cross-posted from: https://infosec.pub/post/54313984

There are opportunies to penalize businesses that try to impose a tor-hostile website on consumers. For example, a bank has a legal obligation to furnish account statements and tax docs. Some tor-hostile banks outright refuse to give a statement on paper. Other tor-hostile banks charge an extra fee for receiving paper statements.

In these cases, I have had good results with reporting them to a regulator or ombudsman. The bank is generally forced to send you a gratis paper statement. Not by a judge.. this is not court-tested. But for them it’s not worth a court battle so they can be pursuaded to give paper docs at their own expense. Side-perk: it helps feed the postal service.

It’s also a fight against opacity. They push a vague 403 error, or worse: just quietly drop packets. It’s an assault on our dignity. I have used this against them by simply playing dumb: “Other websites work for me… your website just gives me this screen: ”. Their abusive and disrespectful vagueness rightfully backfires. They always say “we have had no other complaints”, but then what? Not my problem.

It’s not just banks. There are countless gov institutions arbitrarily blocking Tor. In every such case where they have an obligation to furnish info, Tor users should be forcing them to produce paper as if we are offline. This also helps the people who are actually offline. They need our support and we need theirs.

TOKYO -- A group of 13 Tokyo residents who do not own smartphones or Japan's My Number identification cards sued the Tokyo Metropolitan Government in the Tokyo District Court on Oct. 28, seeking approximately 110,000 yen (about $700) in damages per plaintiff over an app-based points program. The dispute centers on a cost-of-living assistance initiative under which the Tokyo Metropolitan Government issues points worth 11,000 yen (about $70) to residents aged 15 and older who download the official "Tokyo App" and verify their identity using a My Number card. According to the complaint, residents who do not possess smartphones or My Number cards are unable to receive the points, which the plaintiffs argue violates the principle of equal access to public services guaranteed under Japan's Local Autonomy Act and related laws. The metropolitan government provides guidance on how to apply for the points, including in-person assistance. It also plans to allow proxy applications for people who have difficulty operating smartphones, such as those with disabilities. However, the plaintiffs said, "The government should allow applications at service counters or provide cash benefits so that all Tokyo residents are covered." The metropolitan government said, "We would like to review the contents of the complaint once it arrives and respond appropriately." Speaking at a press conference after the filing, plaintiffs' representative Kiyoshi Enomoto, 77, said, "It is wrong that living support does not reach people without smartphones and My Numbers cards." One of the plaintiffs, a 77-year-old unemployed woman living in the Tama region of western Tokyo, said she has not obtained a My Number card because she "does not want to be managed by the national government." She has also been unable to receive the points. Her smartphone use is limited to calls, email and the like, and she did not know the Tokyo App existed. At a meeting of the plaintiffs she attended after Enomoto invited her, she learned that a My Number card was needed to use the app and receive the points. "When everyone else is receiving the benefit, why am I the only one left out?" she said. For the woman, whose monthly pension income is 65,000 yen (approx. $410), the 11,000-yen benefit is a significant amount. "Owning a smartphone or a My Number card is optional. The program should accommodate residents who do not have them," she said.

cross-posted from: https://infosec.pub/post/53934640

Two serious problems with web apps such as Lemmy clients:

① The JavaScript conflict of interest —

The app is dynamically pushed from the server for every execution. The code is controlled by the webmaster, and therefore the app is designed to primarily serve the webserver. The interests of the user running it have a lower priority. The app was designed in a way that is oblivious to the fact that users have multiple accounts on different nodes, for example. The app conceals moderator and admin actions from the user, because that is what’s in the webmaster’s interest.

② Unrealistic expectation of a working uplink —

As we can see from !isitdown@infosec.pub, the Lemmy nodes that are the least repressive and most respectful of our digital rights are up and down. They run on a shoestring budget. Client apps that are dependent on the server having 99.99% availability are themselves fragile and flimsy; helpless and useless when the server goes offline.

In the 1990s, we had newsreaders that would fetch usenet posts and store them locally, similar to email. We could read and take actions offline, then sync up whenever there was a connection. A notable motivator was the fact that many users had dial-up modems that shared a voice landline. There are still people with no Internet, who get their connection occasionally from a public library. They have been left behind.

Little consideration is given to how it’s a shitty quality client that becomes helpless and dysfunctional when the uplink is severed even for a few minutes. As I write this post, the infosec.pub server could fall offline spontaneously. Then what? The submission form stays open. It will let me type as long as I want without telling me that my manual human labor is being wasted. I will get a nasty surprise when clicking the submission button -- a nonsense error pop-up “Type Error”.

A good quality app does not need the server to be online. It would launch a good editor like emacs or vi. When composing a post or comment is finished, it would store the message locally no matter what because it’s wise to have your own copy and so there is no data loss when the server glitches out. The app would have a separate activity to post the message if (and only if) there is an uplink and the Lemmy server is reachable.

Users should not be slaves to the servers’ uptime schedules

③ Anubis / proof of work enshitification —

This is really the same point as ② but in the context of anti-bot tech. Some Lemmy nodes are highly bot-hostile. They let you take just one or two actions, then scrap your session. Usually while typing. Then you must reload the site in another tab (so you don’t lose what you typed), in order to satisfy the proof of work demand over and over throughout your session. A good client would only have to go through that once, then it would submit all your actions quickly.

I get this often enough that it really needs some exposure. Not even the EU is competent enough to at least print URLs and/or QR codes on paper documents that they send as postal mail. Large orgs are the biggest culprits of this variety of incompetence.

The linked page shows that Belgium cares just enough about preventing the forced digital transformation down our throats to pressure banks to offer an analog means of access. But Belgium is okay with banks fleecing offline consumers to the tune of €62.50 €88.10¹/yr above and beyond the normal service costs, plus a bit more to pay for printed bank statements.

One disgusting side-effect is that there is no pressure on banks to avoid enshitification of their digital services. Normally when a digital mechanism is enshitified, we can use the analog mechanism instead. And rightly so if that costs the bank more -- they should factor that into their enshitification plans. But since analog customers must pay substantially more to offset the costs, there is no incentive not to enshitify the service.

Perhaps the greatest injustice is that analog consumers get no refund for the cost of the digital infrastructure that they do not use. It’s comparable to being forced to pay for an MS Windows license on a PC that will only run linux anyway.

So the shitty choices are:

• get enshitified access at a normal price; or
• accept less convenient low-tech but non-enshitified service and pay €88.10¹+/yr more

It seems as if banks are in fact encouraged to enshitify their digital access because driving people to go analog is just an extra bonus revenue.

The original thread is here.

¹ Update: Originally posted €62.50, but that was in 2022. There is an index increasing the cost by €6.40 every year.

Crossposted from https://fedia.io/m/humanrights@crazypeople.online/t/4433054

Belgium plans to do away with paper cheques. Apparently no one is fighting this. The eagerness to do away with paper cheques can only be attributed to addiction to convenience without regard to the consequences.

Once paper cheques are gone, there will be no way to survive without banks. Even if you walk away from your job and go on social aid, the social aid has no way to reach you without a bank account. Paper cheques are the sole means having personal autonomy from banks.

Some pensioners still receive their pension payment as a paper cheque, which they can cash without having a bank account. Belgium is taking this away.

I don’t have a link to the full complaint but I heard it’s around 80 pages.

There is a fucking annoying “s” in that name. If the name were lemmy.pleasetopfaxing.social, it would be sensible because there would be nothing wrong with asking for improvement over faxing.

But until something comes along that actually improves on faxing, this whole instance is inherently a stain of ignorance.

(edit) we need a counter domain: lemmy.plzstoplickingboots.social for fax users who refuse to feed gmail, MS, and other surveillance advertisers who have converted email into a technofeudal network of oppressive fiefdoms.

from https://systemli.social/@anneroth/117228668085415636

“20,000 mail accounts. 20,000 blogs. 5,000 mailing lists. 1,500 websites.

In Europe.

Run by volunteers of @cavallette, perfectly legal, and decidedly antifascist, feminist, queer.

Destroyed and shut down by Trump's administration, extra legally.”

If you ever need to give a reason for refusing to use email, add this to the list of possible reasons.

If you download your tax forms from the shitty tor-hostile website of the stock broker, they give you worksheets and extra reports for dividends and FX to use for tax preparation.

Offline customers get nothing, automatically. To get a 1099 in the mail, you must call every year and request it specifically. If you ask for the worksheets and other docs, they refuse. Apparently they only legally have to give you a 1099, so offline people get the bare legal minimum.

I suppose the question is: is it legal that we must call every year to requst the 1099? Shouldn’t a 1099 be sent automatically?

cross-posted from: https://libretechni.ca/post/2163451

The fax service demands an email address for confirmation purposes. I give a disposable address using a service that lets me choose the username portion. So I choose an address like dysfunctionaladdress@disposablebox.xyz. Then I use that disposable acct to confirm the fax.

The fax service discloses the email address to the recipient. I would expect my email address wording would make it loud and clear to the recipient that it is unfit for sending email. But motherfuckers use it anyway! I suppose they are too lazy to send snail mail to the address I provided. So then their response to dysfunctionaladdress@disposablebox.xyz is publicly shared with the world. And not me, generally, because I don’t return to the disposable box.

It’s such a shit-show. How can I control for this? I need a fax service that does not force exposure of email address to recipients. I don’t mind paying to send a fax so long as it’s a pyg (pay-as-you-go) service. I can only find fax services that require a plan with monthly payments.

Any suggestions? The whole point in using a fax is to prevent the recipient from reaching me over email.

cross-posted from: https://slrpnk.net/post/40597815

WTF Bob Dylan? A friend who is offline is blocked from buying tickets to Bob Dylan in Antwerp, Belgium. The concert is effectively exclusively for online people. Most likely cash payers must fuck off.

It’s exactly the kind of shit Bob Dylan should be bitching about in his songs. WTF, Bob Dylan?

Digital is always better in some ways, but of course not in every aspect. There are some cases where the analog mechanism still has merit because it does /something/ that digital cannot -- yet it is being phased out anyway because of this naive attitude that digital is wholly superior.

VOIP vs POTS

• POTS phone lines are powered. When you have a power outtage, that is when it is most important to have POTS. Yet as a society, we are not smart enough to figure this out. We will all be helpless sitting ducks in power outages, unable to communicate.

• POTS phone lines serve modem and fax transmissions reliably. VOIP is fragile shit. Sure, modems and faxes /sometimes/ /somewhat/ work over VOIP, if conditions are just right.. certain codecs must be in play as well as netneutrality (low latency) and QoS. VOIP is ultimately an enshitification.

• Perhaps we could argue that voice quality is better over POTS than VOIP.

FM radio vs. DAB

• Advertising is a reality and channel surfing a shit-show on DAB. Every receiver takes a different amount of time to decode the AAC or whatever is in the digital signal. This means when you hear an ad or some garbage, you must wait 5 or so seconds for every single channel change. In principle, a receiver could incorporate 2 tuners to make this quicker. But I don’t think any do this.

• A bad signal results in silence, which means a lot of people who use clock radios will wake up later than planned. Could also be fixed in receivers, but still all those without such a (currently nonexistent) feature will show up to work late.

fax vs. email

Although it’s theoretically possible to have an email service that does not expose your email address to the recipient, such a thing does not currently exist. Email forces us to share our email address w/recipients who we do not trust.

Several years ago BBB’s website became Tor-hostile. This forced privacy-minded people to rely on analog methods for complaint submissions.

Fax was our refuge, until just recently. BBB agencies have been dropping their fax numbers. So we are increasingly forced to resort to snail mail, which is slow and increasingly costly particularly for anyone abroad.

What’s left? I won’t touch Yelp. Fuck those incompetent anti-tor motherfuckers. Yelp cannot be taken seriously with the massive sewer of false reports they publish without regard to credibility.

Even if an employer doesn't require the new ID, remember the UK government said that all IDs will soon have to be verified digitally. That suggests the employer will send the ID image or data to a government server which will respond with whether the person is allowed to work. So all IDs will essentially be turned into digital IDs and the government can make individuals unemployable if they do something the government doesn't like.

The concept of "sabotage" here appears to include simply refusing to use AI.

After decades of living in a linux-FOSS world, I noticed these games at a 2nd-hand street market:

• Starcraft (few different versions/themes)
• Age of Empires (few different versions/themes)
• Civilization

They were a dollar each, so why not. I grabbed. Got home, installed win7 on a machine someone dumped on a curb, but could not install any of the games b/c I live offline. Fucking hell.

When I last played Starcraft well over a decade ago, I lived online and probably thought nothing of it. But it seems clear this shitty requirement is an anti-sharing policy because these games do not inherently need Internet. You can play against the machine or on a LAN. It’s not just the elitist exclusive WAN requirement that pisses me off.. there’s a privacy issue too. And what happens when I enter the product key of a used CD? They probably have a tolerance on how many times that can happen, perhaps dependant on whether the hardware changes. Fuck the nannying.

Also consider that Blizzard and Microsoft servers are not going to run forever. They can pull the plug at any time and then no one can install their game. Should be illegal to make installation needlessly dependant on a service. Forced obsolescence.

Some of these games also require a CD to be inserted, which means you must have a fucking noisey CD drive attached at all times. Back when these games were made it was no big deal because all laptops and desktops had CD drives. Not anymore. I’m mostly annoyed by having to insert the disc, wait for it to spin, then I have to hear the loud spin as I play which also wastes power. So I installed Alcohol 120 to image the Warcraft 3 disc (which I still had from yrs past). It has 3 different versions of the crack for the particular shitty scheme used on WC3. None of the images work.

Obviously if I want to play these games I will need warez versions. How good are those dodgy distros these days? I can imagine some are just the original content but you still enter a product key (which I have anyway). But if they still need a WAN that won’t cut it for me. Do the warez versions overcome all these issues? Are they still in circulation?

Alternatively, I should ask, have there been any versions of these games repackaged and re-released for the retro gamers which don’t impose the shitty protections and server dependencies?

If not, I must say unlicensed cracked versions would be the most ethical ones:

• designed obsolescence thwarted
• privacy kept
• more inclusive (offline ppl and those without CD drives)
• better UX (no fiddling with discs and hearing the spin)

Krefel and Electro Depot have TVs on display, but they have no ability to demo TV tuning ability. Electro Depot even sells indoor and outdoor antennas. Sales people said they actually are /not allowed/ to show anything on the screens other than the OEM demo video. WTF? Sales people are actually micromanaged by this constraint that prevents them doing their job.

I’m like: “sell me this TV.. show me that it has a working tuner.”
Sales: “can’t do that”

Electro Depot should be embarassed because they sell antennas too. Yet they cannot show that they actually work in their showroom.

Then I went to Vandan Borre. Same situation, but even more embarrassing: their demo radios are not powered. So you cannot even see whether a DAB radio decodes the album art and shows it. You cannot even hear how it sounds.

Vanden Borre staff: go see the FNAC showroom.

LOL. Are you fucking kidding me?

Also Vanden Borre staff: “broadcast TV does not exist in Belgium. It was eliminated. You have to subscribe to a provider (Telenet, Proximus, etc).”

This seems to explain my problem. But then why is Electro Depot selling antennas? The antennas cover both TV and radio ranges, so it could be for radio, but it’s obviously a bit off that they have no sign posting or disclosure to say TV tuning is impossible in Belgium.

This wiki can be a good place to get instructions on building and using low tech systems that will make you more self-sufficient and less dependent on centralized systems that could fail or deny you service.

(crossposted from !humanrights) The US can be credited with starting the Orwellian idea of forcing all “visa-free” visitors to file an ETA¹. It’s not just a money grab for us$ 20. It’s a snooping mechanism to link people to social media accounts, and then perform a background check on travelers to look for any speech that’s critical of the US. Someone from Lebanon got a scholarship for Harvard. Then he was blocked at the border by border control. The cause: a friend linked to him on social media said something critical of the US. Even though the aspiring student did not himself criticise the US, being associated with someone who did was sufficient to block his entry. (He eventually made it back after some hassle and back and forth on flights). Then the UK decided decided to impose travel authorisations as well, thus doing a money grab of £16. Initially it seemed to just be a retaliation against the US. But recently the UK decided to target Europeans. So now the EU has decided to follow suit. In 2027, the loss of visa-free travel hits Europe. Even those who merely have a connecting flight in Europe will have to pay €20 and pass the background check. You need not even leave the airport to be subjected to this. Of course it’s bullshit to continue calling this “visa-free travel”. They hope a technical semantical spin will fool people into accepting unfunded background checks coupled with surcharges as still “visa-free”. ¹ Electronic Travel Authorisation Human rights Do we still have privacy and free speech, as guaranteed in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Article 12 and 19, which states (respectively):

“No one shall be subjected to arbitrary interference with his privacy, family, home or correspondence, nor to attacks upon his honour and reputation. Everyone has the right to the protection of the law against such interference or attacks.” …

“Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers.”

? Yes, those rights are protected -- but only if you stay in your homeland. Only if you do not expect to simultaneously exercise your Article 13 rights, which states:

“1. Everyone has the right to freedom of movement and residence within the borders of each State. 2. Everyone has the right to leave any country, including his own, and to return to his country.”

What other UDHR-signatory countries have joined this ETA shit-show? Is this also a loss of a right to be analog? Cross-posting to !right_to_unplug because:

the “E” in ETA is electronic, thus implying that there is no offline mechanism for unplugged people and unbanked people (correct me if I am wrong) those who declare not having a social media account are distrusted, presumed nefarious, and potentially denied entry (e.g. entering the US with a new/clean phone has triggered suspicion and ultimately entry refusals)

PDF24 used to be a way to send a fax to European fax numbers. It was a gratis service. It’s still advertised as such but it’s broken now.

The US is covered by faxzero.com, but for faxing outside the US they charge an absurd $2.09 per fax (more than postage in a lot of places). They are also Paypal-only. Fuck paypal.

Any suggestions?

From over at https://sopuli.xyz/post/31041713

!unix_surrealism@lemmy.sdf.org

As someone who pulled the plug on residential Internet, I have naturally clung onto broadcast radio. It occurs to me that tuning into broadcast content gives a rare media source where you are not tracked. There is no digital footprint on your listening.

Tor (along with a couple even more obscure technologies like i2p) are the only viable cloud-sourced ways to escape consumption tracking. Tor is indispensible but it’s not as traceless as tuning broadcast signals. And Tor users are plagued with access discrimination.

Yet broadcast radio must be struggling. They likely lost copious listeners to the Internet. Seems like there is a missed opportunity to promote their stations and privacy along with it. Radio stations should inform people that tracking online is not just to advertise but it’s also used for personalised political manipulation.

Duckduckgo’s privacy theatre demonstrates that privacy promotion works. But DDG relies on trust and it’s rife with scandals. OTA¹ broadcasts do not rely on trust. Promoting privacy would have a long-term self-promotion effect. That is, as listeners come to develop their value of privacy more, their listenership becomes stronger.

Some (most?) stations likely also stream online. But they could still play a different jingle on the broadcast service, no?

¹ OTA: over the air

cross-posted from: https://beehaw.org/post/23925690

the problem

The web is littered with enshitified Tor-hostile resources generally deployed with the naive idea that Tor users are criminals. The Tor community can barely function. The web is broken in countless ways and it’s not always obvious whether Tor users are targeted by the marginalisation because firewalls never state why they are blocking. Sometimes they block based on geolocation or user-agent strings, and sometimes a resource is simply down for everyone. Tor users are left assuming their exit node IP is the culprit.

Also a problem: some people actually have no Internet at home. For some it is temporary and for others it is a permanent way of living a mostly analog life.

the solution (for many cases)

Use the clearnet at a cafe with open access. Of course it’s unreasonable to haul a desktop computer into a cafe or to carry a laptop at all times, so it would be useful to send fetch orders from your PC to your phone. When the phone connects to public Wi-Fi, you tap to execute the queue of fetch orders. Then when back at your PC you download the fulfilled orders from the phone.

This could even be useful within the home, since the block or malfunction can be a number of things. A smartphone could try to execute fetch orders over Orbot, which may or may not fail. And if it fails, it remains an unfulfilled order to retry in a cafe.

Aria2 would be perfect for the underlying heavy lifting because it supports many protocols (HTTP, FTP, bittorrent), and it exists on both the PC and Android. The Android code is apparently just a backend. It’s broken or useless on its own and needs a controller such as the app proposed here.

insufficient alternatives

The usual workarounds have compromises. A VPN may or may not work but it’s still a bit far from anonimity. The VPN provider is essentially like another ISP who can snoop on you.

Download managers already exist on smartphones, but there is no seamless PC interoperability. And (AFAIK) they are just for simple files, not for webpages or Youtube videos.

There is Newpipe but it has no PC interoperability. You must search YT using the Newpipe UI.

Every bank, shitty giant social media platform and countless websites demand a phone number. It’s foolish to give them a voice number (esp. mobile) unless you actually welcome calls from them, their partners, whoever they sell your data to, and whoever exfiltrates it. The best move with all these untrustworthy data-sharing-happy businesses is to give them a pure fax number which is answered only by a fax machine.

In the rare case where reaching you is so important that they would use the number to send you a fax, then it’s probably a message you want to receive anyway (and best to have it in writing). I kept a gratis fax number for decades and never got fax spam.

One extra perk to this is if customer files have fax-only numbers, it could give some pause before a company decides to ditch their fax line.

My unsolved problem:

J2.com no longer gives free fax numbers. I can only find providers who charge a flat subscription of ~$15—25/month (which includes an allowance on outbound faxes). I don’t really need a fax sending svc. I wouldn’t mind paying <$10/year just to have a number that emails faxes to me, even if there is some small measured rate when it actually gets used. A pay-per-fax service like that is hard to find. Any tips would be appreciated.