Article 77 is just making this explicit: You complain where you are living (even cross country!), where you work or where the suspected violation took place. It doesn’t say anything more.

Indeed I am exploiting that option. I have lost confidence in my country of residence. The EDPB reports show that most DPAs are understaffed and up to their necks in work. Germany was an exception. Germany has far more resources for GDPR complaints than most of Europe.

Because of this there is no standard form to fill out: it depends on the agency itself where you choose to enter your complaint.

So Germany does not have a nationwide form? Each of the 17 agencies have their own? I guess I have to work out which region I am dealing with first.

But before that, I need to know if the federal agency is who I am working with. The data controller referred me to the Federal agency, but that seems off… from what I have read, the Federal agency is just a single point of contact for the EDPB. I see nothing about the fed handling GDPR complaints.

(edit) I found the relevent region. I think I’ll distrust the controller’s referral to the federal office and use the regional. Which has its own form.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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 [email protected] has 4 silent down votes. WTF? I’ve seen that before. ETS seems to be heavily read by opponents of ETS.

Thanks for the link. The translation was a bit rough because they apparently used quite colorful wording. My take away was that it was to save money – what a terrible way to save money.

I recently found that some libraries are keeping their media. They are just being cut off from the Médiathéque organisation.

Thanks for the link. The article is a bit vague (at least the machine translation of it). I get the impression they are saying a hypermarket type of business is unsustainable. If that’s accurate, then I guess we can expect to see Carrefour fall as well.

oh, that’s a bummer. Thanks for the info. You saved me some effort in tracking down the brewery.

That link gives me:

Our system thinks you might be a robot!

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

The cheque circulaire isn’t offered since 2010, that’s explained at the bottom of the current fees.

Circular cheques are still being used. I just received one. The articles you link say that the circular cheques will remain when the postal orders are eliminated.

Your links were quite helpful. This looks like the most relevant bit for answering my question (from this article):

(en translation)

…According to the office of the Minister of Public Action and Modernization, Vanessa Matz was able, via the circular cheque, to guarantee a concrete and free cash alternative for the most vulnerable. In particular, this measure concerns those who do not have access to banking services or who are isolated. Neither circular cheques nor prepaid cards will be billed to beneficiaries, says the firm on Tuesday.

(fr original)

…Selon le cabinet de la ministre l’Action et de la Modernisation publiques, Vanessa Matz a pu, via le chèque circulaire, garantir une alternative cash concrète et gratuite pour les plus vulnérables. Cette mesure concerne en particulier ceux qui n’ont pas accès aux services bancaires ou qui sont isolés. Ni les chèques circulaires ni les cartes prépayées ne seront facturés aux bénéficiaires, précise le cabinet mardi.

That seems to explain what I was misunderstanding. I thought if the fee for cheque cashing is going away, perhaps so are the cheques. That would be very disturbing but that’s not the case. Apparently the 4€ fee is going away.🎉 I believe that fee was always illegal. Glad something was done about it.

Remaining question: how does a postal order differ from a circular cheque? What do we lose when postal orders go away? AFAICT, they function the same. This article seems to say circular cheques require movement – going to a bank or post office to cash it, which is a problem for some handicaps. But I don’t get why that would not be the case with a postal order as well. How does a postal order get converted to cash? Is it perhaps about showing ID? Is it a case where a family member could cash a postal order for their grandparent, but not a cheque?

The place to complain – only if you are willing to solve CAPTCHAs:

https://survey.alchemer.eu/s3/90510992/en

I don’t do CAPTCHAs.