ciferecaNinjo

This seems a bit off. Public payphones were what, 25¢/min? Now that they have been eliminated, the cash equivalent is a prepaid mobile service.

Public payphones had an infrastructure of phone booths that needed to be maintained, cleaned, and serviced. They consumed real estate.

Prepaid mobile service is a trivial deployment by comparison. I must maintain my own hardware. Yet my carrier charges 22¢/min in 2025. Comparable to the cost of public payphones.

A lot of useful information covering the city of Brussels is jailed. Apparently only clearnet users are allowed to access the website, AFAICT.

If you need to do any kind of public administration in Belgium, such as perform transactions with city hall or the tax authority, for most uses you are redirected to eid.belgium.be to login using a smartcard reader. A PIN and eID serve as the 2nd factor when authenticating on this site.

But eid.belgium.be blocks Tor. Isn’t 2FA enough? Why would the confidence in their security be so low that they are skiddish about someone’s IP address? IMO it’s unlikely that their security confidence is that low. Most likely they want to track the IP address and thus day-to-day of every citizen. Otherwise it makes no sense for this service to block Tor, which mushrooms into being blocked from accessing many essential services.

This is why the right to be analog is important. I think someone in Denmark is working on that. Belgium has an org called something like the gang of angry elders working on the right to be analog.

Irony indeed. The agency responsible for protecting people’s privacy in Belgium wholly denies people access to the website if they use Tor to protect their own privacy. The firewall simply drops packets which is even less dignified than a 403 error.

You cannot submit an electronic GDPR complaint over Tor, to complain about your privacy being undermined because the same people tasked with protecting your privacy also undermine it.

There are copious hosts in the europa.eu domain. Most of them rudely stonewall Tor users without explanation. Ironically, sometimes they are asking for public feedback on a privacy-related policy but then they block Tor users who would have the most insight.

Few examples of EC sites that are exclusive access:

• commission.europa.eu
• single-market-economy.ec.europa.eu
• energy-efficient-products.ec.europa.eu

Often an open access host links into commission.europa.eu, so people might be part way through a transaction and cannot proceed.

At least eur-lex.europa.eu is open access. That’s the most important one because it publishes enacted law. Yet commission.europa.eu is quite important so definately an injustice that that site is access restricted.

These three prepaid GSM providers will not allow you service unless you have a bank account which you must use for the initial payment before activation:

• Mobile Vikings
• JIM Mobile (same ownership as Mobile Vikings)
• Scarlet
• (edit) Ello? They might have the same issue as the above three

At the same time, some banks will not allow you to open an account unless you provide to them a mobile phone number registered in your name with proof of that registration.

You open a “basic” bank account at a bank that offers those kind of accounts just for the one-time purpose of getting a sim chip from one of the 3 MVNOs, but Belgium has a separate rule that blocks basic accounts from receiving cash, even a small amount like €10.

So you must obtain a sim from a mobile carrier other than the three to get a normal bank account open which accepts cash. Then use that bank account to buy the Jim or Scarlet sim card. Then credit is trapped on the 1st sim card. You can do a phone number transfer to get it credited back, after they siphon off €5 for the porting effort.

senate.be is configured to push a broken CAPTCHA to Tor users.

The Chamber of Representatives website is hard to find with a search. The first several pages are wikis and various pages talking about the chamber of reps, but not www.dekamer.be which was well buried, at least for me. This means it’s an unpopular website. Which suggests efforts to block access is less justified. Tor users are ignored and browsers time out. Also notable that the chamber of reps treats archive.org badly. This leads to a broken CAPTCHA:

http://web.archive.org/web/20250124121819/https://www.dekamer.be/

When people can’t even see an archive of the site, it’s an extra dose of disservice and non-transparency.

Belgium’s “open” data website is also closed to Tor users (timeouts).

FWIW the France’s open data website is open to Tor users, thus probably all users.

To Tor visitors the BIPT just looks like an offline/dead website. But it is reachable on archive.org. The 12ft.io service also reaches BIPT but PDFs are broken.

They claim to support “open data”. They have a separate website for that and it’s actually open to Tor users.

update: https://techrights.org/n/2025/05/24/If/_Your/_Bicycle/_Got/_Stolen/_Then/_Open/_a/_Facebook/_Account/_and/_Sen.shtml

Like anyone who sends postal mail, I compose my letters electronically, print, sign, and mail. Of course I keep a copy of the original unsigned letter.

But after signing I never scan the signed version because it’s inconvenient and a raster version of the whole page is mostly redundant while consuming much more space.

Is this a bad practice that could burn me? Would a court reject my letter as evidence if it does not include my own hand-written signature exactly as it was mailed?

If yes, would it generally be sufficient to keep a log of letters I sign, which could perhaps be used as evidence to the fact that I signed a letter?