overview for freedomPusher

What a CASHLESS society REALLY means in c/[email protected]

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

Prepaid cards are neither gratis nor anonymous in some countries.

(mbin) mechanism needed for users to block whole instances, not just magazines in c/[email protected]

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (7 children)

Let me clarify that Lemmy very much has a global feed of all instances

Oh, indeed. I just noticed Lemmy’s choice between subscribed, local, all, and moderated views. Subscribed is the default and that’s what I’ve always used. If I choose the global view, it’s indeed the same problem as mbin (users can only block on a per-community basis). ~~Mbin offers only the global view on the non-community-specific timeline.~~ (edit: actually it’s like Lemmy; there are different views to choose from, but global is the default)

This is the fediverse,

Exactly. It’s a platform designed for decentralisation. It attracts users who advocate more balance of power and more control by users.

why would those non commercial instances be a problem for you?

The fediverse was constructed with a broader vision. It’s not simply a narrow effort to avoid commercialization. Facebook Threads proves that if the fedi’s sole goal were to avoid commercialization, it would have been a failure.

Because they have too many users? Is decentralization for you not having any real traffic?

Perversely disportionate ~~traffic~~ concentration of control is obviously what the federated design was motivated to avoid. Otherwise, Twitter’s premium service is for you. Many inbound refugees came from Reddit, which suffers from the sharpest abuses of power I’ve ever experienced. They aren’t running from ads. They are fleeing from disempowerment. Of course the ones who have fled into another centralised node have naïvely just swapped one power imbalance for another, pawning themselves to a different master, while making themselves part of the same social problem.

First projections of EU Parliament election results in c/[email protected]

[–] [email protected] 14 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (4 children)

Young voters did this, ironically enough, according to BBC World News. Young people struggling to get jobs after graduation think that right wing parties will fix that.

So as older generations are trying not to hand-off a burning planet to the young, the young are signing up for a burning planet under some delusion that right wingers will get them jobs. Schools have apparently failed to teach kids that the jobs they get under conservative governance are shit jobs -- lousy pay and lousy benefits.

First projections of EU Parliament election results in c/[email protected]

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

My god… “Consumer power” is a myth, there’s no evidence of it working for anything significant.

I guess you are not following Gaza. McDonalds in Israel decided to give free meals to Israeli soldiers. McDonalds customers who boycott Israel impacted McDonalds’ bottom line. And it’s a franchise. The McDonalds shops in Israel had different ownership than McDonalds outside Israel (where the boycott was impacting). So in response McDonalds HQ directly bought out all Israeli branches in order to stop the support to Israeli troops, just to protect their brand.

Lidl and Aldi both started taking a hit in Europe because their produce from Israel was being boycotted. Aldi got caught removing the origin label from their produce when Israel was the origin. Lidl got caught falsifying the label by displaying a different region. If the boycott was insignificant, there would be insufficient motivation for a grocery chain to commit fraud against their customers. So I boycott the whole Lidl chain and Aldi North, not just Israeli products.

Organize your workplace

Or boycott without organising, as this person did:

https://slrpnk.net/post/4687232

Here’s what does not work: not boycotting.

Boycotts only lack effect when in fact they are not executed. IOW, the apathy you advocate weakens the strength of boycotts. The shitty attitude that boycotts don’t work is the sole factor that disempowers boycotts from working.

All official vote results, exit polls and projections from across the EU in c/[email protected]

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Indeed. And it’s worth noting as well that Cloudflare encourages admins to deploy heavy websites, pushes graphical CAPTCHA (which adds weight), and makes text browsers less usable. So I boycott Cloudflare, as well as Google, Amazon, and Microsoft. Lemmy.world uses CF, so changing instances to get off Cloudflare is also a climate action.

First projections of EU Parliament election results in c/[email protected]

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

It seems anti-immigration is driving all these right wing votes. And xenophobia manifests from the naïve idea that immigrants will somehow reduce incomes.

First projections of EU Parliament election results in c/[email protected]

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (3 children)

Well, you can vote harder. The polls are not the only place you vote. Every purchase is a vote. Most people neglect their consumer power. I’m boycotting hundreds (if not thousands) of harmful companies and products, including Amazon. You can always vote harder by investigating the shops and brands you support. You can investigate whether your bank invests in the fossil fuel energy and change banks (or better, become unbanked). You can follow the [email protected] community.

E.g. certainly one small thing @[email protected] can do is ditch sh.itjust.works for a different instance. Website weight has quadrupled since Cloudflare took hold because CF encourages web admins to create heavy websites. sh.itjust.works is CF-based.

All official vote results, exit polls and projections from across the EU in c/[email protected]

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (3 children)

Indeed. What a setback. I will continue practicing individual climate action ([email protected]), which is the only control we have now.

Cancelling Belgian candidates who overtly use exclusive forms of social media in c/[email protected]

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

Can you clarify your objections? Are you refusing candidates who use walled gardens prominently or only ones who use walled gardens exclusively, with no public webpage?

They must be reachable from the open free-world, thus have a comms mechanism that is not exclusive. If their flyer has only FB, Twtr, gmail, etc, they are cancelled. I’m hard and fast about a flyer ending up in my box that tries to force me into a walled garden because it’s being shoved in my face.

If they have a public¹ webpage, that can be good enough. But then consider Olivier De Schutter. He has all the offending social networks, nothing open except a truly public website. But then the “contact” page just prints a gmail address. I’m ½ tempted to nix him, but OTOH the public website at least gives the public access to his proposals. Maybe good enough.

And I’m unfamiliar with your objections around email hosts entirely. Can you explain those?

Google and Microsoft block RFC compliant email to a large extent. I cannot send an email to a gmail user because Google discriminates against my IP address, even though no spam has ever come from my network. It’s purely a manifestation of Google using a crude and reckless practice of IP reputation where earning a bad reputation is automatic if you are a residential subscriber. Microsoft is even worse than Google in this regard. Those two corps together with SpamHaus have broken email by making it exclusive.

(edit) I should mention it’s not just an exclusivity problem with Google and MS. I boycott those companies for as many reasons as you can fill a book with. Even if they accepted my email, the payload would financially support a surveillance advertising platform that I boycott. And what about security? Foolish for European politicians to share their email with the Americans. Belgian politicians should be using a European email service.

From there, I don’t have the time and energy to investigate the open free-world reachability of all ecolo candidates. Some will probably get a bit lucky with my vote for that reason. But at least I was able to freely reach the ecolo website and grab a big PDF of their platform positions. And that PDF expressed favorable positions on digital rights like inclusion and free software.

¹ by public, I mean truly open to the public, not a Cloudflare page or something that blocks Tor.

Financial Surveillance? PayPal Plots Ad Network Built off Your Purchase History and Shopping Habits in c/[email protected]

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

I cannot see how Paypal is GDPR compliant. Not sure why they have not been fined out of EU existence.

A cashless cafe recently had their “Square” terminal on the counter. I asked: is there a way to pay without using Square?

Answer: no, we use Square because it gives us the best deal.

Of course it does, because Paypal is behind Square and Paypal shares your data with 600 corporations so the fees are subsidized with the monetization of customer data. I walked out. Since I boycott Paypal, it means that small local shops using Square also lose my business.

Financial Surveillance? PayPal Plots Ad Network Built off Your Purchase History and Shopping Habits in c/[email protected]

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

They might as well go all the way. Anyone who gives the slightest shit about privacy has already cancelled #PayPal over the past ~10+ years anyway. Those still using PayPal are obviously pushovers who won’t change their habits over this.

Financial Surveillance? PayPal Plots Ad Network Built off Your Purchase History and Shopping Habits in c/[email protected]

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

This link is a bit more respectful of pro-privacy visitors:

https://thefinrate.com/paypal-to-launch-advanced-advertising-platform-using-customer-data/

1

when DAB radio skips like a broken CD/record (sopuli.xyz)

submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

0 comments fedilink

Sometimes DAB radio stations are playing music that skips like a CD, repeating a short segment like a broken record. It often goes on for quite some time, which is a bit puzzling because surely there is nothing about digital radio tech that would cause this. The skipping never happens during talk radio, only with music.

Are radio stations actually playing CDs? If yes, are these CDs also playing on autopilot with no one at the helm to quickly swap out the disc? Or is it just bad timing.. the CD happened to go to shit while the DJ is literally taking a shit and away from the controls?

The skipping was extremely rare, if ever, on analog radio. So I wonder if DAB has also somehow open things up to very low budget stations with robotic DJs, perhaps due to increased sharable bandwidth or something. Switching from analog FM to DAB tripled the number of stations I can receive.

Why don’t they rip their CDs to FLAC files, then listen to the FLAC files for defects to ensure skipping never happens?

1

Plz, for me, send more faxes. Do it for privacy. (sopuli.xyz)

submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

0 comments fedilink

I just had to send a msg to a gov office.

Email has been generally broken¹ the past couple decades. I prefer fax. It’s more reliable and I choose what I want to disclose to the recipient. Even in cases where part of the fax transmission routes over email, it’s still more reliable than pure email because those fax→email gateways are managed by recipients to ensure all-or-nothing (all faxes are delivered or none of them). Fax is immune to shenanigans like “mail server X accepts mail from Y but not Z”.

When I tried to send the fax, the fax machine did not answer. So I voice called the office. They said “we unplugged our fax machine”. WTF! So I said please plug it back in because I’m trying to send a fax. So a bit later I tried again and it worked.

Folks, we are losing fax because most of the population does not grasp the privacy compromise with email, and the compromise of netneutrality and reliability. If I am the only person in the world who keeps fax in use, fax will die fast because it’s easy to marginalise 1 person.

Footnote 1: Email is shit--

Even if the gov office mail server were to accept my msg, I face the problem of not wanting an email reply and not trusting them not to abuse whatever address I reveal to them. I don’t want to be forced to put Google and Microsoft in the loop on my conversations, to go through their hoops, solve their dkim CAPTCHA, and ultimately I don’t want to be forced to feed profitable data to those surveillance advertisers who have partnered with the oil industry. Google and SpamHaus broke email and the population accepted it. So email can fuck right off.

7

Why the ~~fedi~~ threadiverse has a disproportionate imbalance of centralized mega-nodes: → software deficiency (sopuli.xyz)

submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

12 comments fedilink

cross-posted from: https://sopuli.xyz/post/12944261

The psychology of this problem is that users are too lazy to maintain multiple accounts when all they have is Lemmy’s stock web client. So they choose one of the big nodes: lemmy.world, sh.itjust.works, lemm.ee, lemmy.ca, etc.

These Cloudflare-centralized nodes are able to greedily exploit the #networkEffect because due to lack of multi-account software. If there were some well-made 3rd party client apps for Lemmy that would be designed for multiple accounts, then more users would be willing to create accounts in more decentralized parts of the fedi.

Mastodon somewhat proves this because the client-side tooling is in place to make it convenient to have 6 or Mastodon accounts. And Mastodon nodes are better balanced.

1

If a data controller ignores your GDPR request, you can make an access request for how they handled your request. (sopuli.xyz)

submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

0 comments fedilink

Just a pro tip if you want to build a case against a data controller: when they ignore your GDPR request, don’t simply send them a reminder. Instead, send them a new Article 15 request demanding records on how your previous request was handled. This way when you build a case against them, you can tack on yet another Article 15 violation when they also ignore your request for information about how they handled your request.

Not that it matters.. the GDPR isn’t really being enforced. When the DPA ignores your complaint, you’re basically stuffed anyway.

1

Python script to detect whether a website is in Cloudflare’s walled garden (gist.githubusercontent.com)

submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

0 comments fedilink

Might be useful for some.. but note that it uses CF to get the CIDRs.

6

(Ungoogled Chromium) downloads PDF twice if you view it first (sopuli.xyz)

submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

0 comments fedilink

I cannot believe how stupid Chromium is considering it’s the king of browsers from a US tech giant. It’s another bug that should be embarrassing for Google.

If you visit a PDF, it fetches the PDF and launches pdf.js as expected. If you use the download button within pdf.js, you would expect it to simply copy the already fetched PDF from the cache to the download folder. But no.. the stupid thing goes out on the WAN and redownloads the whole document from the beginning.

I always suspected this, but it became obvious when I recently fetched a 20mb PDF from a slow server. It struggled for a while to get the whole thing just for viewing. Then after clicking to download within pdf.js, it was crawling again from 1% progress.

What a stupid waste of bandwidth, energy and time.

1

(Lemmy) cannot reply to Mastodon threads (sopuli.xyz)

submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

0 comments fedilink

Searching for this link from sopuli.xyz yields nothing:

https://mastodon.social/@madeindex/112441311556219112

So there is no way to participate in federated discussion from Lemmy if it originates using Mastodon software.

1

(Mastodon) logged out users now denied access to cached versions of posts, making some content unreachable to some people + Cloudflare now falsifies Mastodon errors (sopuli.xyz)

submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

0 comments fedilink

cross-posted from: https://sopuli.xyz/post/12874750

Mastodon used to show people the mirrored version of federated content which shielded users from Cloudflare’s discriminatory blockade. But something apparently changed. If I try to visit this mirror of a mastodonapp.uk status on layer8.space:

https://layer8.space/@[email protected]/112387605497275701

it redirects to:

https://mastodonapp.uk/@tmmj/112387605489133663

which is apparently a shitty Cloudflare node that deceives us into thinking the account does not exist. If you are logged into the mirrored node, then it does not redirect and you can see the content. Of course, only if you have an account on the mirror which means anonymous viewing is no longer possible.

If I want to share that layer8.space link with other people, it would be an injustice to share the mastodonapp.uk link because it’s in a walled garden that excludes people. It would be like sharing a Facebook link with an audience that includes people outside of Facebook. So naturally I would share the layer8.space version because layer8.space allows all people to visit. But now this is impossible. Cloudflare’s stranglehold of control has been increased by this Mastodon move.

Worse, Cloudflare has started pushing error code 404, not 403. So CF is misrepresenting the error to suggest that the page does not exist. Cloudflare has carte blanche in fucking up the web. A 404 error is supposed to inform users that an object is not found, not that they are not authorised to access it.

The attached image is what Cloudflare-excluded people see when trying to visit this image:

https://files.mastodonapp.uk/media_attachments/files/112/387/580/865/787/635/original/f4442c8789ad52c2.png

2

Did Mastodon quit shielding people blocked by Cloudflare? Why did the error code change to 404? (sopuli.xyz)

submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

0 comments fedilink

Mastodon used to show people the mirrored version of federated content which shielded users from Cloudflare’s discriminatory blockade. But something apparently changed. If I try to visit this mirror of a mastodonapp.uk status on layer8.space:

https://layer8.space/@[email protected]/112387605497275701

it redirects to:

https://mastodonapp.uk/@tmmj/112387605489133663

which is apparently a shitty Cloudflare node that deceives us into thinking the account does not exist. If you are logged into the mirrored node, then it does not redirect and you can see the content. Of course, only if you have an account on the mirror which means anonymous viewing is no longer possible.

If I want to share that layer8.space link with other people, it would be an injustice to share the mastodonapp.uk link because it’s in a walled garden that excludes people. It would be like sharing a Facebook link with an audience that includes people outside of Facebook. So naturally I would share the layer8.space version because layer8.space allows all people to visit. But now this is impossible. Cloudflare’s stranglehold of control has been increased by this Mastodon move.

Worse, Cloudflare has started pushing error code 404, not 403. So CF is misrepresenting the error to suggest that the page does not exist. Cloudflare has carte blanche in fucking up the web. A 404 error is supposed to inform users that an object is not found, not that they are not authorised to access it.

The attached image is what Cloudflare-excluded people see when trying to visit this image:

https://files.mastodonapp.uk/media_attachments/files/112/387/580/865/787/635/original/f4442c8789ad52c2.png

6

(Lemmy) Images from Cloudflared instances are blocked to everyone who CF blocks -- centralisation prevails in the fedi (sopuli.xyz)

submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

0 comments fedilink

cross-posted from: https://sopuli.xyz/post/12858874

When an image is posted by someone on a Cloudflared instance like the following:

#LemmyWorld

#ShitJustworks

#LemmyCA

#LemmyEE

#LemmyZip

#LemmyOne

the image is inaccessible to all demographics of people who Cloudflare discriminates against because images are not mirrored to federated nodes.

We expect corporations to not give a shit about marginising people who are not profitable enough to care about. But when naive asshole users outnumber progressive egalitarians, it highlights a problem with the fedi, which still lacks the tooling needed to keep oppression at bay.

The six listed nodes above effectively host the AOL users of our time. Lacking the sophistication needed to detect and grasp situations of eroded digital rights with a degree of blindness and lack of concern for centralised corporate control.

Suggestions needed for Lemmy nodes that are defederated from the above listed six.

4

Images from Cloudflared Lemmy instances are blocked to everyone who CF blocks -- no mirroring despite federation (sopuli.xyz)

submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

0 comments fedilink

When an image is posted by someone on a Cloudflared instance like the following:

#LemmyWorld
#ShitJustworks
#LemmyCA
#LemmyEE
#LemmyZip
#LemmyOne

the image is inaccessible to all demographics of people who Cloudflare discriminates against because images are not mirrored to federated nodes.

We expect corporations to not give a shit about marginising people who are not profitable enough to care about. But when naive asshole users outnumber progressive egalitarians, it highlights a problem with the fedi, which still lacks the tooling needed to keep oppression at bay.

The six listed nodes above effectively host the AOL users of our time. Lacking the sophistication needed to detect and grasp situations of eroded digital rights with a degree of blindness and lack of concern for centralised corporate control.

Suggestions needed for Lemmy nodes that are defederated from the above listed six.

1

Forced use of e-receipts in Europe → forced data sharing with MS and Google (no data minimisation?) (web.archive.org)

submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

0 comments fedilink

cross-posted from: https://sopuli.xyz/post/12558862

So here’s a disturbing development. Suppose you pay cash to settle a debt or to pay for something in advance, where you are not walking out of the store with a product. You obviously want a receipt on the spot proving that you handed cash over. This option is ending.

It’s fair enough that France wants to put a stop to people receiving paper receipts they don’t want, which then litter the street. But it’s not just an environmental move; there is a #forcedDigitalTransformation / #warOnCash element to this. From the article:

In Belgium: since 2014, merchants can choose to provide a paper or digital receipt to their customers, if they¹ request it.

What if I don’t agree to share an email address with a creditor? What if the creditor uses Google or Microsoft for email service, and I boycott those companies? Boycotting means not sharing any data with them (because the data is profitable). IIUC, the Belgian creditor can say “accept our Microsoft-emailed receipt or fuck off.” If you don’t carry a smartphone that is subscribed to a data plan, and trust a smartphone with email transactions, then you cannot see that you’ve received the email before you leave after paying cash. Even if you do have a data plan and are trusting enough to use a smartphone for email, and you trust all parties handling the email, there is always a chance the sender’s mail server is graylisted, which means the email could take a day to reach you. Not to mention countless opportunities for the email to fail or get lost.

It’s such a fucked up idea to let merchants choose. If it’s a point of sale, then no problem… I can simply walk if they refuse a paper receipt (though even that’s dicey because I’ve seen merchants refuse instant returns after they’ve put your money in the cash register).

But what about creditors? If you owe a debt and the transaction fails because they won’t give you a paper receipt and you won’t agree to info sharing with a surveillance advertiser, then you can be treated as a delinquent debtor.

Google, Facebook, Amazon, and Microsoft must be celebrating these e-receipts because they have been working quite hard to track people’s offline commerce.

It’s obviously an encroachment of the data minimisation principle under the GDPR. More data is being collected than necessary.

¹ This is really shitty wording. Who is /they/? If it’s the customer, that’s fine. But in that case, why did the sentence start with “merchants can choose…”? Surely it can only mean merchants have the choice if they make a request to regulators.