freedomPusher

cross-posted from: https://sopuli.xyz/post/12558862

So here’s a disturbing development. Suppose you pay cash to settle a debt or to pay for something in advance, where you are not walking out of the store with a product. You obviously want a receipt on the spot proving that you handed cash over. This option is ending.

It’s fair enough that France wants to put a stop to people receiving paper receipts they don’t want, which then litter the street. But it’s not just an environmental move; there is a #forcedDigitalTransformation / #warOnCash element to this. From the article:

In Belgium: since 2014, merchants can choose to provide a paper or digital receipt to their customers, if they¹ request it.

What if I don’t agree to share an email address with a creditor? What if the creditor uses Google or Microsoft for email service, and I boycott those companies? Boycotting means not sharing any data with them (because the data is profitable). IIUC, the Belgian creditor can say “accept our Microsoft-emailed receipt or fuck off.” If you don’t carry a smartphone that is subscribed to a data plan, and trust a smartphone with email transactions, then you cannot see that you’ve received the email before you leave after paying cash. Even if you do have a data plan and are trusting enough to use a smartphone for email, and you trust all parties handling the email, there is always a chance the sender’s mail server is graylisted, which means the email could take a day to reach you. Not to mention countless opportunities for the email to fail or get lost.

It’s such a fucked up idea to let merchants choose. If it’s a point of sale, then no problem… I can simply walk if they refuse a paper receipt (though even that’s dicey because I’ve seen merchants refuse instant returns after they’ve put your money in the cash register).

But what about creditors? If you owe a debt and the transaction fails because they won’t give you a paper receipt and you won’t agree to info sharing with a surveillance advertiser, then you can be treated as a delinquent debtor.

Google, Facebook, Amazon, and Microsoft must be celebrating these e-receipts because they have been working quite hard to track people’s offline commerce.

It’s obviously an encroachment of the data minimisation principle under the GDPR. More data is being collected than necessary.

¹ This is really shitty wording. Who is /they/? If it’s the customer, that’s fine. But in that case, why did the sentence start with “merchants can choose…”? Surely it can only mean merchants have the choice if they make a request to regulators.

cross-posted from: https://sopuli.xyz/post/12558862

So here’s a disturbing development. Suppose you pay cash to settle a debt or to pay for something in advance, where you are not walking out of the store with a product. You obviously want a receipt on the spot proving that you handed cash over. This option is ending.

It’s fair enough that France wants to put a stop to people receiving paper receipts they don’t want, which then litter the street. But it’s not just an environmental move; there is a #forcedDigitalTransformation / #warOnCash element to this. From the article:

In Belgium: since 2014, merchants can choose to provide a paper or digital receipt to their customers, if they¹ request it.

What if I don’t agree to share an email address with a creditor? What if the creditor uses Google or Microsoft for email service, and I boycott those companies? Boycotting means not sharing any data with them (because the data is profitable). IIUC, the Belgian creditor can say “accept our Microsoft-emailed receipt or fuck off.” If you don’t carry a smartphone that is subscribed to a data plan, and trust a smartphone with email transactions, then you cannot see that you’ve received the email before you leave after paying cash. Even if you do have a data plan and are trusting enough to use a smartphone for email, and you trust all parties handling the email, there is always a chance the sender’s mail server is graylisted, which means the email could take a day to reach you. Not to mention countless opportunities for the email to fail or get lost.

It’s such a fucked up idea to let merchants choose. If it’s a point of sale, then no problem… I can simply walk if they refuse a paper receipt (though even that’s dicey because I’ve seen merchants refuse instant returns after they’ve put your money in the cash register).

But what about creditors? If you owe a debt and the transaction fails because they won’t give you a paper receipt and you won’t agree to info sharing with a surveillance advertiser, then you can be treated as a delinquent debtor.

Google, Facebook, Amazon, and Microsoft must be celebrating these e-receipts because they have been working quite hard to track people’s offline commerce.

It’s obviously an encroachment of the data minimisation principle under the #GDPR. More data is being collected than necessary.

¹ This is really shitty wording. Who is /they/? If it’s the customer, that’s fine. But in that case, why did the sentence start with “merchants can choose…”? Surely it can only mean merchants have the choice if they make a request to regulators.

So here’s a disturbing development. Suppose you pay cash to settle a debt or to pay for something in advance, where you are not walking out of the store with a product. You obviously want a receipt on the spot proving that you handed cash over. This option is ending.

It’s fair enough that France wants to put a stop to people receiving paper receipts they don’t want, which then litter the street. But it’s not just an environmental move; there is a #forcedDigitalTransformation / #warOnCash element to this. From the article:

In Belgium: since 2014, merchants can choose to provide a paper or digital receipt to their customers, if they¹ request it.

What if I don’t agree to share an email address with a creditor? What if the creditor uses Google or Microsoft for email service, and I boycott those companies? Boycotting means not sharing any data with them (because the data is profitable). IIUC, the Belgian creditor can say “accept our Microsoft-emailed receipt or fuck off.” If you don’t carry a smartphone that is subscribed to a data plan, and trust a smartphone with email transactions, then you cannot see that you’ve received the email before you leave after paying cash. Even if you do have a data plan and are trusting enough to use a smartphone for email, and you trust all parties handling the email, there is always a chance the sender’s mail server is graylisted, which means the email could take a day to reach you. Not to mention countless opportunities for the email to fail or get lost.

It’s such a fucked up idea to let merchants choose. If it’s a point of sale, then no problem… I can simply walk if they refuse a paper receipt (though even that’s dicey because I’ve seen merchants refuse instant returns after they’ve put your money in the cash register).

But what about creditors? If you owe a debt and the transaction fails because they won’t give you a paper receipt and you won’t agree to info sharing with a surveillance advertiser, then you can be treated as a delinquent debtor.

Google, Facebook, Amazon, and Microsoft must be celebrating these e-receipts because they have been working quite hard to track people’s offline commerce.

It’s obviously an encroachment of the data minimisation principle under the GDPR. More data is being collected than necessary.

¹ This is really shitty wording. Who is /they/? If it’s the customer, that’s fine. But in that case, why did the sentence start with “merchants can choose…”? Surely it can only mean merchants have the choice if they make a request to regulators.

A bathroom remodeling service who sells bathrooms on the order of $5k—15k has a contact page that requires a CAPTCHA. It’s as if customer dignity has been tossed out and merchants no longer see the need to respect the traditional role of serving their customer. So I have to wonder, are customers who are willing to spend 4—5 figures on a custom bathroom really willing to solve a CAPTCHA and effectively become subservient to the business they are patronizing?

I’m like, if you’re going to trouble me because you can’t be bothered to do your own spam filting, maybe you don’t really need my business.

cross-posted from: https://sopuli.xyz/post/12515826

I’m looking for an email service that issues email addresses with an onion variant. E.g. so users can send a message with headers like this:

From: replyIfYouCan@hi3ftg6fgasaquw6c3itzif4lc2upj5fanccoctd5p7xrgrsq7wjnoqd.onion  
To: someoneElse@clearnet_addy.com

I wonder if any servers in the onionmail.info pool of providers can do this. Many of them have VMAT, which converts onion email addresses to clearnet addresses (not what I want). The docs are vague. They say how to enable VMAT (which is enabled by default anyway), and neglect to mention how to disable VMAT. Is it even possible to disable VMAT? Or is there a server which does not implement VMAT, which would send msgs to clearnet users that have onion FROM addresses?

No idea how long it has been down.. just noticed the escapebigtech server has been nonresponsive all day. (Could be tor-hostility as I did not test further, but I doubt it)

I’m looking for an email service that issues email addresses with an onion variant. E.g. so users can send a message with headers like this:

From: replyIfYouCan@hi3ftg6fgasaquw6c3itzif4lc2upj5fanccoctd5p7xrgrsq7wjnoqd.onion  
To: someoneElse@clearnet_addy.com

I wonder if any servers in the onionmail.info pool of providers can do this. Many of them have VMAT, which converts onion email addresses to clearnet addresses (not what I want). The docs are vague. They say how to enable VMAT (which is enabled by default anyway), and neglect to mention how to disable VMAT. Is it even possible to disable VMAT? Or is there a server which does not implement VMAT, which would send msgs to clearnet users that have onion FROM addresses?

Different apps expect passwords in the .netrc file to be quoted in different ways. E.g. fetchmail expects passwords to be quoted in a bash style way (quotes needed if there are special chars, but quotes themselves need quotes), while cURL gives no special meaning to quotes and takes them literally if present.

Who to blame for this is a bit unclear, but I believe the original purpose of .netrc was for the standard CLI FTP program, so in principle everything should be aligned on that, IMO.

Some apps will complain if they spot a .netrc syntax they don’t like, as if they get to decide that -- even if the line it complains about is not the record the app is looking for. OTOH, it’s useful to know what an app accepts and rejects.

What a mess.

A software package was released as a tarball, but if it’s not listed in the releases (which gives the size) you’re stuffed if you need to know the size before downloading because curl -LI $url gives content-length: 0.

Updating my browser apparently caused extensions to get updated as well. Now uMatrix 1.1.2 is installed. The config box is very small compared to the size available to the browser window area. You have to scroll horizontally to reach the columns on the right, and the name of the 3rd party entity scrolls out of the window. This makes it inconvenient and cumbersome to alter the settings.

I suppose this change was motivated by complaints that the config window was too large on small screens:

https://github.com/gorhill/uMatrix/issues/483
https://github.com/gorhill/uMatrix/issues/683

I installed #neonmodem by simply grabbing the tarball, which expands files directly into the $CWD instead of nesting them in a folder named after the app. Not a big deal but it gave a slight hint that this project might have quality issues.

This command executes just fine:

$ torsocks neonmodem connect --type lemmy --url https://sopuli.xyz/

It’s irritating that it does not inform the user where the data is being stored and it’s also undocumented. You have to guess how to use it and it’s misleading (I think the connect command does not actually result in a connection being made, it apparently just stores the login creds).

Simply running it crashes instantly:

$ torsocks neonmodem
  panic: Error(s) loading system(s)

  goroutine 1 [running]:
  github.com/mrusme/neonmodem/cmd.glob..func1(0x1771140?, {0xe973eb?, 0x0?, 0x0?})
          /home/runner/work/neonmodem/neonmodem/cmd/root.go:128 +0x268
  github.com/spf13/cobra.(*Command).execute(0x1771140, {0xc00008c1f0, 0x0, 0x0})
          /home/runner/go/pkg/mod/github.com/spf13/cobra@v1.7.0/command.go:944 +0x847
  github.com/spf13/cobra.(*Command).ExecuteC(0x1771140)
          /home/runner/go/pkg/mod/github.com/spf13/cobra@v1.7.0/command.go:1068 +0x3bd
  github.com/spf13/cobra.(*Command).Execute(...)
          /home/runner/go/pkg/mod/github.com/spf13/cobra@v1.7.0/command.go:992
  github.com/mrusme/neonmodem/cmd.Execute(0xc0000061a0?)
          /home/runner/work/neonmodem/neonmodem/cmd/root.go:141 +0x3e
  main.main()
          /home/runner/work/neonmodem/neonmodem/neonmodem.go:13 +0x25

cross-posted from: https://sopuli.xyz/post/11709471

Many political parties are allowing Cloudflare to block some demographics of voters from seeing election info on their own candidates. These political parties are running exclusive websites:

• PS/Vooruit (Socialist / Parti Socialiste [fr/nl])
• Défi (previously part of the MR, now more at the center [fr])
• CD & V (center / Christen Democratisch en Vlaams [nl])
• Groen (Green Party [nl])
• Open VLD (liberal [nl])

Effectively they are operating in an anti-democratic fashion. Open and inclusive access to election info is paramount to democracy.

The political parties who are running inclusive websites are (quite ironically) the right-wing parties. And funnily enough, some of the right-wing parties actually have an English version of their website as well. This defies their historic reputation as being relatively xenophobic. If voting purely on the basis of digital rights and digital inclusion fostered by their website implementation, the right-wingers are the clear winners here.

Voting left entails supporting parties that suppress election info from some demographics of people. Voting right is a non-starter on general principle (e.g. climate denial). Voting is mandatory but there is said to be a “none of the above” option.

(edit) OTOH, the French green party (ecolo.be) has an open website. Perhaps that’s a decent way to vote.