ciferecaNinjo

joined 2 years ago
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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.

[–] ciferecaNinjo@fedia.io 2 points 9 months ago (2 children)

I don’t know when (if ever) I will be able to view that. Youtube has been blocking Tor and DoS attacking Invidious lately. It’s unclear when the open free world will get access to Youtube content again.

 

The linked “magazine” (community) is where Twitter & FB users can converge with non-Twitter & non-FB users to have their messages to their gov reps relayed. This is a hack to circumvent digital exclusion.

 

The linked “magazine” (community) is where Twitter & FB users can converge with non-Twitter & non-FB users to have their messages to their gov reps relayed. This is a hack to circumvent digital exclusion.

[–] ciferecaNinjo@fedia.io 1 points 9 months ago (5 children)

I guess I don’t get the reference. I recall a Bullwinkle cartoon when I was a kid. Is it related?

 

There is an art competition for original CC-licensed art created using FOSS. Some of you might want to submit your work to try to win a prize (there are 3 prizes).

 

More political than artistic, and in fact has a bit of a ransom letter feel to it. But a college nonetheless.

If someone wants to make a more artistic version, I can provide the raw material (an SVG file that was created with Inkscape).

 

What’s going to happen in the EU is public spaces like libraries which already have wi-fi service are going unplug their wi-fi service and take this free wifi4eu option. Then only people who can get the special Google/Apple-only app will have wi-fi access.

So while the project falsely claims to favor digital inclusion, they will actually be making existing networks more exclusive.

[–] ciferecaNinjo@fedia.io 1 points 9 months ago

Yikes. I am disturbed to hear that. I was as well appalled with what I saw in a recent visit to a university. It’s baffling that someone could acquire those degrees without grasping the discipline. Obviously it ties in with the fall of software quality that began around the same time the DoD lifted the Ada mandate. But indeed, you would have to mention your credentials because nothing else you’ve written indicates having any tech background at all.

[–] ciferecaNinjo@fedia.io 0 points 9 months ago (2 children)

How have I made your point at all?

You have acknowledged the importance of having multiple points of failure. It’s a good start because the defect at hand is software with a single point of failure.

You're a bit incoherent with what you're talking about.

I suppose I assumed I was talking to someone with a bit of engineering history. It’s becoming clear that you don’t grasp software design. You’ve apparently not had any formal training in engineering and likely (at best) you’ve just picked up how to write a bit of code along the way. Software engineering so much more than that. You are really missing the big picture.

This has nothing to do with software design or anything else along those lines.

What an absurd claim to make. Of course it does. When software fails to to protect the data it’s entrusted with, it’s broken. Either the design is broken, or the implementation is broken (but design in the case at hand). Data integrity is paramount to infosec and critical to the duty of an application. Integrity is basically infosec 101. If you ever enter an infosec program, it’s the very first concept you’ll be taught. Then later on you might be taught that a good software design is built with security integrated into the design in early stages, as opposed to being an afterthought. Another concept you’ve not yet encounted is the principle of security in depth, which basically means it’s a bad idea to rely on a single mechanism. E.g. if you rely on the user to make a backup copy but then fail to protect the primary copy, you’ve failed to create security in depth, which requires having BOTH a primary copy AND a secondary copy.

This is a simple thing. If your data is valuable you secure it yourself.

That has nothing to do with the software defect being reported. While indeed it is a good idea to create backups, this does not excuse or obviate a poor software design that entails data loss and ultimately triggers a need for data recovery. When a software defect triggers the need for data recovery, in effect you have lost one of the redundant points of failure you advocated for.

When you reach the university level, hopefully you will be given a human factors class of some kind. Or if your first tech job is in aerospace or a notably non-sloppy project, you’ll hopefully at least learn human factors on the job. If you write software that’s intolerant to human errors and which fails to account for human characteristics, you’ve created a poor design (or most likely, no design.. just straight to code). When you blame the user, you’ve not only failed as an engineer but also in accountablity. If a user suffers from data loss because your software failed to protect the data, and you blame the user, any respectable org will either sack you or correct you. It is the duty of tech creators to assume that humans fuck up and to produce tools that is resilient to that. (maybe not in the gaming industry but just about any other type of project)

Good software is better than your underdeveloped understanding of technology reveals.

Thinking that a federated service is going to have a uniform or homogenous approach to things is folly

Where do you get /uniform/ from? Where do you get /homogenous approach/ from? Mbin has a software defect that Lemmy does not. Reporting mbin’s defect in no way derives and expectation that mbin mirror Lemmy. Lemmy is merely an example of a tool that does not have the particular defect herein. Lemmy demonstrates one possible way to protect against data loss. There are many different ways mbin can solve this problem, but it has wholly failed because it did fuck all. It did nothing to protect from data loss.

on your end and a failure of understanding what the technology is.

It’s a failure on your part to understand how to design quality software. Judging from the quality of apps over the past couple decades, it seems kids are no longer getting instruction on how to build quality technology and you have been conditioned by this shift in recent decades toward poorly designed technology. It’s really sad to see.

[–] ciferecaNinjo@fedia.io 0 points 9 months ago (4 children)

Exactly. You’ve made my point for me. Precisely why this defect is a defect. The user’s view should be separate and disjoint from the timeline. Lemmy proves the wisdom of that philosophy. But again, it’s a failure of software design to create a fragile system with an expectation that human users will manually compensate for lack of availaiblity and integrity. I know you were inadvertenly attempting again to blame the user (and victim) for poor software design.

It’s a shame that kids are now being tought to produce software has lost sight of good design principles. That it’s okay to write software that suffers from data loss because someone should have another copy anyway (without realising that that other copy is also subject to failures nonetheless).

[–] ciferecaNinjo@fedia.io 1 points 9 months ago (6 children)

Who cares?

Anyone who values their own time and suffers from data loss cares about data loss, obviously.

This is a serious question.

Bizarre.

Anything that is important to you should be backed up and/or archived. Relying on a third party social media app is folly.

This is a bug report on faulty software. If you have a clever workaround to the bug, specifics would be welcome. A bug report is not the place for general life coaching or personal advice. If there is an emacs mode that stores posts locally and copies them into a lemmy or mbin community and keeps a synchronised history of the two versions, feel free to share the details. But note that even such a tool would still just be a workaround to the software defect at hand.

 

Both Lemmy and mbin have a shitty way of treating authors of content that is censored by a moderator.

Lemmy: if your post is removed from a community timeline, you still have the content. In fact, your logged-in profile looks no different, as if the message is still there. It’s quite similar to shadow banning. Slightly better though because if you pay attention or dig around, you can at least discover that you were censored. But shitty nonetheless that you get no notification of the censorship.

Mbin: if your post is removed, you are subjected to data loss. I just wrote a high effort post europe@feddit.org and it was censored for not being “news”. There is no rule that your post must be news, just a subtle mention in the topic of news. In fact they delete posts that are not news, despite not having a rule along those lines. So my article is lost due to this heavy-handed moderation style. Mbin authors are not deceived about the status of their post like on lemmy, but authors suffer from data loss. They do not get a copy of what they wrote so they cannot recover and post it elsewhere.

It’s really disgusting that a moderator’s trigger happy delete button has data loss for someone else as a consequence. I probably spent 30 minutes writing the post only to have that effort thrown away by a couple clicks. Data loss is obviously a significant software defect.

[–] ciferecaNinjo@fedia.io 0 points 9 months ago

Wojciech Wiewiórowski was intent on calling mastodon a failure for political reasons. When pressed on the harms of public services using Twitter and Facebook, he defends them on the basis of content moderation. Of course what’s despicable about that stance is that a private sector surveillance advertiser is not who should be moderating who gets to say what to their representatives. Twitter, for example, denies access to people who do not disclose their mobile phone number to Twitter, which obviously also marginalises those who have no mobile phone subscription to begin with.

Effectively, the government has outsourced the duty of governance to private corporations -- without rules. Under capitalism.

The lack of funding on the free world platforms was due to lack of engagement. When the public service does not get much engagement they react by shrinking the funding.

We need the Facebook and Twitter users to stop engaging with gov agencies on those shitty platforms. Which obviously would not happen. Those pushover boot-licking addicts would never do that.

tl;dr: is it a good idea to put Elon Musk in control of who gets to talk to their government?

[–] ciferecaNinjo@fedia.io 1 points 11 months ago

Thanks for the insights. I was looking for a client not a server. So maybe this can’t help me. A server somewhat hints that it would be bandwidth heavy. I’m looking to escape the stock JS web client. At the same time, I am on a very limited uplink. To give an idea, I browse web with images disabled because they would suck my quota dry.

[–] ciferecaNinjo@fedia.io 1 points 11 months ago
[–] ciferecaNinjo@fedia.io 2 points 11 months ago (3 children)

Photon is a strange beast. How do you install it?

It seems to only come as a docker container. That’s weird. I don’t have docker installed but docker should really be a choice.. not a sole means of installation. I see no deb file or tarball. It seems that it has taken a direction that makes it non-conducive to ever becoming part of the official Debian repos.

Then it seems as well that their official site “phtn.app” is a Cloudflare site -- which is a terrible sign. It shows that the devs are out of touch with digital rights, decentralisation, and privacy. That doesn’t in itself mean the app is bad but the tool is looking quite sketchy so far. Several red flags here.

(edit) I found a tarball on the releases page.

[–] ciferecaNinjo@fedia.io 2 points 11 months ago (1 children)

I just need to work out exactly what the effect of the user-configured node block is. In principle, if an LW user replies to either my thread or one of my comments in someone else’s thread, I would still want to see their comments and I would still want a notification. But I would want all LW-hosted threads to be hidden in timelines and search results.

On one occasion I commented in an LW-hosted thread without realising it. Then I later blocked the community that thread was in (forgetting about my past comment). Then at one point I discovered someone replied to me and I did not get the notification. That scenario should be quite rare but I wonder how it would pan out with the node-wide blocking option.

[–] ciferecaNinjo@fedia.io 1 points 11 months ago (2 children)

Ah, I see! Found it. Indeed that was not there last time I checked.

I’m on both Lemmy and mbin. I have several Lemmy accounts.

Now I need to understand the consequences of blocking lemmy.world. Is it just the same as blocking every lemmy.world community, or does it go further than that? E.g. If I post a thread and a LW user replies, I would not want to block their reply from appearing in my notifications. I just don’t want LW threads coming up in searches or appearing on timelines.

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