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.

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[–] 1 point 1 month ago (4 children)

Use Deepl, please. If I can access the website without friction, you can also.

5000 characters at a time. I'd advise starting by the bulleted index, locate the relevant part to your doubts and read through it.

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  • [–] [S] 2 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (3 children)

    DeepL was good in its infancy years ago. The they turned it to unusable shit with broken Javascript that broke it for years. They eventually fixed the js, but then they put it on Cloudflare, so a US tech giant who sees ⅓ of all web traffic in the world sees everyones sensitive DeepL translations. DeepL eventually whitelisted Tor, but they maintained the deceiving lie that their service is “secure”. It could not be less secure by showing all the translations to a US corporation proven untrustworthy by various scandals. You should be condemning #DeepL.

    That said, the doc you reference is not sensitive. So deepl is viable. However, that’s another shit show. The national bank of portugal should be embarrassed that they use Cloudflare for their own website. Thus what should be a public resource is access restricted (as they do not whitelist Tor). At the same time, they share any sensitive data traversing their site with Cloudflare. That should be investigated for GDPR violations. Anyway, archive.org should be the refuge in this case. So I went there. And wtf… Cloudflare also blocked archive.org from accessing the national bank, FFS. As if the world’s most important public library is a malicious entity. The embarrassment goes on. So then I dug into older archives of that page. Found one where archive.org was able to cache the page successfully. I clicked to download the PDF. But the link lies. It’s actually javascript embedded in HTML masquerading as a PDF. So I could not actually get the PDF. It was all a waste of time.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 month ago (2 children)

    The site for BdP is a publicly accessible one. There is nothing there that is classified or sensible. Your concerns with safety pass as out of proportion in this case.

    You want me to upload the file here, so you can access it?

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  • [–] [S] 1 point 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (1 child)

    I was able to reach the site on the 3rd attempt. Deepl rejects the 71-page PDF with:

    “This file exceeds your plan’s character limit. Try a shorter file or remove it.”

    It has 122726 characters, which is about 26 times the deepl quota. If you have an English version I would be interested. But I don’t think you can post PDFs in a thread.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 month ago

    If you're really interest in reading the document, you'll find a way. You made clear you are technically capable.

    I'd advise on focusing your attention on part one of the document, from page seven to page thirteen.

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