Administrators and judges viligantly look for cause to close a case to get it off their desk. One of the very common tactics is to cherry pick a single claim or complaint out of a list of them, attack that one claim, and then close the whole file without addressing the other issues. It’s rampant. I’ve seen this strategy for avoiding work at all levels of governance, from first line admins all the way up to judges.

Another similar tactic:

You claim X and the case handler closes it saying the infringing agency did not do Y. IOW, they attack a strawman, which is a well known fallacy.

Or so I thought. As I was trying to work out what the first case might be called (attacking the weakest point of many and using that as a basis to close a case), I found this:

http://www.changingminds.org/disciplines/argument/fallacies/strawman.htm

WTF.. not my understanding. I understand a strawman to be that of attacking a completely fabricated argument that is falsely presented as the opponent’s. After more thought, it does seem like a strawman variety in the sense that a collection of arguments is being wholly misrepresented as just one of the parts. But ok, strawman is a just a layman’s term anyway.

Lawyers must have some more appropriate verbiage/nomenclature for the situation of treating all claims as the weakest claim. Any insight?

Bit of irony here. I was on https://www.edf-feph.org/ trying to use the menus. You hover over a menu item at the top and the menu for that category pops up. But when you move off the category bar to actually select a link in the popup menu, it disappears faster than you can move the mouse.

After some irritating fiddling with this whack-a-mole game, I figured out that the mouse pointer must follow an invisible vertical line that bisects the popup. Any deviation from that path and everything is unclickable.

Just thought the irony should be showcased because this website intends to advocate for people with disabilities.

Bit of irony here. I was on https://www.edf-feph.org/ trying to use the menus. You hover over a menu item at the top and the menu for that category pops up. But when you move off the category bar to actually select a link in the popup menu, it disappears faster than you can move the mouse.

After some irritating fiddling with this whack-a-mole game, I figured out that the mouse pointer must follow an invisible vertical line that bisects the popup. Any deviation from that path and everything is unclickable.

Just thought the irony should be showcased because this website intends to advocate for people with disabilities.

It has always been disturbing that to search for EU gov/public resources, we face licking the boots of Microsoft, Google, Cloudflare, etc.

Since 2024, a half-baked shitshow has been under development. It’s unclear when this shitshow will hit the fan. It starts as a join venture between #Ecosia and #Qwant. Yikes indeed. This façade ensures that the EU is very unlikely to give us a properly public resource that is independent from the US now.

Qwant and Ecosia have always been Microsoft syndicates who work in contradiction to their claimed values and purpose (privacy and environment, respectively). They have added Google syndication, because why not? Considering their patrons weren’t wise enough to condemn Microsoft.

Qwant and Ecosia both lack respect for privacy and treat the Tor community with hostility. Amazon-hosted Ecosia fails to grasp how working with Amazon and Microsoft contradicts the environmental cause.

Ecosia used to use Cloudflare (the top web enshitifier in the world, US-based). That may have changed, but they picked up Google.

The contradictions:

Microsoft (US): partners with the worst oil companies, uses AI to help them find oil digging sites. Notorious privacy abuser.

Amazon (US) and Google (US) both: partner with oil companies and uses AI to help them find oil, just like MS. Both are notorious privacy abusers.

Will the EU endorse this garbage? Likely. The general public is mostly naive about the false positioning of Qwant and Ecosia.

Looks like a bit of bullshit in Wikipedia:

“L'entreprise a pour objectif le développement d'un index de moteur de moteur de recherche souverain permettant à Qwant et Ecosia de devenir indépendant de Microsoft Bing et Google[1],[2].”

cross-posted from: https://crazypeople.online/post/23992245

The CoE whose job it is to protect peoples’ human rights under the Social Charter of Council of Europa has hired an exclusive US tech giant to confine their website to Cloudflare’s walled-garden.

This means several demographics of people are excluded from being informed about their rights. Anyone not in Cloudflare’s preferred demographics of people (such as the Tor community) are blocked from access. Even the world’s ubiquitous public library (archive.org) is blocked from making copies of the website for public consumption.

Exceptionally, this link works where at one moment archive.org was able to visit CoE: https://web.archive.org/web/20260219202536/https://www.coe.int/en/web/conventions/full-list?module=treaty-detail&treatynum=035

But it’s enshitified to the point of just rendering a blank page, at least in my case, after refusing some shitty popup about cookies or some shit. That page is likely the page that attempts to publish the “European Social Charter (ETS №35)”.

Update: Ireland shares

I could only dig up a 1961 version of the European Social Charter from the CoE’s minefield of broken pages within archive.org. If anyone wants a recent version (1996), Ireland is sharing it openly:

http://hria.equalit.ie/pdf/en/10/europe/European%20social%20charter_English.pdf

cross-posted from: https://crazypeople.online/post/23992245

The CoE whose job it is to protect peoples’ human rights under the Social Charter of Council of Europa has hired an exclusive US tech giant to confine their website to Cloudflare’s walled-garden.

This means several demographics of people are excluded from being informed about their rights. Anyone not in Cloudflare’s preferred demographics of people (such as the Tor community) are blocked from access. Even the world’s ubiquitous public library (archive.org) is blocked from making copies of the website for public consumption.

Exceptionally, this link works where at one moment archive.org was able to visit CoE: https://web.archive.org/web/20260219202536/https://www.coe.int/en/web/conventions/full-list?module=treaty-detail&treatynum=035

But it’s enshitified to the point of just rendering a blank page, at least in my case, after refusing some shitty popup about cookies or some shit. That page is likely the page that attempts to publish the “European Social Charter (ETS №35)”.

Update: Ireland shares

I could only dig up a 1961 version of the European Social Charter from the CoE’s minefield of broken pages within archive.org. If anyone wants a recent version (1996), Ireland is sharing it openly:

http://hria.equalit.ie/pdf/en/10/europe/European%20social%20charter_English.pdf

cross-posted from: https://crazypeople.online/post/23992245

The CoE whose job it is to protect peoples’ human rights under the Social Charter of Council of Europa has hired an exclusive US tech giant to confine their website to Cloudflare’s walled-garden.

This means several demographics of people are excluded from being informed about their rights. Anyone not in Cloudflare’s preferred demographics of people (such as the Tor community) are blocked from access. Even the world’s ubiquitous public library (archive.org) is blocked from making copies of the website for public consumption.

Exceptionally, this link works where at one moment archive.org was able to visit CoE: https://web.archive.org/web/20260219202536/https://www.coe.int/en/web/conventions/full-list?module=treaty-detail&treatynum=035

But it’s enshitified to the point of just rendering a blank page, at least in my case, after refusing some popup about cookies or some garbage. That page is likely the page that attempts to publish the “European Social Charter (ETS №35)”.

Update: Ireland shares

I could only dig up a 1961 version of the European Social Charter from the CoE’s minefield of broken pages within archive.org. If anyone wants a recent version (1996), Ireland is sharing it openly:

http://hria.equalit.ie/pdf/en/10/europe/European%20social%20charter_English.pdf

The linked article covers some ways to tap a touch screen without a finger. That’s probably the most comprehensive document on the topic yet those options all seem impractical for my needs.

So here’s my problem:

Travel websites are increasingly enshitified and consumer-hostile (and often Tor-hostile). They are also protectionist with the data as they use anti-bot tech (which really amounts to anti-human tech b/c bots serve humans). Kiosks are a refuge of a sort (almost, kind of).

Some kiosks have useful information without the anti-bot shenanigans, but they are also still designed to be labor intensive. Kiosks that sell train or bus tickets force users to supply a specific date of travel and specific destination. For me, the date of travel depends on the price of the ticket, but the UI does not allow users to know the price until after they fill out a form. Sometimes I don’t even know the destination because the city I visit depends on the price as I look for a cheap trip somewhere.

What we need is a tool that will enter all combinations of queries for ranges of travel dates and times and for sets of origin-destination pairs. Is there hardware that can handle this job? If the kiosk is a touch screen, my knee-jerk instinct was for a laser do the job of a finger. But after further checks, I don’t think a laser can have an electro magnetic effect or whatever is needed.

Apart from convenience of being able to harvest a dataset and do my own queries, I also imagine some handicapped people (e.g. without the use of arms) have the same problem and would benefit from the same solution. The dataset could then be openly published to everyone, not just the exclusive demographic who is able to reach the website of the carrier and tolerate the enshitification.

In attempt to make !humanrights@crazypeople.online more known, I tried to add it to lemmy-federate.com and was blocked. It basically said there is no account for that instance. I don’t fully grasp how that site works but I think an admin might want to register crazypeople.online on lemmy-federate.com so that the communities are better publicized in the various fedi datasets.