ciferecaNinjo

I’ve been using LaTeX to prepare legal documents in PDF format with a tree of PDF bookmarks like this:

• list of facts
  -- exhibit A
  -- exhibit B
  -- exhibit C
  -- exhibit D
• law
  -- national
  -- international

So if you click “exhibit C” in the sidebar of the PDF viewer, it jumps to that document which has “exhibit C” in the corner of the doc in a bubble, along with commentary like “redactions in Bob’s version but not Alice’s”. I have no idea to what extent courts and lawyers appreciate or oppose metadata like this.

Some recipients want to see a verbatim version of the document without my markups. I am tempted to use the \usepackage{attachfile} … \attachfile{exhibit_c.pdf} which puts a thumbtack on the page whereby someone can click it and extract the original version without markups. The problem is that this embeds another redundant copy of the document in the PDF so every document presented will have two copies and ultimately double the size of the PDF.

Is there a tool or method that would enable just one copy of every doc to be stored in the PDF and the commentary to be in an overlay layer that can be toggled for printing and also toggled for on-screen viewing?

PDF annotations kind of try to have that effect, but the PDF standard for annotations is a disaster. Most apps force their own way of rendering a PDF annotation, which is often implemented as a tiny yellow Post-It note and it ignores the author’s font. PDF annotations lack control and look like garbage in most PDF viewers and likely even worse when printed.

(update) This thread mentions several ways to write annotations on top of a document in LaTeX:

https://overflow.manganiello.tech/exchange/tex/questions/15314/how-can-i-superimpose-latex-tex-output-over-a-pdf-file

I’ve always used the overpic method. But the problem is no one talks about how to make the overlay content a separate layer that viewers can give different treatment to. When a viewer opens a PDF where overpic was used to apply markups to an original PDF, it’s all the same single layer to the viewer. E.g. I tell Okular not to print annotations, and yet it prints my overpic markups anyway.

The top response to this thread mentions the pdfcomment package. I’ve used it. It gives no way to put an object of your creation in the annotation layer. You can use a \pdffreetextcomment command but then you have extremely limited rudimentary control over the appearance.

ATM it’s not even clear if the PDF spec can accommodate an annotation layer that is not confined to a fixed set of spec-defined objects.

solution

The LaTeX package ocgx2 seems to solve the problem. It supports custom user-defined PDF layers than can be toggled in many viewers. This code adds an evidence label that can be toggled on and off:

\usepackage{ocgx2}
\usepackage{pdfpages}
\usepackage{hyperref}
…  
\pdfbookmark{Exibit A}{A}
\includepdf[pages=1-,picturecommand={%
  \put(500,800){\begin{ocg}{Evidence labels}{el}{on}
      \Large\rotatebox{-45}{\fbox{Exhibit~A}}
    \end{ocg}}
}]{evidence.pdf}

RCS seems to be replacing email-SMS gateways. RCS is supposedly an open standard, but apparently if you do not have Android 8.1 or newer, you cannot use RCS to send an SMS in Belgium.

In principle, iiuc, you should be able to use a desktop app or browser to send an RCS msg. But for some reason it’s a shitshow.

Since e-mail has become recognised as the equivalent of a registered letter (scary!), I would like to know how courts want it submitted as evidence.

Email arrives with enough headers to fill half an A4 page. It often has a plaintext MIME part and an HTML MIME part. The HTML part is almost always garbage. The code is usually unreadable and it only renders in a decent form in recent mainstream browsers. Sometimes the whole payload is base64-encoded, which is printable but wholly useless to read.

So the question is, what does the court generally accept?

If the details of the email were quite important and it’s a murder trial that calls for evidence of a very high standard, then I suppose the raw forensic blob of text would be needed. But murder trials aside, what’s the general practice?

I use a text-based mail client and generally refuse to render the HTML due to tracker pixels and various shenanigans. My text view of an email is sometimes a bit rough looking, but I prefer it. Does the court accept a raw text representation, including cases where there is only an HTML part and w3m is used for rendering?

There is a shitty practice by tech illiterates to top post (which means to quote the entire message they are responding to below it). So every message embeds a redundant copy of the long history of the thread, sometimes followed by a 20+ line signature block. Are we expected to print 2+ pages for each message in this case?

My temptation is to truncate the quoted threads entirely, and also use a tiny font on the giant signature blocks. But I have no idea how a court will regard this.

I would like to know if vegans have any protection for their practice under human rights laws. Veganism is essentially a boycott against all industries that exploit non-human animals. And more broadly, are boycotts of any kind protected?

These laws could potentially be relevant:

International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights

Article 1

1. All peoples have the right of self-determination. By virtue of that right they freely determine their political status and freely pursue their economic, social and cultural development.

Self-determination seems quite vague and would seem to imply autonomy in general. Does that imply that someone can boycott whatever they want, like fossil fuels, credit cards, cars, meat, Internet, etc?

I also wonder about the language effect of using “peoples” in that wording. It would seem to imply that individuals do not get self-determination, but a people (a group of people) have that right. Can anyone clarify?

UDHR

Article 18:

Everyone has the right to freedom of thought, conscience and religion; this right includes freedom to change his religion or belief, and freedom, either alone or in community with others and in public or private, to manifest his religion or belief in teaching, practice, worship and observance.

International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights

Article 18

1. Everyone shall have the right to freedom of thought, conscience and religion. This right shall include freedom to have or to adopt a religion or belief of his choice, and freedom, either individually or in community with others and in public or private, to manifest his religion or belief in worship, observance, practice and teaching.
2. No one shall be subject to coercion which would impair his freedom to have or to adopt a religion or belief of his choice.
3. Freedom to manifest one's religion or beliefs may be subject only to such limitations as are prescribed by law and are necessary to protect public safety, order, health, or morals or the fundamental rights and freedoms of others.

Vegan is not religion but this seems to say you can manifest a belief and practice it. So then I wonder about (for example) a vegan in prison. Can a vegan prisoner insist on a plant-based diet?

I wonder to what extent ¶3 can reduce these rights. To say it’s okay to limit ¶1 rights in pursuit of “public order” is quite broad. Any action by a gov to repress ¶1 would be argued to be in the interest of “public order”.

If an Amish person or luddite were to say “fuck the Internet -- I’m done with CAPTCHAs, tracking and surveillance, forced use of email…etc“, and develop beliefs against Internet and thus unplug from it, couldn’t the gov argue that going analog compromises “public order” (as governments increasingly impose the use of Internet on people)?

(edit) A big fuck you to the cowardice assholes silently downvoting this thread for asking questions. Contempt for people knowing their rights is despicable.

In Belgium real estate listings mostly omit addresses. This makes it extremely annoying for consumers looking to either buy or rent because they are forced into engagement with the landlord/seller just to find out the address. Very time-wasting. You must register on a site and disclose your email address, then wait for someone to reply with the address (and often they do not, or they want to speak on the phone and hear your voice -- which can go badly if you don’t speak the local language)†.

The published listings tend to only disclose what approximate neighborhood the dwelling is in (useless for my needs because you have no way of knowing if it’s near a tram stop that is relevant). But there are some exceptions. Maybe ~5—10% of listings have an address. I decided to ignore the majority of listings and only consider those with an address. This meant in order to get a decent number of choices I had to scrape every single real estate site that covers my city to harvest just the listings with addresses.

Then I used a geocaching API to convert the addresses to GPS coords. From there, I scraped the public transport websites. For every address in my city the tool would grab all weekday public transport routes from every GPS fix, which includes trams and transfer times. Then it calculated the walk time on both sides to/from the tram stops on every route to derive the shortest door to door time.

I also wanted to be within a certain cycling time from the center of the city, to ensure I don’t get too far from the center. That was calculated using an API.

The tool also accounted for the usual filters, like budget. I ended up selecting the dwelling that was the shortest commute without deviating from the proxity to center constraint.

The only problem with my approach was that one listing used a fake address. So my tool trusted the addresses and some jack ass published bogus info that lead me to a place that was occupied and unavailable. When I called to say “where are you” he said “down the street.. I gave an address that was close but incorrect”.. WTF. It was far enough to screw up the public transport option.

Anyway, this would have been impossible to do without scraping all those websites. I had freedom and power that’s denied to all other consumers who are trapped in the UIs of the real estate sites. But the next time I need a dwelling, the tool is certainly broken due to how rapidly websites change and also how increasingly anti-bot they have become. I think when I built that tool it was during the last moment of time that the web was relatively open access.

Everyone is generally forced to look for a place close to work. But close in terms of straight distance does not translate into a short tram commute because the routes are chaotic. You could be somewhat close but need 2 or 3 transfers. One interesting thing I noticed was a dwelling on the complete opposite side of the city was reasonable because it was close to a train station with no need for transfers. Trains are the fastest with much fewer stops. Also, there are express buses (fewer stops) and normal buses. So intuition is too inaccurate.

† The point of contact is often a real estate agent or property manager who has many listings. So if you call or write to ask for an address of many listings, the same person sees all your requests and ignores all of them because they assume you are not serious. They think: what kind of person looks all over the place.. surely they only want to see one or two neighborhoods. So this bullshit blocks consumers from searching for a place to live in a way that accounts for public transport schedules. They want to force you to choose where to live based on everything other than the address.

I have not been able to track down the Belgian open data law¹ but it seems in principle blocking both Tor users and archive.org from access to the address book of Chamber of Representatives would not be in line with the spirit of open data. They may not have the IT competency to serve Tor users but to treat archive.org like a malicious robot is to underachieve.

¹ I can only find an old archive of the goals of the open data policy (in French), but not the law:

http://web.archive.org/web/20160416034829/http://www.digitalbelgium.be/sites/default/files/content/FR/_strategisch/_dossier.pdf

The original link was from https://openknowledge.be/ which seems to be a stale website and an inactive project. It feels like open data got started in Belgium but then the ball was dropped.

(original post)

To reach the Belgian datasets of open data from Tor you must go through archive.org:

http://web.archive.org/web/20241003145143/https://data.gov.be

And because the website is interactive and also not completely archived, I ultimately could not even browse through to see what data there is beyond the first page of databases. Thus not entirely “open”.

But the Brussels datasets are open to all.

I could not find the data I was looking for. That is, I wanted to know how many complaints are sent to the various different SPF regulators as well as ombuds people -- and very specifically how many complaints are ignored. Some offices produce annual reports but I have never seen an annual report that exposes the count of ignored complaints.

Anyway, the question I have is what section of legal code covers open data in Belgium?

case 1: account closure

Cashless banks have no vault and no cash services apart from the ATMs. ATMs in Europe never handle denominations smaller than €20. This means that even when you are closing an account at a cashless bank, the most you can pull out is a multiple of €20 from your balance. The bank expects you to open an account somewhere else first and transfer the remainder to the other account. This is to keep people trapped in the banking system.

It seems to violate article 17 ¶2:

1. Everyone has the right to own property alone as well as in association with others.
2. No one shall be arbitrarily deprived of his property.

This is not exactly up there with genocide and torture. It’s perhaps the smallest human rights infraction I can think of. But nonetheless, banks should be structured to comply with human rights no matter how trivial, no? It seems like even a cashless bank should (in effect) be required to keep some petty cash on-hand for account closures.

case 2: withdrawal limits

The same question applies for bigger cases. E.g. a bank (cashless or not) may have a daily withdrawal limit; weekly, and monthly too. Perhaps it is fair enough to have a fee or penalty for exceeding their limits, but if I understand correctly the bank has a human rights obligation to allow you to withdraw all your money. At the moment banks with limits simply refuse to execute withrawals that exceed their limits.

case 3: card refusal

ATMs and shops refuse people access to their money for countless arbitrary reasons.

• When a customer’s ID card copy on the bank’s files expires, some banks do not bother to inform the customer or request an updated copy. They just freeze the account. When money is denied, the customer magically presents themselves to the bank to find out why. Cutting off access to funds is the bank’s way of communicating.
• ATMs reject cards for undisclosed reasons. Sometimes a faulty AI bot falsely triggers and claims a transaction looks fraudulent. Sometimes ATMs are discriminating against people based on their origin (locally issued cards get a higher limit than foreign ones, but the ATM does not tell the customer what the limit is or why their transaction is denied).

The closed-source app is exclusively available in these places:

• Google Playstore
• Apple store
• Huawei store

The app will only run on quite recent phones. So anyone who does not keep their OS up to date (which implies periodically buying new hardware for the shitshow platforms people much choose between) are locked out of their account. Also:

• No walk-in service
• Over the counter service requires appointment and a fee for many staff-assisted operations
• No paper statements. No phone → no statements.

The app requires SMS 2fa, so non-phone or landphone users: don’t even think about trying to use an android emulator.

If you want to close your account to escape this shitshow, you have 2 options:

• In the app use the account closure feature, OR
• Send a shit load of sensitive information (ID/passport, utility bill, bank account numbers to close, account numbers of your new external account to transfer the money to, etc) via Google (gmail) from an IP address that Google accepts.

(edit) Worth mentioning an aspect of these cashless banks that should be embarrassing for them: when you close an account, they have no cash so they cannot pay you your balance. You can pull money from an ATM but obviously only in denominations of paper banknotes. So how do you get the rest out? They expect you to open an account elsewhere and transfer it. How silly is that? Maybe you don’t want another account, or maybe you’re moving to a completely different part of the world and the transfer cost will exceed what remains.

You can hack around this various ways, like dining out and paying an exact amount by card and the rest by cash. But really, banks should be embarrassed they cannot give you cash. They shouldn’t need a vault just to secure €20 or so in change.