ciferecaNinjo

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Belgian service “itsme” is not a bank. But it is listed as such for GrapheneOS users ( github.com )

There is a list of bank apps that work on GrapheneOS. The Belgian list includes “itsme”, which is not a bank. It’s an authentication portal used by many different kinds of services. It’s also untrustworthy because it’s in Cloudflare.

ciferecaNinjo ,

Just commenting based on the title since I am blocked from YT and also don’t speak German. (An English transcript would be useful)

Ditching Gmail is trivially easy. Boycotting gmail is where the interesting conversation is, because often you need to reach someone who uses gmail. You can do an MX lookup on the domain of the recipient’s email address, but that only works about 70% of the time. If they use an email firewall like Barracuda or a forwarding address, then there is no way to know where the email route ends.

If I cannot get confidence from an MX lookup, then the recipient is getting a fax or postal letter from me. Google could still end up in the loop, but as long as you don’t reveal an email address to the recipient, at least you remain in control over what Google collects and profits from.

ciferecaNinjo ,

Thanks. I noticed that but I would have to wait till I have a decent connection and then I wouldn’t understand the German anyway.

Scarlet vindicated from being forced to implement snooping filters to hit customers who use p2p to share copyrighted works ( gdprhub.eu )

The CJEU held that national courts may not order Internet Service Providers ('ISPs') to preventively, indefinitely and at their own expense install a filtering and blocking system applicable to all electronic communication between customers. This type of system breaches ISPs’ right to conduct business...

Germany’s anti-discrimination office (FADA) is so swamped with files that they are blocking all new cases ( www.antidiskriminierungsstelle.de )

“Due to the large number of enquiries and limited staff resources, we are currently unfortunately unable to process new written submissions. We are working on solutions. Therefore, we are unfortunately unable to process new written submissions at the moment. We regret this very much and ask for your understanding. ”

🇫🇷(France) Federal gov website locked in Cloudflare and also unreachable via archive.org ( web.archive.org )

The French federal website www.economie.gouv.fr should be public access. But they allow US tech giant Cloudflare to restrict access and then snoop on people who manage to get access. ...

ciferecaNinjo OP ,

thanks but it does not solve my problem. My internet is capped so i can’t do streaming.

ciferecaNinjo ,

OLPC (one-laptop-per-child) is a FOSS e-ink laptop (but small enough to function as an e-reader). Though I think they are no longer made and they were always hard to get.

ciferecaNinjo , (edited )

I’m not sure what you want a source for. You mean a vendor who will sell one? XO-4 Touch was apparently the last model. I just had a look at laptop.org and the site looks useless now. It used to be full of wikis with copious details about the hardware and software of the OLPC.

There are (or were) a variety of NGOs who worked on getting OLPCs into impoverished schools. One of them was https://unleashkids.org/. They are not in the business of selling them but ~15 yrs ago they were kind enough to sell some. The idea was that teachers and developers would need them to help support the OLPC project. I suggest touching base with them and see what they say, since they seem to still be around.

The XO-4 Touch came with “Sugar”, a foss OS just for kids. It was easy to make it boot into Gnome instead (underpinned by RedHat). And someone made an Android OS that could be flashed onto an SD card and booted in the OLPC. I should mention that the OLPC was never 100% FOSS. The usual shit-show of blobs for some of the hardware drivers. I mainly just used it as an e-reader on Gnome.

I’ve always been baffled that these FOSS e-ink laptops did not make it onto the general marketplace, while at the same time there were no commercial makers of anything like it. There was a “Pixel QI” dual-mode screen that could be bought bare and installed in Thinkpads and other machines, but for some reason that never took off either.

ciferecaNinjo , (edited )

From the PDF, one of the EU’s concerns is:

However, much of the value generated by open-source projects is exploited outside the EU, often benefiting tech giants.

When tech giants use FOSS, it’s a shame they can extract wealth without compensating the contributors. OTOH, if the baddies become dependent on FOSS, that’s favorable anyway. It means they might contribute code to the projects which otherwise would not happen.

The PDF does not cover public schools specifically. They need to be told that public schools are the most important place to deploy FOSS. Consider a university in Denmark pushes commercial software on students (sadly, they provide that software on a campus webpage improperly titled “Free Software” b/c it is gratis for students). The damage is of course that Denmark educates people to be dependent or clung-onto closed-source software like MATLAB, not GNU Octave. That negative training means the young generations are being conditioned to favor non-free software.

FSFE does not know about this?

The FSFE has a newsletter for “public money → public code”. They have not mentioned this /have your say/ page. Strange.

Downvotes?

I get why the OP was downvoted here.. this is a bit off-topic for BuyFromEU. But European Tech Sovereignty has 4 silent down votes. WTF? I’ve seen that before. ETS seems to be heavily read by opponents of ETS.

ciferecaNinjo ,

Here is a way to use open data law to take individual action:

https://lemmy.sdf.org/post/48016373

ciferecaNinjo OP , (edited )

Email delivery has never been designed to be reliable.

Indeed, not inherently. Though it /can/ be reliable only if sent a certain way. Sender emails a “digital notary” service and puts the ultimate destination in a separate header. The digital notary forwards the msg, timestamps it, signs it, and includes the sig of the previously sent transmission (to create a verfiable chain). A service called the UK Timestamper demonstrates this. It proves posting but not reception. There is a RFC (documented open standard) for read receipts whereby the recipient sends a signal when they open the msg. Of course it’s voluntary and relies on a willing recipient.

In the end, Belgium simply declares that a simple email serves as a registered letter.

Your situation, of course, is one you have created entirely by your choice and typically email delivery is very reliable - but the technological underpinnings absolutely are not.

My situation proves how catastrophic it is to presume reliability. I conciously traded off reliability in exchange for privacy (of a certain kind), control, and malice detection. Though I have no way of knowing how much reliability I am trading. Blackholing is borne out of incompetent design. Delivery cannot be guaranteed but a delivery failure should be signaled to one party or the other.

€10 for a registered mail is not extortionate. It is a reasonable price for the service, which also serves the necessary low barrier that prevents abuse.

It’s absurdly extortionate. It first requires prior class. Prior class within Belgium is more than sending prior from Germany to anywhere in the EU. Then they are charging an additional ~€7 just to collect a sig. The postal workers are quick to insert a slip into the mailbox that forces the recipient to go to the post office and wait in line. It’s very streamlined and convenient (for them, not us). In some cases they don’t even bother buzz the doorbell.. just drop off the slip with the rest of the mail.

If DIGI comes around to drill into your façade to add another cable, you then have a legal obligation to send DIGI a registered letter every time you renovate your facade in the area of the cables. If you have 8 cables attached to your house, that’s a cost of ~€80.

There is an easy opportunity here for a company like Deliveroo to expand and undercut them.

ciferecaNinjo OP , (edited )

Nonsense. This is like comparing the price of rice in China to potatoes in Ireland. Process serving is a legal process with liability. Process serving does not allow for dropping a slip in a box and waiting for the served to come to your office and stand in line at the convenience of the process server. Process servers must be resilient to track down a human, who may rarely be home. There is no lax rule of just waiting 2 weeks for the served person to appear and sending it back.

(edit) A registered letter can also be refused. Which amounts to a simple tickbox and returned letter.

BTW, this is not to say process serving is not also overpriced. But process serving /should/ cost much more than registered letter.

(edit 2) Process serving can turn into a man hunt. I’ve seen process servers dig around like private investigators to find out where someone hangs out, in order to track them down and get papers in front of them. And when it all fails, a process server has to publish the circumstance in a local newspaper to then be able to argue in court that the served had an opportunity to become informed that way.

ciferecaNinjo OP ,

Yeah I’m not surprised there are subject matter-specific ombuds offices. I was hoping for one at the top of the tree for when those fail. I just found this page where the EU lists them for each member state:

https://www.ombudsman.europa.eu/en/european-network-of-ombudsmen/members/all-members

And for Germany, this office is given:

https://epetitionen.bundestag.de/epet/peteinreichen.html

The complexity in the description on the EU’s page indeed gives cause for concern.

ciferecaNinjo OP ,

The petitions are again something else.

I was indeed alienated by the mention of petitions because in English it usually means asking lawmakers to change policy. I wondered if it meant something different in Germany. And if it means the same thing, it’s apparently wrong for the EU to list that agency as an ombudsman.

I am normally happy to use courts. But I don’t live in Germany, don’t speak German, and financing a lawyer would be a non-starter. I suppose I could try to find a German NGO who would support my case.

How to find EU explanetory memorandums ( europe.pub )

Linked post gives detail. The absolute shit-show of fake PDFs comes amid the eur-lex site’s restricted access that blocks Tor users, which means we can only reach laws that are mirrored on archive.org. And only if the builtin search tool can be avoided. ...

ciferecaNinjo OP ,

You’re referring to “basic” accounts. Those are crippled accounts (e.g., no cash services in Belgium). There is no way to get the cash into a basic account. Basic accounts are also not gratis. You generally pay more for less, as retail accounts are sometimes gratis. But retail accounts are harder to get.

There is also the scenario that some people are unbanked /by choice/. They should be able to retain their human rights like right to autonomy as they pursue their human right to a fair trial.

Why do hotels not have full shower curtain/enclosure?

I've stayed in hotels throughout Europe and have found that shower curtains are almost non-existent, and glass shower enclosures don't cover the entire shower. Why is that? Is this one of those weird things like the gap in the bathroom doors on North American bathrooms? How do you shower without getting water everywhere?

ciferecaNinjo ,

Not sure that’s a sufficient explanation. So I will elaborate for the OP:

Some designs are called a “wet floor”, which means the whole bathroom floor is sloped toward a drain even outside the shower and beyond the showerpan. It’s seems to be a design in cheaper establishments, like cheap hostels. It works but it can be annoying when the floor is still wet when later entering the bathroom in socks or something.

Some designs are more luxury, and have a really big shower pan. A big area is sloped within the shower as an elegant “curbless” design which is great for elderly and handicapped people who might struggle to step over a shower curb. The shower pan is big enough that if the drain is slow or clogged, a fair amount of water can build up without overspilling into the rest of the bathroom.