Skip Navigation
mbin: data loss on censored threads, unlike Lemmy. Kbin also likely affected.
  • Yikes. I am disturbed to hear that. I was as well appalled with what I saw in a recent visit to a university. It’s baffling that someone could acquire those degrees without grasping the discipline. Obviously it ties in with the fall of software quality that began around the same time the DoD lifted the Ada mandate. But indeed, you would have to mention your credentials because nothing else you’ve written indicates having any tech background at all.

  • mbin: data loss on censored threads, unlike Lemmy. Kbin also likely affected.
  • How have I made your point at all?

    You have acknowledged the importance of having multiple points of failure. It’s a good start because the defect at hand is software with a single point of failure.

    You're a bit incoherent with what you're talking about.

    I suppose I assumed I was talking to someone with a bit of engineering history. It’s becoming clear that you don’t grasp software design. You’ve apparently not had any formal training in engineering and likely (at best) you’ve just picked up how to write a bit of code along the way. Software engineering so much more than that. You are really missing the big picture.

    This has nothing to do with software design or anything else along those lines.

    What an absurd claim to make. Of course it does. When software fails to to protect the data it’s entrusted with, it’s broken. Either the design is broken, or the implementation is broken (but design in the case at hand). Data integrity is paramount to infosec and critical to the duty of an application. Integrity is basically infosec 101. If you ever enter an infosec program, it’s the very first concept you’ll be taught. Then later on you might be taught that a good software design is built with security integrated into the design in early stages, as opposed to being an afterthought. Another concept you’ve not yet encounted is the principle of security in depth, which basically means it’s a bad idea to rely on a single mechanism. E.g. if you rely on the user to make a backup copy but then fail to protect the primary copy, you’ve failed to create security in depth, which requires having BOTH a primary copy AND a secondary copy.

    This is a simple thing. If your data is valuable you secure it yourself.

    That has nothing to do with the software defect being reported. While indeed it is a good idea to create backups, this does not excuse or obviate a poor software design that entails data loss and ultimately triggers a need for data recovery. When a software defect triggers the need for data recovery, in effect you have lost one of the redundant points of failure you advocated for.

    When you reach the university level, hopefully you will be given a human factors class of some kind. Or if your first tech job is in aerospace or a notably non-sloppy project, you’ll hopefully at least learn human factors on the job. If you write software that’s intolerant to human errors and which fails to account for human characteristics, you’ve created a poor design (or most likely, no design.. just straight to code). When you blame the user, you’ve not only failed as an engineer but also in accountablity. If a user suffers from data loss because your software failed to protect the data, and you blame the user, any respectable org will either sack you or correct you. It is the duty of tech creators to assume that humans fuck up and to produce tools that is resilient to that. (maybe not in the gaming industry but just about any other type of project)

    Good software is better than your underdeveloped understanding of technology reveals.

    Thinking that a federated service is going to have a uniform or homogenous approach to things is folly

    Where do you get /uniform/ from? Where do you get /homogenous approach/ from? Mbin has a software defect that Lemmy does not. Reporting mbin’s defect in no way derives and expectation that mbin mirror Lemmy. Lemmy is merely an example of a tool that does not have the particular defect herein. Lemmy demonstrates one possible way to protect against data loss. There are many different ways mbin can solve this problem, but it has wholly failed because it did fuck all. It did nothing to protect from data loss.

    on your end and a failure of understanding what the technology is.

    It’s a failure on your part to understand how to design quality software. Judging from the quality of apps over the past couple decades, it seems kids are no longer getting instruction on how to build quality technology and you have been conditioned by this shift in recent decades toward poorly designed technology. It’s really sad to see.

  • mbin: data loss on censored threads, unlike Lemmy. Kbin also likely affected.
  • Exactly. You’ve made my point for me. Precisely why this defect is a defect. The user’s view should be separate and disjoint from the timeline. Lemmy proves the wisdom of that philosophy. But again, it’s a failure of software design to create a fragile system with an expectation that human users will manually compensate for lack of availaiblity and integrity. I know you were inadvertenly attempting again to blame the user (and victim) for poor software design.

    It’s a shame that kids are now being tought to produce software has lost sight of good design principles. That it’s okay to write software that suffers from data loss because someone should have another copy anyway (without realising that that other copy is also subject to failures nonetheless).

  • mbin: data loss on censored threads, unlike Lemmy. Kbin also likely affected.
  • Who cares?

    Anyone who values their own time and suffers from data loss cares about data loss, obviously.

    This is a serious question.

    Bizarre.

    Anything that is important to you should be backed up and/or archived. Relying on a third party social media app is folly.

    This is a bug report on faulty software. If you have a clever workaround to the bug, specifics would be welcome. A bug report is not the place for general life coaching or personal advice. If there is an emacs mode that stores posts locally and copies them into a lemmy or mbin community and keeps a synchronised history of the two versions, feel free to share the details. But note that even such a tool would still just be a workaround to the software defect at hand.

  • Bug reports on any software @sopuli.xyz ciferecaNinjo @fedia.io
    mbin: data loss on censored threads, unlike Lemmy. Kbin also likely affected.
    fedia.io AZERTY→QWERTY keyboard conversion painful - Europe - Fedia

    My laptop’s keyboard is QWERTY and the OS is configured for that. But when I attach an external AZERTY keyboard, it’s a disaster. Only five keys need to be rearranged (Q, W, A, Z, M), or so it seems superficially. But the punctuation is all wrong. It’s not just an arrangement problem but in fact the...

    AZERTY→QWERTY keyboard conversion painful - Europe - Fedia

    Both Lemmy and mbin have a shitty way of treating authors of content that is censored by a moderator.

    Lemmy: if your post is removed from a community timeline, you still have the content. In fact, your logged-in profile looks no different, as if the message is still there. It’s quite similar to shadow banning. Slightly better though because if you pay attention or dig around, you can at least discover that you were censored. But shitty nonetheless that you get no notification of the censorship.

    Mbin: if your post is removed, you are subjected to data loss. I just wrote a high effort post europe@feddit.org and it was censored for not being “news”. There is no rule that your post must be news, just a subtle mention in the topic of news. In fact they delete posts that are not news, despite not having a rule along those lines. So my article is lost due to this heavy-handed moderation style. Mbin authors are not deceived about the status of their post like on lemmy, but authors suffer from data loss. They do not get a copy of what they wrote so they cannot recover and post it elsewhere.

    It’s really disgusting that a moderator’s trigger happy delete button has data loss for someone else as a consequence. I probably spent 30 minutes writing the post only to have that effort thrown away by a couple clicks. Data loss is obviously a significant software defect.

    8
    EDPS decentralised social media pilot: the end of a successful story
  • Wojciech Wiewiórowski was intent on calling mastodon a failure for political reasons. When pressed on the harms of public services using Twitter and Facebook, he defends them on the basis of content moderation. Of course what’s despicable about that stance is that a private sector surveillance advertiser is not who should be moderating who gets to say what to their representatives. Twitter, for example, denies access to people who do not disclose their mobile phone number to Twitter, which obviously also marginalises those who have no mobile phone subscription to begin with.

    The lack of funding on the free world platforms was due to lack of engagement. When the public service does not get much engagement they react by shrinking the funding.

    We need the Facebook and Twitter users to stop disengaging with gov agencies on those shitty platforms. Which obviously would not happen. Those pushover boot-licking addicts would never do that.

  • Lemmy vs. PieFed vs. Mbin
  • Thanks for the insights. I was looking for a client not a server. So maybe this can’t help me. A server somewhat hints that it would be bandwidth heavy. I’m looking to escape the stock JS web client. At the same time, I am on a very limited uplink. To give an idea, I browse web with images disabled because they would suck my quota dry.

  • installation instructions needed

    The readme talks about docker. I’m not a docker user. I did a git clone when I was on a decent connection. ATM I’m not on a decent connection. The releases page lacks file sizes. And MS Github conceals the size: curl -LI 'https://github.com/Xyphyn/photon/archive/refs/tags/v1.31.2-fix.1.tar.gz' | grep -i 'content-length' output: > content-length: 0

    So instead of fetching the tarball of unknown size, I need to know how to build either the app or the tarball from the cloned repo. Is that documented anywhere?

    3
    Lemmy vs. PieFed vs. Mbin
  • Photon is a strange beast. How do you install it?

    It seems to only come as a docker container. That’s weird. I don’t have docker installed but docker should really be a choice.. not a sole means of installation. I see no deb file or tarball. It seems that it has taken a direction that makes it non-conducive to ever becoming part of the official Debian repos.

    Then it seems as well that their official site “phtn.app” is a Cloudflare site -- which is a terrible sign. It shows that the devs are out of touch with digital rights, decentralisation, and privacy. That doesn’t in itself mean the app is bad but the tool is looking quite sketchy so far. Several red flags here.

    (edit) I found a tarball on the releases page.

  • Recording website state at a snapshot in time for evidence

    I often save websites to my local drive when collecting evidence that might later need to be presented in court. But of course there problems with that because I could trivially make alterations at will. And some websites give me different treatment based on my IP address. So I got in the habit of using web.archive.org/save/$targetsite to get a third party snapshot. That’s no longer working. It seems archive.org has cut off that service due to popular demand, which apparently outstrips their resources.

    Are there more reliable alternatives? I’m aware of archive.ph but that’s a non-starter (Cloudflare).

    In the 1990s there was a service that would email you a webpage. Would love to an out-of-band mechanism like that since email has come to carry some legal weight and meets standards of evidence in some countries (strangely enough).

    0
    Bug reports on any software @sopuli.xyz ciferecaNinjo @fedia.io
    (mbin) Onion hosts are not recognized as URLs and thus get funny treatment
    0
    Lemmy vs. PieFed vs. Mbin
  • I just need to work out exactly what the effect of the user-configured node block is. In principle, if an LW user replies to either my thread or one of my comments in someone else’s thread, I would still want to see their comments and I would still want a notification. But I would want all LW-hosted threads to be hidden in timelines and search results.

    On one occasion I commented in an LW-hosted thread without realising it. Then I later blocked the community that thread was in (forgetting about my past comment). Then at one point I discovered someone replied to me and I did not get the notification. That scenario should be quite rare but I wonder how it would pan out with the node-wide blocking option.

  • Lemmy vs. PieFed vs. Mbin
  • Ah, I see! Found it. Indeed that was not there last time I checked.

    I’m on both Lemmy and mbin. I have several Lemmy accounts.

    Now I need to understand the consequences of blocking lemmy.world. Is it just the same as blocking every lemmy.world community, or does it go further than that? E.g. If I post a thread and a LW user replies, I would not want to block their reply from appearing in my notifications. I just don’t want LW threads coming up in searches or appearing on timelines.

  • Lemmy vs. PieFed vs. Mbin
  • I don't get why you want users to be able to apply cloudflare filters, though.

    Suppose an instance has these users:

    • Victor who uses a VPN
    • Cindy whose ISP uses a CGNAT (she may or may not be aware of the consequences of that)
    • Terry who uses a Tor
    • Norm who uses the normal clearnet
    • Esther who is ethical (doesn’t matter what she uses)

    And suppose the instance is a special interest instance focused on travel. The diverse group of the above people have one thing in common: they want to converge on the expat travel node and the admin wants to accommodate all of them. Norm, and many like him, are happy to subscribe to countless exclusive and centralised forums as they are pragmatic people with no thought about tech ethics. These subscriptions flood an otherwise free world node with exclusive content. Norm subscribes to !travelpics@exclusivenode.com. Then Victor, Terry and sometimes Cindy are all seeing broken pics in their view because they are excluded by Cloudflare Inc. Esther is annoyed from an ethical standpoint that this decentralised free world venue is being polluted by exclusive content from places like like Facebook Threads™ and LemmyWorld. Even though she can interact with it from her clearnet position, she morally objects to feeding content to oppressive services.

    The blunt choice of the admin to federate or not with LemmyWorld means the admin cannot satisfy everyone. It’s too blunt of an instrument. Per-community blocks per user give precision but it’s a non-stop tedious manual workload to keep up with the flood of LW communities. It would be useful for a user to block all of LemmyWorld in one action. I don’t want to see LW-hosted threads and I don’t want LW forums cluttering search results.

  • Lemmy vs. PieFed vs. Mbin
  • Cloudflare is an exclusive walled garden that excludes several demographics of people. I am in Cloudflare’s excluded group. This means:

    • when an LW user posts an image, I am blocked from seeing it. Images do not get mirrored onto the federated nodes.
    • when I encounter an LW community with very little content and I then need to visit the LW host to see what’s there before deciding whether to subscribe, I am blocked. I can only see content that got mirrored into the local timeline. There are various circumstances where visiting the source host is necessary but Cloudflare ruins that option.

    CF nodes like LW breaks the fedi in arbitrary ways that undermine the fedi design and philosophy. So the use case is to get rid of the pollution. To get broken pieces out of sight and unbury the content that is decentralised, inclusive, open and free. To reach conversations with people who have the same values and who oppose digital exclusion, oppose centralised corporate control, and who embrace privacy. It’s also necessary to de-pollute searches. If I search for “privacy”, the results are flooded with content from people and nodes that are antithetical to privacy. Blocking fixes that. If I take a couple min. to block oxymoron venues like lemmy.world/c/privacy and do the same for a dozen other cloudflared nodes, then search for “privacy” again, I get better results.

    When crossposting from Lemmy, there is a pulldown list of target communities which is another search tool. That is broken when there are more communities than what fits in the box. And it’s often ram-packed with Cloudflare venues -- places that digital rights proponents will not feed. Blocking the junk CF-centralised communities makes it possible to select the target community I’m after.

    So it works. The federated timeline is also more interesting now because it’s decluttered of exclusive places. The problem is that it’s more tedious that it needs to be. I am blocking hundreds of LW communities right now. It probably required 500 clicks to get the config that I have right now and I probably have hundreds of more clicks to go. When in fact I should have simply been able to enter ~10 or nodes.

  • Lemmy vs. PieFed vs. Mbin
  • tl;dr:

    • Lemmy ← shit show for years
    • (mk)bin ← shit show but understandable given its age
    • piefed ← never heard of it

    I’ve been using Lemmy for years, back when there were only 2 or 3 nodes and federation capability did not exist. It’s a shit show. Extremely buggy web clients and no useful proper desktop clients. I must say it’s sensible that the version numbers are still 0.x. It’s also getting worse. 0.19.3 was more usable than 0.19.5 which introduced serious bugs that make it unusable in some variants of Chromium browser.

    mBin has been plagued with serious bugs. But it’s also very young. It was not ready for prime-time when it got rolled out, but I think it (or kbin) was pushed out early because many Redditors were jumping ship and those refugees needed a place to go. IMO mbin will out-pace Lemmy and take the lead. Mbin is bad at searching. You can search for mags that are already federated but if a community does not appear in a search I’m not even sure if or how a user can create the federated relationship.

    The running goat fuck with Lemmy is in recent years with the shitty javascript web client. There’s only so much blame you can fairly put on those devs though because they need to focus on a working server. The shitty JavaScript web client should just be considered a proof-of-concept experimental test sandbox. JavaScript is unfit for this kind of purpose. It’s really on the FOSS community to produce a decent proper client. And what has happened is there has been focus on a dozen or so different phone apps (wtf?) and no real effort on a desktop app.

    Cloudflare filters lacking

    Both Lemmy and Mbin lack the ability to filter out or block Cloudflare nodes. They both only give a way to block specific forums. So you get imersed/swamped in LemmyWorld’s walled garden and to get LemmyWorld out of sight there is a big manual effort of blocking hundreds of communities. It’s a never ending game of whack-a-mole.

  • Lemmy vs. PieFed vs. Mbin
  • Yes indeed.. “threads” in the generic sense of the word pre-dates the web. And threadiverse is a few years older than “FB Threads™”. That’s what’s so despicable about Facebook hi-jacking the name. It’s also why I will not refer to them by Meta (another hi-jacking of a generic term with useful meaning that their ego-centric marketers fucked up)

  • Rules and conventions for labeling documentary evidence -- I write “exhibit A” on the doc but it’s getting resistence

    I often supply documents as evidence to regulators (e.g. GDPR regulators). A document is normally in A4 format and I digitally superimpose that onto an A4 page. Thus generally without shrinking or expanding.

    I label it by printing “exhibit A”, “bewijsstuk A”, or “pièce A” in the topmost rightmost corner at a 45° angle and give a small margin to avoid unprintable areas. I do that on every single page. If it would overlap something, I shift it down to avoid overlap. It seems to do the job well but a regulator once requested that I resubmit the evidence without my markups.

    So apparently they don’t like my style. Maybe they wonder if I could be making more material alterations. What is the normal convention in the legal industry? These evidence submissions are not for a court process but they always have potential to end up in court in the future.

    I have some ideas:

    • (only for paper submissions) I could stick a Post-It note to every document (every page?) and hand-write evidence labels. This would be inconvenient for them to scan. If they remove the notes to feed into a scanner, then the digital version is lossy and so they cannot dispense of the paper version. Or they must be diligent with entering the label into the file’s metadata or filename.
    • (only for electronic submissions) I could make the evidence label a PDF annotation, so when viewing the doc and printing it the user can decide whether to show/print annotations. This seems useful superficially but it’s problematic because the PDF tools poorly adhere to the standard to w.r.t. annotations. Many tools do not handle annotations well. A recipient’s app does not necessarily give them control over whether annotations appear, and how they appear (different fonts chosen by different tools and if a tool does not have the source font it may simply ignore the annotation). The 45° angle that sets it apart and makes it pop-out better is apparently impossible with PDF annotations. And with little control over the font it might look good in one viewer but overlap in another.
    • (versatile for both kinds of submissions) I could shrink the doc to ~90% of the original size, put a frame around it, and push it low on the page to leave space at the top for metadata like evidence labels. The the label is obviously not altering the original.
    • (versatile for both kinds of submissions) I could add a cover page to each doc with the sole purpose of writing “exhibit A”. Seems good for digital submissions but I really don’t like the idea of bulking out my paper submissions. It would add €1 to the cost for every ten docs.
    • (versatile for both kinds of submissions) Perhaps I could get away with rotating “exhibit A” 90° and finely printing it along the edge of the margin. This could even be combined with bullet 3 and maybe with less scaling (~95%).

    Any other ideas?

    0
    Barcelona is banning Airbnbs. Other European cities have cracked down already — with some success.
  • It’s good news just considering that Peter #Thiel is a stakeholding¹ cofounder of airbnb. This is the same motherfucker who got Trump into power in 2016 by using Cambridge Analytica, Facebook and Thiel’s dark money contributions -- which more recently got JD Vance into power. Also the same xenophobic scumbag motherfucker behind Palantir. The same piece of shit who cofounded PayPal (a surveillance capitalist). Thiel’s profits are detrimental to the world.

    ¹ to be clear he was a stakeholder ~10 years ago… not sure if that’s still the case.

  • This forum is strangely specific. Can we broaden it, or should a new magazine be formed?

    Decisions about who to federate with can be so much more interesting than just talking specifically about Meta. And from where I sit, this mag is dead due to being so narrowly focused. (edit: moving to another node… that explains it).

    Consider that there are many nodes that are centralised and go against many digital rights values. E.g. all Cloudflare nodes are centralised and expose us all to corporate greed, manipulation, exclusion, and privacy abuses.

    I propose renaming to something like “DefederateTechGiants” or “DefederateTechnoFeudalism”.

    0
    français → anglais translation help wanted for a paragraph of legal text
  • Thanks for the insight; that’s quite helpful.

    The concept of easements still exists in this area but it seems like easements are not being used for façades, which kind of makes sense. The dispute I’m getting into is over a telecom company that is not serving the whole public. They are discriminatory and exclusive. I consider it an injustice that they can arbitrarily drill into people’s houses to support a “public” service which they then exclude some people from access (including owners of the homes they are drilling). Property owners then have a burden of paying €10 per cable to give notice by registered letter to all telecoms using their façade whenever a homeowner wants to perform work on their own façade.

    That’s why I am looking closely at this law. I found nothing in the law that requires telecoms to be inclusive.

  • Translation help wanted on telecom law
  • Are you saying tends is not a false friend and the French and English meanings are quite similar? Because in English that word is astonishing in this legal context. Commercial translation tools are often better quality than Argos, so I was more tempted to trust the commercially translated version.

    (edit) tends has a couple different meanings in English. One might have a tendency to do something or feel something. You might also tend to a store, which means to oversee something. Perhaps it’s that latter meaning that is intended by lawmakers. That the telecom operator oversees agreement.

  • Translation help wanted on telecom law

    I would like to understand this paragraph:

    > § 2. Lorsque (un opérateur d'un [¹ réseau public de communications électroniques]¹) a l'intention d'établir des câbles, lignes aériennes et équipements connexes, de les enlever ou d'y exécuter des travaux, elle tend à rechercher un accord quant à l'endroit et la méthode d'exécution des travaux, avec la personne dont la propriété sert d'appui, est franchie ou traversée.

    Argos Translate yields:

    > § 2. When (an operator of a [¹ public electronic communications network]¹) intends to establish cables, airlines and related equipment, to remove or perform work therein, it tends to seek an agreement on the location and method of carrying out work, with the person whose property serves as a support, is crossed or crossed.

    I think tends is a false friend here because it seems unlikely in this context. A commercial machine translation yields:

    > § 2. When (an operator of a [¹ public electronic communications network]¹) intends to establish, remove or carry out work on cables, overhead lines and related equipment, it shall seek agreement as to the location and method of carrying out the work with the person whose property is used as support, is crossed or is being traversed.

    Sounds more accurate. I’m disappointed that there seems to be no requirement that the telecom company obtain consent from property owners. Is that correct? The telecom operator does not need consent on whether to use someone’s private property, only consent on how they deploy the cables?

    7
    Network Neutrality and Digital Inclusion @sopuli.xyz ciferecaNinjo @fedia.io
    Belgian tax law (“FisconetPlus”) exclusively accessible to those willing to share personal data with Microsoft Corporation
    fedia.io Belgian tax law (“FisconetPlus”) exclusively accessible to those willing to share personal data with Microsoft Corporation - Brussels - Fedia

    Surely the tax law must be reachable in other forms like Moniteur Belge publications which are openly public. But it’s still alarming that any public service would operate exclusively. I’m not sure what FisconetPlus is exactly and if it *uniquely* gives access to any information....

    Belgian tax law (“FisconetPlus”) exclusively accessible to those willing to share personal data with Microsoft Corporation - Brussels - Fedia
    0
    Network Neutrality and Digital Inclusion @sopuli.xyz ciferecaNinjo @fedia.io
    Belgian tax law (“FisconetPlus”) exclusively accessible to those willing to share personal data with Microsoft Corporation
    fedia.io Belgian tax law (“FisconetPlus”) exclusively accessible to those willing to share personal data with Microsoft Corporation - Brussels - Fedia

    Surely the tax law must be reachable in other forms like Moniteur Belge publications which are openly public. But it’s still alarming that any public service would operate exclusively. I’m not sure what FisconetPlus is exactly and if it *uniquely* gives access to any information....

    Belgian tax law (“FisconetPlus”) exclusively accessible to those willing to share personal data with Microsoft Corporation - Brussels - Fedia
    0
    Degoogling my phoone - Feeling like is too much trouble for the privacy
  • What do you say? Am I too lazy or it is unpractical to stay away from big tech?

    Laziness is what the surveillance advertisers are exploiting. It is everyone’s duty to resist the tyranny of convenience that Tim Wu articulates in a famous essay.

    After a year I'm starting to think that maybe my data is not worth the hassle just to keep big tech out of my digital life.. I guess Big Brother wins

    Think of it as boycotting. Exposure of your personal data may not be worth the effort of protecting it, but the big picture is that privacy seekers are not just looking for confidentiality. Privacy is about power and agency. You are exercising your right to boycott a harmful entity. Boycotts are no longer simply a matter of not handing money over, because data is worth money. So boycotting now entails not handing your data over. Giving Google your data feeds Google’s profits.

    So you are really asking, “should I give up the boycott”? The answer is no, because the boycott is not just a duty to yourself; it’s a duty everyone benefits from (except Google).

  • Should Académie Française curate language translation models?

    The FOSS app Argos Translate enables people to locally translate their documents without depending on an external service and then hoping their content is not snooped on (while simultaneously hoping to get translation service for free). Argos does okay with quite popular language pairs but it’s really not up to a good standard of quality overall.

    The machine learning input into Argos known as “models” are trained on samples of (hopefully manual) translations. The models require huge amounts of data. Apparently the effort to gather large volumes of input leads to grabbing poor quality samples, which ultimately leads to bad translations. To worsen matters, you have a sparse scatter of different projects making their own models. So the effort is decentralised in a detrimental way. End users are then left with having to experiment with different models.

    Shouldn’t Académie Française (the French language protection org) have some interest in the public having access to resources that give high-quality translations into French?

    Consider that Académie Française members each spend €230k on clothes (yes, that “k” after the number is correct), surely they have money sloshing around to promote French. If playing dress-up is worth €9.2 million (€230k × 40 members), just imagine how much money they must have for their mission of supporting the French language.

    1
    When a law requires you to supply information that does not exist -- then what? Or when you cannot comply because you don’t have what is required?

    This question is inspired by Belgian law but there is no Belgian law forum and I think it’s likely that Netherlands would have the same problem. So answers w.r.t. Dutch law would be interesting enough.

    It’s increasingly common for law to mandate that people give the government their email address in various situations. If someone has no email address, I have to wonder how can they be expected to comply with the law? When the law requires disclosure of information that does not exist, is it implied that we must take necessary steps to make that information come into existence in order to disclose it? Is it implied by that law that we must enter the private marketplace and subscribe to email service, then periodically check our email?

    I happen to have email addresses but I refuse to disclose them to users of Micosoft Outlook or Google. That includes government offices because the gov uses MS Outlook and simultaneously does not use PGP. Since my workflow of non-disclosure to MS & Google has ensured that email has the tiniest of roles in my life, it would not be a big step for me to nix email altogether and end my subscriptions. But I need to know if it’s even legal for me to do so.

    2
    How should “bis” and “ter” be typeset?

    French law often adds a “bis” (e.g. “Article 29bis”) if more law is added later and for whatever reason they don’t just append it to Article 29.

    It’s ugly in text, but I’m writing a document in LaTeX so I have freedom and control to do something better. At the same time, I don’t want to invent something that alienates readers. I just want to know from people who have read a lot of well typeset French what style is common. I think italicizing the “bis” is common. But what about making it a subscript or superscript? What about putting a ½ space between the bis and the number?

    2
    Right to be Offline / Analog / Unplugged @sopuli.xyz ciferecaNinjo @fedia.io
    The cost of avoiding a email & CAPTCHA in Belgium: €2.66 (EU postage)
    fedia.io The cost of avoiding a CAPTCHA in Belgium: €2.66 (cost of EU postage) - Brussels - Fedia

    In 2016 it was €6.50 for 5 EU stamps. I thought that was extortionate then, as US stamps were 47¢ for a letter that has roughly the same range....

    The cost of avoiding a CAPTCHA in Belgium: €2.66 (cost of EU postage) - Brussels - Fedia
    0
    Belgian law & EU law: /merchants/ must handle warranty service for 2 yrs, or more?
    fedia.io Belgian law & EU law: /merchants/ must handle warranty service for 2 yrs, or more? - Brussels - Fedia

    The rumor I heard was that if you buy a product that fails before the warranty ends, you do not need to contact the manufacturer (in #Belgium). You can simply return the product to the merchant and the merchant must deal with the warranty service....

    The rumor I heard was that if you buy a product that fails before the warranty ends, you do not need to contact the manufacturer (in #Belgium). You can simply return the product to the merchant and the merchant must deal with the warranty service.

    A store manager refused to accept my return of a device that died after 2yrs+2 months, which was covered under a 3 year warranty. He said I must deal directly with the manufacturer. I threatened to complain officially and the manager gave in. But then as he was angrily returning money to me, he said he is only required to handle warranty service for the 1st two years and that he is making an exception for me. I figured he was confused because 2 years happens to be the length of the EU implied warranty. I had not heard that it was also a limit of the store’s obligation as an intermediary.

    To complicate matters, the product was marked down on liquidation because the store apparently severed ties with that manufacturer. Though I doubt that’s relevant to my situation because it would not void the warranty. But the article also says merchants must accept returns for any reason in the first 14 days, yet the store makes that zero days for liquidated goods. Does that break EU law?

    Anyway, I need answers. Maybe I owe the manager a bottle of wine. The EU article indeed confirms sellers must handle warranty returns for up to 2 years. But that’s EU-wide #law. What about #Belgian national law?

    Next question, out of curiousity: normally manufacturers have a choice whether to replace, repair or refund. Is that choice passed through to merchants? Or are merchants required to handle this with one instant transaction (thus no repair as the consumer would have to return to the store later)?

    3
    Do Blu-Ray images exist for Bookworm yet? Is this the best offline way?

    I have a limited internet connection. So I will need to find internet cafes and grab whole damn thing (which is what, 100gb?) I think I saw 4 BDs for past releases, but I cannot find a mirror that has BDs for Bookworm. But perhaps I’m looking in the wrong place.. it’s often quite non-intuitive to navigate. I looked here:

    http://ftp.de.debian.org/debian/dists/bookworm/main/installer-amd64/current/images/

    and here:

    http://ftp.de.debian.org/debian/dists/bookworm/main/binary-amd64/

    The docs:

    https://www.debian.org/releases/bookworm/amd64/ch04s02.en.html#where-files

    I just see small files. No ISOs. I’m not just after the Debian system, but all official packages as well. In principle I would want an installer and a separate disk that is all DEB files, but IIRC the only way to easily get a full set is to get the BD ISOs.. maybe via torrent, not sure. I have no optical drive, so I guess I would put the ISOs on a drive and mount them.

    I know it’s theoretically possible to go through the list of apps I need and find out which CDs they are on, but I looked at just Libre Office and LaTeX and noticed the files for these packages were scattered all over the place. So it really seems impossibly complex and I get the impression I will likely need every single CD anyway.

    0
    Belgian National Bank invests in fossil fuel

    “ClientEarth alleges that the Belgian National Bank's participation in the CSPP, by not taking into account climate, environment, and human rights impacts, violated Article 11 of the Treaty on the Functioning of the EU and Article 37 of the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights (both concern the obligation to integrate environmental protection into EU policies).”

    ^ wow. Really disturbing that a national bank has such controversial investments. When a commercial bank invests in fossil fuels, we can boycott. But you can’t boycott a national bank.

    0
    When /some/ YT videos get special download-resistent treatment but not others

    For example, this invidious instance offers a download option for a YoutTube video, as that instance does for all YT videos:

    https://invidious.fdn.fr/watch?v=lU4vv7qCQvg (see update)

    Exceptionally, if you opt to download it it merely opens a player to watch realtime. While other downloads from the same invidious instance have no issues. Why is this one getting different treatment?

    update Apparently it’s an instance-specific problem with that particular video:

    works → https://invidious.fdn.fr/watch?v=lU4vv7qCQvg

    broken → https://iv.ggtyler.dev/watch?v=lU4vv7qCQvg

    I’ve seen other instances where this particular video download is broken. AFAIK, invidious.fdn.fr is the only place where it works as expected.

    12
    Do any ATMs in Belgium support balance inquiries?

    ATMs I’ve checked:

    BNP Paribas: no balance inquiry option. Nor did it print the balance on the receipt.

    Attijariwafa: no balance inquiry option. Both ATMs are always out of paper, so no way to check whether the balance would be printed on the receipt. Anti-feature: you must enter your PIN before it shows you the menu. Does that mean it connects to my bank even in the absense of a transaction?

    Ing: no longer has ATMs? KBC: no longer has ATMs? \#Belfius: no longer has ATMs? (answered) Aion: only has 1 ATM (unplugged & vandalized) Europabank: has no ATMs? DHB bank: has no ATMs? Fintro: ATM is the same as BNP Parabas? BBVA: do they still exist? Bank of Baroda: has no ATMs? Beobank: didn’t check if they have any ATMs Keytrade: likely has no ATMs BinckBank: likely has no ATMs

    Batopin (3rd party w/Ing & KBC): no balance inquiry option.

    This website claims to give a way to check your balance, but I’m not so trusting:

    https://www.getmybalance.com/

    17
    InitialsDiceBearhttps://github.com/dicebear/dicebearhttps://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/„Initials” (https://github.com/dicebear/dicebear) by „DiceBear”, licensed under „CC0 1.0” (https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/)CI
    ciferecaNinjo @fedia.io
    Posts 27
    Comments 201
    Moderates