accurate. Card payers are protected from fees (fees that cash payers are not).

They can’t make that commitment because not all countries use euro in the EU, that’s why there’s no common EU wide solution for cash payment legislation.

The EU absolutely has the power (exclusively, in fact) to prevent surcharging cash. Non-euro countries have more sovereignty in this regard, by choice.

That’s handled by article 62(3) that made it illegal to charge additionally beyond the direct cost of a transaction to merchant themselves.

Sure, but then they say “hiring someone to process your cash is a cost to us”. They have commercial freedom to allocate costs however they please so long as it does not cause an upcharge to card payers.

(edit) note as well that card transactions incur a 0.9% direct charge to the merchant, but they cannot pass that on to the consumer as a surcharge.

And the EU cannot be hold responsible for the wrong Treatment of other nationalities.

Every EU country agreed to make their banks discriminate against Americans through fatca. Of course they are responsible for what they agree to.

With that logic each country must accept every currency because it would limit autonomy otherwise.

You’re not getting it. It’s not USD that’s getting harsh treatment. It’s Americans who try to use EU banks, regardless of currency.

This has nothing to do with Americans.

Nonsense. Read about FATCA.

The assumption is cash doesn’t get charged extra. No rights are being taken away.

Bad assumption. Cash payers are now being charged more, for train and bus tickets for example. A €10 ticket has an extra fee of €12 for paying cash (12 on top of the 10), for example.

Charges associated with useing cash for payments is handled with separate legislation, which is different in different parts of the EU because they use different currencies. Typically dealt with under laws relating to legal tender.

You are apparently unfamiliar with the Rundfunk case in Germany. The EU has exclusive competency over the euro and meaning of legal tender. And no, it does not protect cash payers from surcharges.

I wonder if a good pushback is to lodge open data requests. Of course, only if the website is government run and the gov has a usable open data law.

Some “accessibility” policies are popping up in the US and EU which are intended to ensure blind people can still function. I’m not blind but I’m tempted to file accessibility complaints whenever they push a GUI CAPTCHA.

When email is withheld, I’ll do an MX lookup on their domain and see that it points to Microsoft or Google, in which case I refuse to use the contact form because I believe those traverse their email. Sometimes the MX lookup reveals barracuda or some email firewall which masks what they use. So having transparency in the shitter exacerbates the need for snail mail.

“A decade after the Paris Agreement, we see little to no action from banks and investors to stop the money pipeline to tropical forest destruction,”

We also see no action from consumers who continue to patronise banks more and more, and who look away from the war on cash.

Individual climate actions against banks:

• https://slrpnk.net/post/4665959
• https://slrpnk.net/post/5114249

By paying requirements I mean, that at least the German government sometimes still provides documents in Microsoft formats using macros, templates and design features, that are not supported by open source, or free alternatives.

That’s already illegal. Directive 2019/1024 Art.5¶1 states:

Without prejudice to Chapter V, public sector bodies and public undertakings shall make their documents available in any pre-existing format or language and, where possible and appropriate, by electronic means, in formats that are open, machine-readable, accessible, findable and re-usable, together with their metadata. Both the format and the metadata shall, where possible, comply with formal open standards.

So when you encounter a gov agency who distributes public docs exclusively in MS Word, in principle it’s just a matter of filing a complaint that they are required to act on. But I suppose there could be a snag because MS published an open spec for the Word format. It was likely just a symbolic gesture because I heard MS Word implementations do not comply with MS’s own spec. But then that works to your advantage because it could be argued that a non-conformant doc fails to be “re-usable” and fails to comply with the open standard.

In my opinion, every document provided by a city, a state, a country, should be available in the least expensive way and it is really no big hustle to turn MS stuff into open formats.

I agree but there need not be a law about cost because using an open standard generally and typically implies that some FOSS will exist for it, and most FOSS is incidentally gratis.

Regarding the HTML problem, I think everything can suck hard, if someone wants it to or doesn’t care.

Not with FTP. FTP greatly limits the ways and degree by which the deployment can suck. Someone who doesn’t care in the very worst would choose a non-intuitive file structure. Someone who wants to be malicious doesn’t have many ways to do so. And their act in FTP would stand out and be difficult to explain.

With HTML there are infinite ways to make it suck. Most web devs abuse their freedom in countless ways to make it suck. It’s actually very difficult to find well designed websites. FTP is the inverse of that. It would be difficult to find a poorly designed FTP host.

Oh, I thought they were the same. Well, what I mean is the company who provides service to the IDF, which IIRC is security in nature. Of course HP products are anti-consumer garbage, and I’m not sure if that’s the same company. But it’s the service to the IDF that creates an injustice when public money is spent on them. Anyone sympathetic to Palestine should be offended when they see HP products in public libraries and gov agencies.

I don’t know about FTP, a useful and crawlable website is fine for me.

The problem with HTML is it gives too much freedom to the web developer who can enshitify it with proprietary JavaScript, CAPTCHAs, etc. Sure it is possible to implement interoperable non-enshitified HTML like this example:

http://bettermotherfuckingwebsite.com/

But you cannot trust web devs to be responsible. And you cannot trust lawmakers to have the competency required to ban all the shitty things that can be done using HTML and JS. FTP is inherently limited so a bad admin cannot screw it up too much. It technologically protects us from enshitification.

public access should be access without any redundant payment requirements.

Not sure what you mean by payment requirements. Govs distributing docs usually does not involve payment. Nonetheless, I want as many payment options as possible because even payment systems are enshitified. E.g. PayPal is a shit show by a controversial company with a long list of wrong doing.

If you go to lemmyverse.net and click TAGS next to a funnel icon, you can then select to /hide/ Cloudflare tags (in which case it’s not hiding the tags but actually hiding nodes that have the CF tag). That is one way to find a Cloudflare-free Lemmy instance.

I personally fetched the dataset, imported it into a DB, then I had the freedom to specify all the criteria I want in my searches.

Strange to read your comment then notice that you are writing that from Cloudflare’s centralised walled garden. Not supporting corporate technofeudal shitholes entails staying outside of Cloudflare.

Complaining is part of contributing ideas. You can contribute code, or ideas, or both. Have a look at !foss_requests@libretechni.ca.

One good principle that’s aligned with what you’re saying is that every FOSS contributor desides for themself what work to do. It’s uncivil to try to task someone in partcular with work. No one should be personally pushed to do work. Avoid that, and there is nothing wrong with reporting bugs and making suggestions generally to the commons.

Not over Tor. It has the same problem as newpipe over tor.

We need a more advanced tool, like this:

https://libretechni.ca/post/420147

I must say I am not the least bit surprised that Tor users get a 403 error when trying to fetch a book whereby Cory Doctorow attempts to redefine “enshittification” in a narrow context that’s less useful to consumers:

When Google started its attack on Invidious, I was forced to try direct YT access. The ads were so frequent and intrusive that I had to walk. It’s intolerable.

Google has mostly killed off the piracy option. Any Invidious instance that gets traction gets cut off by Google.

The FOSS option is newpipe, but if you use that over Tor (for privacy from Google), Google blocks connections.

Its shockingly easy to unplug from the majority of platforms.

FYI, you’re using the most abusive privacy abusing platform in silicon valley: Cloudflare. I suggest leaving lemmy.world.

I vaguely recall that there are good and bad ways to dump it in a landfill. You can bury it well, but the rot creates methane gas pockets just below the surface which escape into the atmosphere when dug up. When it’s rotting on the surface, it gradually leaks methane as it’s produced. Though I think it’s less rot when aired out. Mulch likely has ~½ the surface area against the soil and rotting there, so I would expect notable methane in that case.

Anyway, I’ve read nothing specific on it but conjecture that it should be studied. All that work capturing the carbon into tree wood only to cause the emission of a much worse GHG.

I see no mention of GHG. Tree services often cannot find a use for the trees they cut down (which is strange because you would think they could mill it and sell the lumber). In the end, they dump trees they were paid to remove into landfills. When trees rot they release methane gas, which is 10× worse than CO₂.

I bring this up because wouldn’t wood mulch have the same problem?