freedomPusher

joined 3 years ago
MODERATOR OF
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sorted by: new top controversial old
(mbin) mechanism needed for users to block whole instances, not just magazines in c/bugs@sopuli.xyz
[–] freedomPusher@sopuli.xyz 1 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) (4 children)

I don’t see an issue with large instances. I value having a bunch of different options, and we do have a bunch of different options.

Having 7 disproportionately giant instances all centralised under the same oppressive corporation is not “a bunch of different options”. More than half the threadiverse is controlled by a single corporate power-abusing gatekeeper. The greed of the people farming ensures you have fewer options because it makes ghost towns out of instances that could have been great. Many good themed instances never got traction and pulled the plug. For example:

  • community.xmpp.net ← was a whole instance dedicated to XMPP discussion
  • links.esq.social ← was a whole instance dedicated to discussions about law
  • nano.garden ← was a whole instance dedicated to discussions about nano cryptocurrency
  • lemmy.globe.pub ← was a whole instance dedicated to discussions about travel
  • wayfarershaven.eu ← not sure if they were themed on travel or general purpose

These are great options that we lost because of foolish over-crowding on general purpose giants. If you put a McDonalds on every single street corner, that’s a lot of real estate that cannot be used by more creative restaraunts. Imagine if McDonalds was general, and had a huge menu (Chinese food, Mexican, Italian, French, Indian, etc). And there are no Indian or French restaurants in town but the McDs on every street corner has Indian and French cuisine. Are you happy with your options?

Alternatively, what about Amazon?Do you think the amazon.com store gives you lots of options? I boycott Amazon because the way I see it Amazon destroys options by driving businesses out of business and thwarting the emergence of competitors. Some items are not even carried in local shops anymore. The shop staff will say “we don’t carry that anymore, check Amazon”. I can no longer find somewhat obscure goods locally.

General purpose nodes is not great from an organizational standpoint. We have ~15+ “privacy” communities because every general purpose node created one. Are there 15 significantly different rule sets that makes it sensible to have that much division?

Running an instance yourself requires a fair amount of work

Your choices are:
① self host
② use a decentralised host in the free world
③ use a centralised host in Cloudflare’s exclusive walled garden

Nixing ① does not imply ③.

If anything, on the subject of control, I like the model of social.coop over on mastodon where users can vote on direction and volunteer.

That is meaningless with Cloudflare nodes, because no one can vote to make Cloudflare inclusive. Suppose 100% of voters say CGNAT users should get access. There is no way to force Cloudflare to change their policy.

What a CASHLESS society REALLY means in c/privacy@links.hackliberty.org
[–] freedomPusher@sopuli.xyz 1 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) (2 children)

Why do you think 210 is statistically insignificant? Is there a reason why the central limit theorem does not apply in this case?

If you’re more fixated on the samples coming from Mastodon, can you explain why you might expect cashless proponents to be even fewer in populations outside of Mastodon? IMO, a Mastodon-using population is more likely to embrace individual rights and condemn imbalances of power that favor giant corporations like banks. I believe if the same survey is carried out outside of Mastodon, the 26% will be even bigger, if different.

What a CASHLESS society REALLY means in c/privacy@links.hackliberty.org
[–] freedomPusher@sopuli.xyz 1 points 5 months ago

Visa, Mastercard, Amex, and Paypal famously colluded to block donations to wikileaks. That control was exercised at an international level.

What a CASHLESS society REALLY means in c/privacy@links.hackliberty.org
[–] freedomPusher@sopuli.xyz 1 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago)

Denmark, Netherlands, Belgium, France, and Spain. Banks in those places will freeze your account easily, like a doc on file expiring.

US banks are more trustworthy with your money than European banks, but US banks are less trustworthy with your data. Exceptionally, there is a pitfall where you can lose your money: dormancy. I recall a woman in California who had a safe deposit box that she did not access for a number of years. The bank declared it “dormant”, drilled it, and gave the property to the state’s unclaimed assets, who then auctioned off her stuff.

What a CASHLESS society REALLY means in c/privacy@links.hackliberty.org
[–] freedomPusher@sopuli.xyz 1 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago)

Are there women who can stash thousands away to prepare to flee, but cannot somehow have a SECRET bank account?

^ fixed your question - an important word was missing. And now to answer it, in some countries it is impossible to open a bank account without your spouse knowing about it. If you are married, your spouse must cosign.

What a CASHLESS society REALLY means in c/privacy@links.hackliberty.org
What a CASHLESS society REALLY means in c/privacy@links.hackliberty.org
[–] freedomPusher@sopuli.xyz 1 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) (1 children)

If you deposit money at a bank, it is covered by federal deposit protection insurance (up to some limit that varies by country but generally in the range of $100k-$250k), so you are guaranteed to be able to get it back no matter what.

Time matters. Those insurance claims take months to process and they only cover bankruptcy (which is the least likely reason a bank denies you access to funds).

The copy of my ID card that the bank had on file expired. I renewed it on time but did not think to update the bank with a new copy. The bank’s way of communicating to me that their records of my card were out of date was to freeze my account. Boom, just like that, I have no money all of the sudden. I don’t recall the time of day it happened, but if it had happened on a Friday night I would not have access to my money until I appear in person at the bank Monday morning

assuming it’s even possible to get off work. At that time, I kept an empty fridge.. only eating on the go. Had I not had cash on hand, getting food could have been a struggle.

Even if the bank fails. Banks are subject to extremely strict regulation to protect consumers and make sure you have access to your funds

LOL! Those so-called strictly enforced banking regs are not for us. Banks are scared shitless of AML/KYC shit hitting the fan. Banks laugh at the consumer protection variety of regs with reckless disregard. It’s a joke. I’ve reported banks in breach of consumer rights. The bank’s regulators do fuck all. One reculator responded to me and said “why don’t you switch banks”. I shit you not. That came from a regulator who’s job it was to enforce a law that the bank was breaking.

PayPal is not a bank, it’s an EMI (e-money institution), but those are heavily regulated to protect consumers. Your funds are not covered by deposit protection insurance, but as an EMI they have to keep your money in a safeguarding account at a real bank and they can’t use it themselves, so in case PayPal fails you will still get your money back.

No, that’s not how it is. PayPal has a reputation for copious extremely out of whack “anti-fraud” false positives. I was burnt by it. Paypal blocked my acct and kept my money. There are many similar complaints.

https://git.disroot.org/cyberMonk/liberethos_paradigm/src/branch/master/rap_sheets/paypal.md

What a CASHLESS society REALLY means in c/privacy@links.hackliberty.org
[–] freedomPusher@sopuli.xyz 0 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago)

In case of domestic violence, you go to the police.

What a bizarre disconnect from reality. You have waaay too much confidence in police power (and assumptions about actionable evidence), capability, and motivation, and no idea about battered women living in fear of the next attack, which a restraining order does not necessarily stop, if you can get one, especially if the next attack is a bullet. A cop who checks on a battery victim will be told “that big bruise on my cheek is from falling down the stairs”.

Domestic violence victims need options. You’re advocating for taking options away. That’s fucked up.

What a CASHLESS society REALLY means in c/privacy@links.hackliberty.org
[–] freedomPusher@sopuli.xyz 1 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago)

Spain, Belgium, and France have banned cash transactions above a threshhold (e.g. €3k) at least 5 years ago already. Cannot pay tax using cash in Belgium. Think about that for a minute.

New recent law in Belgium: all businesses (incl. self-employed workers and even landlords renting out property) MUST accept electronic payment. Try doing that without using a bank.

What a CASHLESS society REALLY means in c/privacy@links.hackliberty.org
What a CASHLESS society REALLY means in c/privacy@links.hackliberty.org
[–] freedomPusher@sopuli.xyz 1 points 5 months ago

Prepaid cards are neither gratis nor anonymous in some countries.

(mbin) mechanism needed for users to block whole instances, not just magazines in c/bugs@sopuli.xyz
[–] freedomPusher@sopuli.xyz 1 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) (7 children)

Let me clarify that Lemmy very much has a global feed of all instances

Oh, indeed. I just noticed Lemmy’s choice between subscribed, local, all, and moderated views. Subscribed is the default and that’s what I’ve always used. If I choose the global view, it’s indeed the same problem as mbin (users can only block on a per-community basis). ~~Mbin offers only the global view on the non-community-specific timeline.~~ (edit: actually it’s like Lemmy; there are different views to choose from, but global is the default)

This is the fediverse,

Exactly. It’s a platform designed for decentralisation. It attracts users who advocate more balance of power and more control by users.

why would those non commercial instances be a problem for you?

The fediverse was constructed with a broader vision. It’s not simply a narrow effort to avoid commercialization. Facebook Threads proves that if the fedi’s sole goal were to avoid commercialization, it would have been a failure.

Because they have too many users? Is decentralization for you not having any real traffic?

Perversely disportionate ~~traffic~~ concentration of control is obviously what the federated design was motivated to avoid. Otherwise, Twitter’s premium service is for you. Many inbound refugees came from Reddit, which suffers from the sharpest abuses of power I’ve ever experienced. They aren’t running from ads. They are fleeing from disempowerment. Of course the ones who have fled into another centralised node have naïvely just swapped one power imbalance for another, pawning themselves to a different master, while making themselves part of the same social problem.

1
the wisdom of a Danish & German apartment buildings replacing coin-fed laundry machines with the cloud (yikes!) (sopuli.xyz)
submitted 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) by freedomPusher@sopuli.xyz to c/asshole_crappy_design
1 comments fedilink
 

cross-posted from: https://sopuli.xyz/post/13133455

It used to be that you could insert a coin into a washing machine and it would simply work. Now some Danish and German apartment owners have decided it’s a good idea to remove the cash payment option. So you have to visit a website and top-up your laundry account before using the laundry room.

Is this wise?

Points of failure with traditional coin-fed systems:

  1. your coin gets stuck
  2. you don’t have the right denomination of coins

Points of failure with this KYC cashless gung-ho digital transformation system:

  1. your internet service goes down
  2. the internet service of the laundry room goes down
  3. the website is incompatible with your browser
  4. the website forces 3rd party JavaScript that’s either broken or you don’t trust it
  5. you cannot (or will not) solve CAPTCHA
  6. the website rejects your IP address because it is a shared IP
  7. the payment processor rejects your IP address because it is a shared IP
  8. the bank rejects your IP address because it is a shared IP
  9. the payment processor is Paypal and you do not want to share sensitive financial data with 600 corporations
  10. the accepted payment forms do not match your payment cards
  11. the accepted payment form matches, but your card is still rejected anyway for one of many undisclosed reasons:
    • your card is on the same network but foreign cards are refused
    • the payment processor does not like your IP address
    • the copy of your ID doc on file with the bank expired, and the bank’s way of telling you is to freeze your card
    • it’s one of these new online-only bank cards with no CVV code printed on the card so to get your CVV code you must install their app from Google’s Playstore (this expands into 20+ more points of failure)
  12. your bank account is literally below the top-up minimum because you only have cash and your cashless bank does not accept cash deposits; so you cannot do laundry until you get a paycheck or arrange for an electronic transfer from a foreign bank at the cost of an extortionate exchange rate
  13. you cannot open a bank account because Danish banks refuse to serve people who do not yet have their CPR number (a process that takes at least 1 month).
  14. you are unbanked because of one of 24 reasons that Bruce Schneier does not know about
  15. the internet works when you start the wash load, but fails sometime during the program so you cannot use the dryers; in which case you suddenly have to run out and buy hanging mechanisms as your wet clothes sit.

In my case, I was hit with point of failure number 11. Payment processors never tell you why your payment is refused. They either give a uselessly vague error, or the web UI just refuses to move forward with no error, or the error is an intentional lie. Because e.g. if your payment is refused you are presumed to be a criminal unworthy of being informed.

Danish apartment management’s response to complaints: We are not obligated to serve you. Read the terms of your lease. There is a coin-operated laundromat 1km away.

Question: are we all being forced into this shitty cashless situation in order to ease the hunt for criminals?

12
the wisdom of a Danish & German apartment buildings replacing coin-fed laundry machines with the cloud (yikes!) (sopuli.xyz)
submitted 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) by freedomPusher@sopuli.xyz to c/right_to_unplug@sopuli.xyz
2 comments fedilink
 

It used to be that you could insert a coin into a washing machine and it would simply work. Now some Danish and German apartment owners have decided it’s a good idea to remove the cash payment option. So you have to visit a website and top-up your laundry account before using the laundry room.

Is this wise?

Points of failure with traditional coin-fed systems:

  1. your coin gets stuck
  2. you don’t have the right denomination of coins

Points of failure with this KYC cashless gung-ho digital transformation system:

  1. your internet service goes down
  2. the internet service of the laundry room goes down
  3. the website is incompatible with your browser
  4. the website forces 3rd party JavaScript that’s either broken or you don’t trust it
  5. you cannot (or will not) solve CAPTCHA
  6. the website rejects your IP address because it is a shared IP
  7. the payment processor rejects your IP address because it is a shared IP
  8. the bank rejects your IP address because it is a shared IP
  9. the payment processor is Paypal and you do not want to share sensitive financial data with 600 corporations
  10. the accepted payment forms do not match your payment cards
  11. the accepted payment form matches, but your card is still rejected anyway for one of many undisclosed reasons:
    • your card is on the same network but foreign cards are refused
    • the payment processor does not like your IP address
    • the copy of your ID doc on file with the bank expired, and the bank’s way of telling you is to freeze your card
    • it’s one of these new online-only bank cards with no CVV code printed on the card so to get your CVV code you must install their app from Google’s Playstore (this expands into 20+ more points of failure)
  12. your bank account is literally below the top-up minimum because you only have cash and your cashless bank does not accept cash deposits; so you cannot do laundry until you get a paycheck or arrange for an electronic transfer from a foreign bank at the cost of an extortionate exchange rate
  13. you cannot open a bank account because Danish banks refuse to serve people who do not yet have their CPR number (a process that takes at least 1 month).
  14. you are unbanked because of one of 24 reasons that Bruce Schneier does not know about
  15. the internet works when you start the wash load, but fails sometime during the program so you cannot use the dryers; in which case you suddenly have to run out and buy hanging mechanisms as your wet clothes sit.
  16. (edit) the app of your bank and/or the laundry service demands a newer phone OS than you have, and your phone maker quit offering updates.

In my case, I was hit with point of failure number 11. Payment processors never tell you why your payment is refused. They either give a uselessly vague error, or the web UI just refuses to move forward with no error, or the error is an intentional lie. Because e.g. if your payment is refused you are presumed to be a criminal unworthy of being informed.

Danish apartment management’s response to complaints: We are not obligated to serve you. Read the terms of your lease. There is a coin-operated laundromat 1km away.

Question: are we all being forced into this shitty cashless situation in order to ease the hunt for criminals?

4
(EU,Brazil,Cali) If a company or gov ignores your analog correspondence (fax or snail mail), use the GDPR to force them to say why (sopuli.xyz)
submitted 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) by freedomPusher@sopuli.xyz to c/right_to_unplug@sopuli.xyz
0 comments fedilink
 

I’ve noticed that if you try to contact corp or gov offices the old fashioned way, they simply ignore you. They want to force you to use email or solve a CAPTCHA. The fix I have in mind is a tweak on this idea:

https://sopuli.xyz/post/12919557

but the first contact you make with an office need not even be GDPR¹ related. If you contact a gov or corp for any purpose and they ignore it, your next request can and should include an access request for records on how they handled your initial correspondence.

¹ GDPR isn’t the only game in town. Brazil and California supposedly have some privacy law similar to the GDPR which I assume includes a right of access. Hence why they were also mentioned in the title.

#fuckEmail

1
(lemmy) links.esq.social vanished (links.esq.social)
 

It was a Lemmy service that centered on law. Now it gives a 404.

The threadiverse is starving for small decentralized nodes with a theme focus. There are far too many general purpose nodes. It’s a shame the law node is gone. There is nothing to replace it.

3
Plz, for me, send more faxes. Do it for privacy. (sopuli.xyz)
submitted 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) by freedomPusher@sopuli.xyz to c/right_to_unplug@sopuli.xyz
7 comments fedilink
 

I just had to send a msg to a gov office.

Email has been generally broken¹ the past couple decades. I prefer fax. It’s more reliable and I choose what I want to disclose to the recipient. Even in cases where part of the fax transmission routes over email, it’s still more reliable than pure email because those fax→email gateways are managed by recipients to ensure all-or-nothing (all faxes are delivered or none of them). Fax is immune to shenanigans like “mail server X accepts mail from Y but not Z”.

When I tried to send the fax, the fax machine did not answer. So I voice called the office. They said “we unplugged our fax machine”. WTF! So I said please plug it back in because I’m trying to send a fax. So a bit later I tried again and it worked.

Folks, we are losing fax because most of the population does not grasp the privacy compromise with email, and the compromise of netneutrality and reliability. If I am the only person in the world who keeps fax in use, fax will die fast because it’s easy to marginalise 1 person.

Footnote 1: Email is shit--Even if the gov office mail server were to accept my msg, I face the problem of not wanting an email reply and not trusting them not to abuse whatever address I reveal to them. I don’t want to be forced to put Google and Microsoft in the loop on my conversations, to go through their hoops, solve their dkim CAPTCHA, and ultimately I don’t want to be forced to feed profitable data to those surveillance advertisers who have partnered with the oil industry. Google and SpamHaus broke email and the population accepted it. So email can fuck right off.

-1
Why the ~~fedi~~ threadiverse has a disproportionate imbalance of centralized mega-nodes: → software deficiency (sopuli.xyz)
submitted 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) by freedomPusher@sopuli.xyz to c/fediverse@discuss.online
3 comments fedilink
 

The psychology of this problem is that users are too lazy to maintain multiple accounts when all they have is Lemmy’s stock web client. So they choose one of the big nodes: lemmy.world, sh.itjust.works, lemm.ee, lemmy.ca, etc.

These Cloudflare-centralized nodes are able to greedily exploit the #networkEffect because due to lack of multi-account software. If there were some well-made 3rd party client apps for Lemmy that would be designed for multiple accounts, then more users would be willing to create accounts in more decentralized parts of the fedi.

Mastodon somewhat proves this because the client-side tooling is in place to make it convenient to have 6 or Mastodon accounts. And Mastodon nodes are better balanced.

1
If a data controller ignores your GDPR request, you can make an access request for how they handled your request. (sopuli.xyz)
 

Just a pro tip if you want to build a case against a data controller: when they ignore your GDPR request, don’t simply send them a reminder. Instead, send them a new Article 15 request demanding records on how your previous request was handled. This way when you build a case against them, you can tack on yet another Article 15 violation when they also ignore your request for information about how they handled your request.

Not that it matters.. the GDPR isn’t really being enforced. When the DPA ignores your complaint, you’re basically stuffed anyway.

1
Python script to detect whether a website is in Cloudflare’s walled garden (gist.githubusercontent.com)
submitted 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) by freedomPusher@sopuli.xyz to c/netneutrality@sopuli.xyz
0 comments fedilink
 

Might be useful for some.. but note that it uses CF to get the CIDRs.

6
(Ungoogled Chromium) downloads PDF twice if you view it first (sopuli.xyz)
submitted 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) by freedomPusher@sopuli.xyz to c/bugs@sopuli.xyz
0 comments fedilink
 

I cannot believe how stupid Chromium is considering it’s the king of browsers from a US tech giant. It’s another bug that should be embarrassing for Google.

If you visit a PDF, it fetches the PDF and launches pdf.js as expected. If you use the download button within pdf.js, you would expect it to simply copy the already fetched PDF from the cache to the download folder. But no.. the stupid thing goes out on the WAN and redownloads the whole document from the beginning.

I always suspected this, but it became obvious when I recently fetched a 20mb PDF from a slow server. It struggled for a while to get the whole thing just for viewing. Then after clicking to download within pdf.js, it was crawling again from 1% progress.

What a stupid waste of bandwidth, energy and time.

1
Did Mastodon quit shielding people blocked by Cloudflare? Why did the error code change to 404? (sopuli.xyz)
submitted 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago) by freedomPusher@sopuli.xyz to c/netneutrality@sopuli.xyz
0 comments fedilink
 

Mastodon used to show people the mirrored version of federated content which shielded users from Cloudflare’s discriminatory blockade. But something apparently changed. If I try to visit this mirror of a mastodonapp.uk status on layer8.space:

https://layer8.space/@tmmj@mastodonapp.uk/112387605497275701

it redirects to:

https://mastodonapp.uk/@tmmj/112387605489133663

which is apparently a shitty Cloudflare node that deceives us into thinking the account does not exist. If you are logged into the mirrored node, then it does not redirect and you can see the content. Of course, only if you have an account on the mirror which means anonymous viewing is no longer possible.

If I want to share that layer8.space link with other people, it would be an injustice to share the mastodonapp.uk link because it’s in a walled garden that excludes people. It would be like sharing a Facebook link with an audience that includes people outside of Facebook. So naturally I would share the layer8.space version because layer8.space allows all people to visit. But now this is impossible. Cloudflare’s stranglehold of control has been increased by this Mastodon move.

Worse, Cloudflare has started pushing error code 404, not 403. So CF is misrepresenting the error to suggest that the page does not exist. Cloudflare has carte blanche in fucking up the web. A 404 error is supposed to inform users that an object is not found, not that they are not authorised to access it.

The attached image is what Cloudflare-excluded people see when trying to visit this image:

https://files.mastodonapp.uk/media_attachments/files/112/387/580/865/787/635/original/f4442c8789ad52c2.png

6
(Lemmy) Images from Cloudflared instances are blocked to everyone who CF blocks -- centralisation prevails in the fedi (sopuli.xyz)
submitted 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago) by freedomPusher@sopuli.xyz to c/bugs@sopuli.xyz
0 comments fedilink
 

cross-posted from: https://sopuli.xyz/post/12858874

When an image is posted by someone on a Cloudflared instance like the following:

  • #LemmyWorld
  • #ShitJustworks
  • #LemmyCA
  • #LemmyEE
  • #LemmyZip
  • #LemmyOne

the image is inaccessible to all demographics of people who Cloudflare discriminates against because images are not mirrored to federated nodes.

We expect corporations to not give a shit about marginising people who are not profitable enough to care about. But when naive asshole users outnumber progressive egalitarians, it highlights a problem with the fedi, which still lacks the tooling needed to keep oppression at bay.

The six listed nodes above effectively host the AOL users of our time. Lacking the sophistication needed to detect and grasp situations of eroded digital rights with a degree of blindness and lack of concern for centralised corporate control.

Suggestions needed for Lemmy nodes that are defederated from the above listed six.

2
Images from Cloudflared Lemmy instances are blocked to everyone who CF blocks -- no mirroring despite federation (sopuli.xyz)
submitted 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago) by freedomPusher@sopuli.xyz to c/netneutrality@sopuli.xyz
0 comments fedilink
 

When an image is posted by someone on a Cloudflared instance like the following:

  • #LemmyWorld
  • #ShitJustworks
  • #LemmyCA
  • #LemmyEE
  • #LemmyZip
  • #LemmyOne

the image is inaccessible to all demographics of people who Cloudflare discriminates against because images are not mirrored to federated nodes.

We expect corporations to not give a shit about marginising people who are not profitable enough to care about. But when naive asshole users outnumber progressive egalitarians, it highlights a problem with the fedi, which still lacks the tooling needed to keep oppression at bay.

The six listed nodes above effectively host the AOL users of our time. Lacking the sophistication needed to detect and grasp situations of eroded digital rights with a degree of blindness and lack of concern for centralised corporate control.

Suggestions needed for Lemmy nodes that are defederated from the above listed six.

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