Brussels

I quit using the trains a couple years ago because SNCB started blocking Tor, which is a form of privacy abuse.

As an experiment, I stepped outside of Tor to see what the UX is like these days. For national trips it works but:

• prices are lousy.
• PDF feature was dropped. That sucks. We used to be able to enter two stops in Brussels (train or de lijn) and it would generate a PDF book of all times at the stops so you could put the PDF on your phone and have an offline on-the-fly way to see the bus times.

For international travel searches have a variety of issues:

• users are forced to solve a CAPTCHA (generally Tor users get CAPTCHAs but b-europe.com apparently pushes them to everyone.. bizarre that the general public actually puts up with that shit)
• Cloudflare is in the loop at some point which means a US tech giant gets to snoop on your transactions
• Pricing is unclear. There’s a 50% off promo on weekend travel, but when you get a price quote there’s no indication if the promo was applied.

irail.be is the free world option where you can get access to rail data that’s liberated by Belgium’s open data law. But sadly it seems to be missing a lot of trains (e.g. you can get TGV schedules on some routes but not IC trains). And no pricing info.

In any case, the quoted price given was 2½ times higher than the price of a bus ticket to the same destination. So the bus is still a clear winner.

Court of appeal ruling means government has only until 2030 to reach target

Interesting tidbit: “Per person, Belgians are some of the biggest polluters on the planet.”

BTW, did #Guardian kill its onion service? This link did not work:

https://www.guardian2zotagl6tmjucg3lrhxdk4dw3lhbqnkvvkywawy3oqfoprid.onion/world/2023/dec/01/belgian-court-orders-faster-emissions-cuts-as-countrys-climate-targets-insufficient

When you register an “ebox” box #Belgium for official correspondence, they warn you that correspondence has been “received” merely by landing in your inbox, even if you do not login.

Anyone see the problem with this? You are be responsible for having been officially informed about something that requires your action even if you have not actually logged in to see the messages. E.g. your browser stops working with the website and suddenly you’re responsible for having read unreachable documents.

Or do I have it wrong?

Has anyone sent documents to an ebox? Do you get any kind of signal when the message is opened or downloaded?

Anyone wondering why your #GDPR complaint reports are not leading to enforcement - this may be the answer:

• According to a recent report published by the European Data Protection Board, 77% of DPAs complain about a lack of budget and personnel. While German DPAs employ around 1200 staff, Belgian, Croatian, and Romanian DPAs average only 50.

For Belgium in 2022, the staff size was actually 62. And note that the Belgian DPA budget is tiny compared to France, Italy, Spain, Germany, and Netherlands.

Why is budget a problem? Can’t proceeds from the fines feed the DPA’s office? They should easily be able to pay for themselves.

The Schaerbeek newsletter (vol. 390) page 14 says American start-ups will be considered to write software for the digital transformation that’s being forced on us.

Two concerns:

• competency- most technologists are incompetent as it is. We see how enshitified the web is. And we see the disaster with communes forcing people to use broken tools. Is it really sensible to bring in start-ups?

• sovereignty- American suppliers will be more likely to create dependencies on unethical data-abusing US tech giants (#Amazon, #Microsoft, #Cloudflare, #Google).

Vivaqua removed their cash machine and now refuses cash. So indeed: being able to get access to water service in #Brussels is now contingent on being accepted by the bank and agreeing to use banking services.

#corporateDisobedience

I saw a bicycle worth €1500 new at a Brussels street market for €200. I thought surely it’s too good to be true. The seller must be in a real hurry to sell it. I had no idea how to verify the legitimacy of it.

Denmark is on the ball

Denmark has made it illegal to buy a stolen bicycle. That’s right. A buyer of a stolen bike can be prosecuted. Of course my first thought is: how can they hold a buyer accountable when the buyer can’t know with certainty what the bike’s history is? #Denmark has a toll-free hotline to check the serial number of a bike before buying.

It’s a great idea assuming that hotline keeps call records & vindicates buyers who call before a serial number is known to be that of a stolen bike.

Belgium

It’s legal in #Belgium to buy a stolen bike. In fact, buyers of stolen property actually have rights! There is sympathy for buyers because they spent money on the stolen goods. If a victim discovers their stolen property in someone else’s possession, the police do not simply return the property to the rightful owner. They ask the new “owner” to sign an agreement to relinquish the property. Nutty!

Belgium has no hotline for checking serial numbers. There is a sticker program where owners can register their bike before it’s stolen. The stickers are claimed to leave sticky residue on the bike if removed. So it seems the anti-theft system relies on buyers looking for evidence of removed stickers. How do buyers know whether a removed sticker was previously a registration sticker vs. any other kind of sticker? Seems useless. Apparently they’re hoping thieves will be sloppy and leave the sticker on it so buyers can check the website, which unreasonably assumes buyers carry with them an Internet-subscribed device.

The bike I saw at the street market did in fact have residue from a removed sticker. But that could have been anything. I needed a way to call in the serial number of the frame.

Another embarrassment: victims of bicycle theft in #Brussels were denied access to photos of recovered stolen bikes if they did not have a Facebook account.

Until recently, it was possible to download #Youtube videos on a library PC & store on USB drive by using an #Invidious front-end. Recently the library has blocked all invidious instances. You can still view videos but when you try to download one it gives a 403 forbidden error.

Why are they doing this?

I can only think of two possibilities: 1. bandwidth limitations 2. copyright issues. Anyone know anything solid about this?

Suggestions on other options would be appreciated. I assume users cannot install their own apps, which means front-ends that need installation are problably a non-starter. It looks like there is a web-based front end called #Piped but many of those instances are hosted with the same domain as Invidious thus may be blocked as well.

#lawfedi

An ATM from BNP Paribas did not offer an option to check my balance. Nor did it print the balance on the receipt.

Do any ATMs handle balance inquiries?

This website claims to give a way to check your balance, but I’m not so trusting:

https://www.getmybalance.com/

Both stamp prices and registered letter prices have been taking giant leaps. A charge of €9.85 for confirmed registered letters is not #inflation, it’s crazy.

Question is, are there any alternatives? #AskFedi

Surely all the food couriers in #Brussels would be keen to get paid that much per envelope & deliver it faster than bPost.

(edit) There is a digital alternative (Digiconnect) but it has some issues:

1. Clicking “subscribe now” only brings you to a login page. There is no registration page.

2. #Digiconnect uses MS Outlook, so you must trust #Microsoft with all your correspondence. Yikes!

So I am still looking for an alternative.

Every #userGuide for every recent product I’ve looked at has several pages of safety notices. I’ve been conditioned to just ignore them. How can we take them seriously when a kitchen scale manual says:

“CAUTION! RISK OF INJURY! Do not place more than 5kg on the product.”

?

And about reference to “the product” without saying what the product is-- apparently all user manuals are written from a template and the technical writing monkeys can’t be bothered to even appear to have made an effort. Every single user manual now begins with these words verbatim:

“We congratulate you on the purchase of your new product. You have chosen a high quality product.”

LOL. I always buy the cheapest piece of low quality junk I can find. Yet the #manuals still always start off this way.

The core of my complaint is manuals often lack necessary information. It’s because they’ve apparently dumped some min wage worker in MS Word with a template that they are in a robotic mindset of just filling in blanks. So the information that is unique to a product is missing.

If technical writers used #LaTeX, user manuals wouldn’t be so useless.

They get away with it because no one returns a product for having a shit manual. Maybe we should. Or maybe the #rightToRepair needs to force #userManuals to improve.

In the spirit of the #Reddit mass migration, here is an interesting story that was censored in the r/Brussels subreddit:

Facebook account required for bicycle theft victims to see whether their bike was recovered by Brussels police.

Update

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