ciferecaNinjo

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1
I didn’t know what I was doing in the voting booth (fedia.io)
 

There were a dozen or so lists to choose from. I selected a list. Normally I would just select the list and tap submit. But someone told me that if you select an individual it adds weight to the vote or gives them more power somehow. So when I choose a list, the screen is filled with a candidate for every position.

Should I select every single name on that screen? Someone told me you only need to select the party and all names are automatically chosen. But what’s the situation with the extra weight?

I got an A4 paper flyer from Ecolo/groen that lists over 40 candidates in their party which corresponds for every position. But about ¼ of the names are highlighted and have a green checkmark next to them. What does that mean? Does it mean that only ~25% are actually with the green party and the other 75% are other candidates who are merely endorsed by the green party?

Another ecolo/groen flyer lists only a dozen or so names, some matching the checked names on the other flyer and some not. It’s quite confusing to work out what going on here.

I wonder if I did not vote at all for some positions. I just don’t get it.

1
jazz stations in Brussels non-existent! But some non-jazz stations have jazz segments (fedia.io)
2
New forum where people excluded by Twitter and Facebook can get their msgs proxied (fedia.io)
 

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.

3
In 2023 the Belgian federal Ombudsman only handled 44% of the complaints it received (www.federaalombudsman.be)
 

This is really a shitshow. The federal ombudsman is simply ignoring complaints -- not even giving people a case number or status. Because of that, many complaints are about the fed ombudsman itself, from people asking what’s going on with their complaint.

My question: who is above the federal ombudsman on the food chain?

The fed ombudsman should only be getting complaints about other Belgian federal agencies. So the fact that the fed ombudsman is swamped with over 10,000 complaints means that other federal agencies are failing in their duties at a high rate. From the report:

“That clearly shows that citizens are having difficulties exercising their rights and that they risk losing trust in public service.”

The report also says:

“In 2023, the Federal Ombudsman obtained a positive result in 75%”

Of course that’s only 75% of the ~~44%~~48% it cherry picked to work on. So really only 36% of complaints are getting results. Thus roughly 7000 people were disserviced by a federal agency and could not get a remedy from the federal ombudsman. (edit: of the 48%, 44% are trivial complaints merely about delays; thus apparently only about 15% are getting meaningful results on a significant matter)

Who do we complain to about mismanagement at the federal ombudsman?

3
What is “Parking Brussels”? Some political candidates say they oppose it. (fedia.io)
 

Got a flyer from a political candidate saying he opposes:

  • Good Move
  • Parking Brussels
  • Aux taxes et aux impôts abusifs

I had to look up the 1st two items. Couple goals of good move is:

  • Reduce the need for private cars by offering a set of attractive options addressing the different needs for travel;

  • prioritising off-street parking, adapting tariffs per sector, reducing the number of places in public spaces

Seems to be a success. I found this: One year Good Move in Brussels city: 25% less car-traffic and 36% more bicycles.

Less car traffic is also good for car drivers because they have fewer other cars in their way. So it’s unclear what the guy’s problem is.

I also had to look up Parking Brussels to work out what his issue may be. Goals of that project:

  • Make it easier for residents to park in their neighbourhood
  • Encourage short-stay parking
  • Discourage long-stay on-street parking

That’s wise. It’s a bad idea for public parking to be used for long-term parking. My street is always clusterfucked with cars that fill the public parking so there is no way to have visitors or deliveries. I’m not sure why Good Move and Parking Brussels have failed to solve the problem for my street, but canceling them would seem to just make that problem less likely to be solved.

3
Art for Digital Freedom Huion Challenge 2024 -- 2 days left to submit your artwork (digitalfreedoms.org)
 

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).

17
Wi-Fi in EU-based libraries expected to become more exclusive (fedia.io)
 

The EU has implemented a free public wi-fi infrastructure and is pitching this service to various public buildings, including public libraries. This “Wifi4EU” project is limited to people with smartphones, and only those that are running iOS or Android OS. The app needed to connect to the network is closed-source and exclusively available in the walled gardens of Google and Apple. The network is inaccessible without the special app.

AFAICT, these are the excluded demographics of people:

  • people with laptops
  • people who do not have or carry a smartphone
  • people with old non-updatable smartphones (all iOS & AOS devices are designed for obsolescence)
  • people with cheap Chinese phones that exclude Google Playstore (which requires licensing with Google that some vendors do not subscribe to)
  • people with deGoogled phones
  • people with no Google account (i.e. those without the mobile phone number needed to register with Google)
  • people who refuse to install and execute non-free closed-source software, and those on FOSS platforms that do not support such software

My concern is that when a public library decides to deploy Wifi4EU, they will discontinue their current wi-fi service, which does not require a special app and which is generally open to more demographics of people. Note that it’s a bit of a shit-show already because some current library wi-fi services already exclude people who cannot overcome the shitty captive portal + SMS verification design. Wifi4EU is even more exclusive.

6
(amateur) collage illustrating the EU’s unsuccessful attempt to deploy wi-fi in an inclusive privacy-respecting way (Wifi4EU) (fedia.io)
 

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).

1
Collage illustrating the EU’s Wifi4EU shit-show of digital exclusion (fedia.io)
 

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.

4
Collage illustrating the EU’s Wifi4EU shit-show of privacy offenses (fedia.io)
2
mbin: data loss on censored threads, unlike Lemmy. Kbin also likely affected. (fedia.io)
 

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 [email protected] 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.

2
Trying to get election info in Brussels from an official source: (fedia.io)
 

Obviously it makes sense to vote against the incumbents in this case. Though still a question of who the challengers are.

Lemmy vs. PieFed vs. Mbin in c/[email protected]
[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago

good, thanks!

Lemmy vs. PieFed vs. Mbin in c/[email protected]
[–] [email protected] 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.

Lemmy vs. PieFed vs. Mbin in c/[email protected]
[–] [email protected] 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.

Lemmy vs. PieFed vs. Mbin in c/[email protected]
[–] [email protected] 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.

Lemmy vs. PieFed vs. Mbin in c/[email protected]
[–] [email protected] 0 points 11 months ago (4 children)

I think he is talking about admins blocking instances in the settings for the whole node. AFAIK, users on Lemmy and k/mBin have no such setting.

Lemmy vs. PieFed vs. Mbin in c/[email protected]
[–] [email protected] 0 points 11 months ago (3 children)

I don't get why you want users to be able to apply cloudflare filters, though.

Suppose an instance has these users:

  • Victor who uses a VPN
  • Cindy whose ISP uses a CGNAT (she may or may not be aware of the consequences of that)
  • Terry who uses a Tor
  • Norm who uses the normal clearnet
  • Esther who is ethical (doesn’t matter what she uses)

And suppose the instance is a special interest instance focused on travel. The diverse group of the above people have one thing in common: they want to converge on the expat travel node and the admin wants to accommodate all of them. Norm, and many like him, are happy to subscribe to countless exclusive and centralised forums as they are pragmatic people with no thought about tech ethics. These subscriptions flood an otherwise free world node with exclusive content. Norm subscribes to [[email protected]](/c/[email protected]). Then Victor, Terry and sometimes Cindy are all seeing broken pics in their view because they are excluded by Cloudflare Inc. Esther is annoyed from an ethical standpoint that this decentralised free world venue is being polluted by exclusive content from places like like Facebook Threads™ and LemmyWorld. Even though she can interact with it from her clearnet position, she morally objects to feeding content to oppressive services.

The blunt choice of the admin to federate or not with LemmyWorld means the admin cannot satisfy everyone. It’s too blunt of an instrument. Per-community blocks per user give precision but it’s a non-stop tedious manual workload to keep up with the flood of LW communities. It would be useful for a user to block all of LemmyWorld in one action. I don’t want to see LW-hosted threads and I don’t want LW forums cluttering search results.

Lemmy vs. PieFed vs. Mbin in c/[email protected]
[–] [email protected] 2 points 11 months ago (6 children)

Cloudflare is an exclusive walled garden that excludes several demographics of people. I am in Cloudflare’s excluded group. This means:

  • when an LW user posts an image, I am blocked from seeing it. Images do not get mirrored onto the federated nodes.
  • when I encounter an LW community with very little content and I then need to visit the LW host to see what’s there before deciding whether to subscribe, I am blocked. I can only see content that got mirrored into the local timeline. There are various circumstances where visiting the source host is necessary but Cloudflare ruins that option.

CF nodes like LW breaks the fedi in arbitrary ways that undermine the fedi design and philosophy. So the use case is to get rid of the pollution. To get broken pieces out of sight and unbury the content that is decentralised, inclusive, open and free. To reach conversations with people who have the same values and who oppose digital exclusion, oppose centralised corporate control, and who embrace privacy. It’s also necessary to de-pollute searches. If I search for “privacy”, the results are flooded with content from people and nodes that are antithetical to privacy. Blocking fixes that. If I take a couple min. to block oxymoron venues like lemmy.world/c/privacy and do the same for a dozen other cloudflared nodes, then search for “privacy” again, I get better results.

When crossposting from Lemmy, there is a pulldown list of target communities which is another search tool. That is broken when there are more communities than what fits in the box. And it’s often ram-packed with Cloudflare venues -- places that digital rights proponents will not feed. Blocking the junk CF-centralised communities makes it possible to select the target community I’m after.

So it works. The federated timeline is also more interesting now because it’s decluttered of exclusive places. The problem is that it’s more tedious that it needs to be. I am blocking hundreds of LW communities right now. It probably required 500 clicks to get the config that I have right now and I probably have hundreds of more clicks to go. When in fact I should have simply been able to enter ~10 or nodes.

Lemmy vs. PieFed vs. Mbin in c/[email protected]
[–] [email protected] 0 points 11 months ago (28 children)

tl;dr:

  • Lemmy ← shit show for years
  • (mk)bin ← shit show but understandable given its age
  • piefed ← never heard of it

I’ve been using Lemmy for years, back when there were only 2 or 3 nodes and federation capability did not exist. It’s a shit show. Extremely buggy web clients and no useful proper desktop clients. I must say it’s sensible that the version numbers are still 0.x. It’s also getting worse. 0.19.3 was more usable than 0.19.5 which introduced serious bugs that make it unusable in some variants of Chromium browser.

mBin has been plagued with serious bugs. But it’s also very young. It was not ready for prime-time when it got rolled out, but I think it (or kbin) was pushed out early because many Redditors were jumping ship and those refugees needed a place to go. IMO mbin will out-pace Lemmy and take the lead. Mbin is bad at searching. You can search for mags that are already federated but if a community does not appear in a search I’m not even sure if or how a user can create the federated relationship.

The running goat fuck with Lemmy is in recent years with the shitty javascript web client. There’s only so much blame you can fairly put on those devs though because they need to focus on a working server. The shitty JavaScript web client should just be considered a proof-of-concept experimental test sandbox. JavaScript is unfit for this kind of purpose. It’s really on the FOSS community to produce a decent proper client. And what has happened is there has been focus on a dozen or so different phone apps (wtf?) and no real effort on a desktop app.

Cloudflare filters lacking

Both Lemmy and Mbin lack the ability to filter out or block Cloudflare nodes. They both only give a way to block specific forums. So you get imersed/swamped in LemmyWorld’s walled garden and to get LemmyWorld out of sight there is a big manual effort of blocking hundreds of communities. It’s a never ending game of whack-a-mole.

Lemmy vs. PieFed vs. Mbin in c/[email protected]
[–] [email protected] 3 points 11 months ago

Yes indeed.. “threads” in the generic sense of the word pre-dates the web. And threadiverse is a few years older than “FB Threads™”. That’s what’s so despicable about Facebook hi-jacking the name. It’s also why I will not refer to them by Meta (another hi-jacking of a generic term with useful meaning that their ego-centric marketers fucked up)

Barcelona is banning Airbnbs. Other European cities have cracked down already — with some success. in c/[email protected]
[–] [email protected] 22 points 11 months ago (2 children)

It’s good news just considering that Peter #Thiel is a stakeholding¹ cofounder of airbnb. This is the same motherfucker who got Trump into power in 2016 by using Cambridge Analytica, Facebook and Thiel’s dark money contributions -- which more recently got JD Vance into power. Also the same xenophobic scumbag motherfucker behind Palantir. The same piece of shit who cofounded PayPal (a surveillance capitalist). Thiel’s profits are detrimental to the world.

¹ to be clear he was a stakeholder ~10 years ago… not sure if that’s still the case.

français → anglais translation help wanted for a paragraph of legal text in c/[email protected]
[–] [email protected] 3 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (1 children)

Thanks for the insight; that’s quite helpful.

The concept of easements still exists in this area but it seems like easements are not being used for façades, which kind of makes sense. The dispute I’m getting into is over a telecom company that is not serving the whole public. They are discriminatory and exclusive. I consider it an injustice that they can arbitrarily drill into people’s houses to support a “public” service which they then exclude some people from access (including owners of the homes they are drilling). Property owners then have a burden of paying €10 per cable to give notice by registered letter to all telecoms using their façade whenever a homeowner wants to perform work on their own façade.

That’s why I am looking closely at this law. I found nothing in the law that requires telecoms to be inclusive.

Belgian election information in English for Tor users (some political parties are blocking some people from election info) in c/[email protected]
[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago

Looks like PTB has the right idea with digital rights:

https://fedia.io/m/Brussels/t/1066667/Belgian-tax-law-FisconetPlus-exclusively-accessible-to-those-willing-to

Ecolo as well, which supports public money → public code

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