Audi CEO Gernot Döllner’s campaign appearance with President Donald Trump has provoked outrage among workers at the Volkswagen Group. And rightly so. Döllner’s appearance is neither a slip-up nor “pragmatism”, but an expression of the fact that the German bourgeoisie is preparing to collaborate with fascism—in the US as in Germany. Meanwhile, the IG Metall union is criticising Döllner for championing American rather than German jobs.

Suppose you boycott #Unilever because they fight cash as a member of Bill Gates’ “Better than Cash Alliance”. You could use the linked app on a flipper zero to change the price tags of Unilever goods to “Boycott Unilever”, for example.

cross-posted from: https://infosec.pub/post/51680197

Append “_nomap” to the end of your SSIDs to instruct Google not to use your wi-fi access point for their mapping services.

To do the same for Apple, add “_optout” to the end of your SSIDs¹.

To boycott both, the rumor is that Google’s “_nomap” must be last, but Apple’s “_optout” flag must be in the penultimate position if and only if Google’s token is at the end. So you might have an SSID like “boycottCloudflare_optout_nomap” to boycott the baddies, for example. But note that “boycottCloudflare” is merely symbolic, to raise awareness of the web’s most harmful enshitifier.

¹ sorry to say I have no reference to cite for the Apple rules. It’s just a rumor.

update

The Apple opt-out procedure has apparently changed to align with Google. Someone refers to this page for Apple.

update 2

Mapquest is suddenly gaining popularity.

Most (if not all) color printer makers are printing unique tracking dots on every printed page. But some of them are transparent about it and disclose it to consumers.¹

In any case, in the mid-1980s Xerox and Canon developed the anti-consumer feature decades before it became known to the public in 2004. So certainly we can blame them for surreptitiously assaulting our privacy.

It’s the surreptitious element of this that is the most infuriating. Transparently disclosing the feature to consumers is the socially responsible approach because at least informed consumers know they are signing up for:

• reduction of print quality
• higher cost of consumables (more yellow consumption)
• loss of privacy
• inability to print a black document when yellow ink/toner is empty

Xerox and Canon should be boycotted not just for the anti-consumer feature but for concealing it.

¹ citation needed.. I don’t recall where I read that some printer makers are transparent about it. I would like to know which ones are transparent just from a standpoint of knowing where the integrity is.

Update- other threads on this topic:

• (law) https://lemmy.sdf.org/post/45605675
• (asshole design) https://lemmy.sdf.org/post/45653037
• (FOSS request for circumvention) https://lemmy.sdf.org/post/45652622

This resource combines information from a variety of sources (check the Sources tab). It's intent is to be comprehensive, yet user friendly. It's not perfect but its the best I can do and IMO is better than the alternatives.

Each listing shows the reason for inclusion (donating to Trump, assisting ICE, advertised on Fox News, etc).

Check https://www.chicodemocracy.com/boycotts.html for additional boycott resources and alternatives.

Europe’s block on boycotting banks

No law directly prohibits boycotting banks AFAIK, but it’s effectively illegal to boycott banks because:

• It is illegal to be paid wages in cash in some (all?) countries.
• Some EU countries governments insist on tax payments by bank transfer. This is for all kinds of tax (income tax, property tax, and other forms of tax).
• EU level: all cash transactions above €10k are illegal in the whole of Europe. Most of western Europe reduces that limit to €1—3k.

Belgium’s ban on boycotting energy suppliers

Offgrid energy is illegal.

Denmark: you cannot boycott email, as of this year

Denmark eliminates the postal service this year. This essentially means you cannot boycott email because the snail mail option is generally gone. Exceptionally, you can perhaps send letters using UPS or FedEx, but that’s not really affordable if you are boycotting email. Not sure if hand-delivery is an option. Consider Germany, where postal boxes are not always public access and couriers are given a key to the lobby. If that happens in Denmark, then hand-delivery cannot be relied on.

US ban on boycotting Israel

You can boycott the US in the US if you want, but you cannot boycott Israel if your job is from the US government. This tyranny was showcased in Texas when a Palestinian school contractor who taught kids how to speak Arabic had to renew her contract. The new contract required her to agree to not boycott Israel. She could not in good conscious sign such a bizarrely oppressive contract, so she was let go.

cross-posted from: https://slrpnk.net/post/26435334

A Transcend Storejet external HDD has this software:

• RecoveRx_v2.6.zip
• RecoveRx_Win_4.3_setup.exe
• SecureEraseTool_Win_v1.10_setup.exe
• TranscendElite_Win_v4.28_setup.exe

I am offline, so I went to a public library to fetch the above files. Early in the installation process the piece of shit tries to connect to the Internet and craps out when it discovers there is no Internet connection. WTF?

It’s a nasty trend. I’ve seen other drivers and various hardware support tools pull this shit in recent years.

Is it legal? Seems questionable considering:

• They use deception. The packaging for the harddrive probably does not have an “Internet required” disclosure, nor would any reasonable buyer expect Internet to be required to use a hard drive. Then they use deception again when you download the tools. I am led to believe I am downloading a “SecureEraseTool” and a “TranscendElite” software package, but in fact these are just proprietary download managers pretending to be tools.
• (GDPR regions) By forcing you to needlessly access the cloud with their proprietary tool, they collect your IP address and whatever else that download manager collects to share with them. This does not seem compliant with data minimization.

Tech discussion unrelated to the forum topic

Why are those tools needed (you might wonder). The drive is in a shitty state. It’s in a usb3 enclosure and was usb-attached to 3 different machines:

• linux laptop with usb3 expresscard, attached both with and without supplemental power. The drive spins, LED on the enclosure blinks rapidly, it gets a device handle and /var/log/kern.log shows it was detected okay. Running fdisk on the unmounted drive just hangs for ~10—15′ before timing out. Reattaching and trying to mount it also causes a long ~10—15′ hang before it gives up.
• win7 one two different machines: spins forever, LED blinking rapidly. Windows never gives up and it never gets recognized or mounted.

So I wanted to first try the official tools to see how they react to the drive. Since they turned out to be a piece of shit, I will probably try next:

• Remove the drive from the enclosure and attaching directly to a real SATA bus (not one of those shitty SATA-USB adapters and not a SATA-PATA drive bay adapter, even though those would be easier. I will put it on a proper SATA bus because the SMART diag stuff is often crippled when going over a bus adapter of some kind.
• Run the DOS Ultimate Boot CD, which (IIRC) is still the king of disk diagnostic tools.
• See what smartctl does.
• Try zero-filling with dd

⚠ Avoid Transcend products for being anti-consumer

Anyway, the main point of this thread is to expose the shit Transcend pulls by shipping download managers that masquerade as tools. It’s a shitty practice because:

• The tools are forever dependent on the supplier keeping a host running. Not only to snoop on you but so to do a sneaky form of designed obsolescence. When your drive model is old enough to need the tools, that is when they will pull the plug. You only think you have the software, until it’s game over. You lose autonomy and control over your own product without knowing it.
• Discriminates against offline people.
• Discriminates against tech illiterates, who rely on the easy tools and cannot handle tools like dd, smartctl, and UBCD.
• Assaults right to repair. No right to repair laws are good enough to think of this kind of dark pattern.
• Obsolescence by design. If you cannot install the tools you need to keep the device running, they are effectively bullying you into buying your way out of the problem.

cross-posted from: https://slrpnk.net/post/24727109

The right to be analog is a critical enabler to the power to boycott.

Suppose you boycott Microsoft and Google. If you need to reach a gov office who uses MS or Google for email, then you are writing a snail mail letter. Denmark has eliminated the national postal service. The loss of an important analog option forces Danes to use the digital mechanism. No one in Denmark can say: “hold on, I am boycotting Microsoft, so I cannot be obligated to correspond with your office”.

No country gives its people either rights. That is, there is no country that gives you a right to boycott or the right be analog. In principle, we could loosely claim to derive those rights through the human rights to autonomy, dignity, and self-determination. But that won’t hold up in court, as human rights are generally disregarded in court. Abstract human rights like that are really a long-shot as well. Even if a court were to concede to human rights, you’ve already lost if you have to go to court because in Europe you cannot generally recover all damages even if the judge takes your side.

I believe a window of opportunity is passing us by. If we do not establish a right to be analog hard and fast, it will be too late once mechanisms supporting our analog refuge are gone.

Europe is quietly removing the cash option. Europeans are boiling frogs. They don’t see that they have already lost the option to be free from banks. Forced banking is already in force. This enables banks to gradually force you onto their enshitified digital platforms.

What I find most disturbing is how a vast majority are blind to this.