activistPnk

An important part of the Youtube content is the transcript at the bottom of the video description. There are some 3rd-party sites that collect and share the YT transcripts separately but then the naive admins put the service in Cloudflare’s walled garden, which is worse than YT itself and purpose-defeating to a large extent. (exceptionally this service is CF-free, but it says “Transcript is disabled on this video” in my test: https://youtubetranscript.io)

Invidious should be picking up the slack here.

And Lemmy could do better by automatically fetching the transcript of youtube/invidious links and include it, perhaps spoiler style like this.

The linked PDF is the EU’s proposal to amend the current ADR¹ policy. One favorable change for consumers is that traders will have a duty to respond to the ADR agencies. But I also see regressions for consumers. E.g. the EU wants to remove the requirement that traders inform consumers about ADR entities. I only read the first 6 pages or so but it looks like the changes will overall weaken consumer protection.

I try to consume as little as possible and live somewhat as a minimalist. But I still get ripped off plenty and want protection. OTOH, I wonder if weakened consumer protections will perhaps create more minimalists who ditch their consumerist habits out of frustration with lack of protections.

¹ alternative dispute resolution

I browse with images disabled. But sometimes I encounter a post where I want to see the image, like this one:

https://iejideks5zu2v3zuthaxu5zz6m5o2j7vmbd24wh6dnuiyl7c6rfkcryd.onion/@JosephMeyer@c.im/112923392848232303

When opening that link in a browser configured to fetch images, it redirects to the original instance, which is inside an access-restricted walled garden. This seems like a new behaviour for Mastodon thus may be a regression.

It’s a terrible design because it needlessly forces people on open decentralised networks into centralised walled gardens. The behaviour arises out of the incorrect assumption that everyone has equal access. As Cloudflare proves, access equality is non-existent. The perversion in this particular case is an onion is redirecting to Cloudflare (an adversary to all those who have onion access).

There should be two separate links to each post: one to the source node, and one to the mirror. This kind of automatic redirect is detrimental. Lemmy demonstrates the better approach of giving two links and not redirecting. (But Lemmy has that problem of not mirroring images).

cross-posted from: https://slrpnk.net/post/12108012

The EU guarantees most people a right to open a “basic”¹ bank account. Superficially that sounds good, but of course having a right to open a bank account implies that you can then be expected to have an account. It’s an enabler for the #warOnCash. The right to a bank account is a masquerade of freedom from which oppression manifests.

Anyway, you have to ask: do you really have a “right” to open a basic bank account if the procedure for opening the account is inherently exclusive? That is, if a bank only offers a basic account to people who are online, doesn’t a problem arise when this right to an account then leads to an assumption that everyone has an account?

Some banks take the requirement to offer basic accounts seriously by making the application a static PDF which can also be obtained on paper form. So the only thing you need is a pen (to open the account and presumably to use it). But it’s bizarre some banks put the application for their basic account exclusively in an interactive online format. Are offline people just getting “lucky” if a bank happens to offer a basic account application on paper?

¹ “basic” is not just common language here. It refers to a specific type of account that fulfills specific legal criteria.

The EU guarantees most people a right to open a “basic”¹ bank account. Superficially that sounds good, but of course having a right to open a bank account implies that you can then be expected to have an account. It’s an enabler for the #warOnCash. The right to a bank account is a masquerade of freedom from which oppression manifests.

Anyway, you have to ask: do you really have a “right” to open a basic bank account if the procedure for opening the account is inherently exclusive? That is, if a bank only offers a basic account to people who are online, doesn’t a problem arise when this right to an account then leads to an assumption that everyone has an account?

Some banks take the requirement to offer basic accounts seriously by making the application a static PDF which can also be obtained on paper form. So the only thing you need is a pen (to open the account and presumably to use it). But it’s bizarre some banks put the application for their basic account exclusively in an interactive online format. Are offline people just getting “lucky” if a bank happens to offer a basic account application on paper?

¹ “basic” is not just common language here. It refers to a specific type of account that fulfills specific legal criteria.

There are some very slow nodes (like Beehaw) where the server is apparently so overworked it cannot render a login form most of the time. The browser times out waiting. In the rare moments that there is a login opportunity, about ½ the time the login fails with a 2 second popup saying “incorrect login credentials”.

It’s quite terrible because obviously users would assume their account has been deleted

because that’s how most online services work. Admins do not generally give warnings or say why an account is deleted. They just hit the delete button. Like Marvin in Office Space who was not told he was laid off.. they just “fixed the payroll glitch”. This is generally how communication works on communication platforms.. admins just pull the plug.

So because of how people learn that their account is deleted, users cannot distinguish a purposeful account removal from a faulty server. If you have a Beehaw account and you are told “incorrect login credentials”, don’t believe it. Keep trying. Eventually you’ll get in.

ecfr.gov used to be a decent source for looking up laws. When looking up the anti spam laws, the linked page is littered with links to an access-restricted Cloudflare site (www.govinfo.gov). The important parts of the law are missing from ecfr.gov. It’s common for various states to have this mom-pop shop competency level, but tragic and embarrassing that the US feds lack competency to the point of Cloudflare-dependency.

Often Cornell University publishes federal law and mitigates the embarrassment to some extent. But when looking up the CAN-SPAM law at Cornell, the Cornell law site redirects to another access-restricted Cloudflare site (www.gpo.gov).

There needs to be a fundamental high-level that requires all laws to be accessible to all people, not just people who Cloudflare is willing to give access to.

If you need to pay someone in the US, it’s interesting that you can walk into the bank used by the recipient and make a deposit into their account. You just need to know their account number and IIRC that even works with cash. There is generally no fee. Sometimes tenants and landlords have that arrangement.

Anyone know if that’s possible in Europe? Does it depend on the bank? I know the conventional way in Europe is to bring cash into the post office, and the post office will take the cash and transfer the money to the recipient. But there is a transaction fee and I think a restriction as well that the payer must be a resident. Can a payer go direct to the recipient’s bank and get service, ideally without a fee?

In the stock Lemmy web client there is apparently no mechanism for users to fetch their history of posts. The settings page gives only a way to download settings. This contrasts with Mastodon where users can grab an archive of everything they have posted which is still stored on the server.

Or am I missing something?

IIUC, there is no GDPR issue here because no data is personal (because all Lemmy accounts are anonymous). But if a Lemmy server were to hypothetically require users to identify themselves with first+last name, then the admin would have a substantial manual burden to comply with GDPR Art.20 requests. Correct?

cross-posted from: https://slrpnk.net/post/11937000

The article is normally paywalled but I prefixed 12ft.io/ to it, which worked for me. Google supposedly quit caching websites but old caches are still reachable with 12ft.io.

The UK’s GDPR might make it hard for banks to use people’s purchase data to derive their alcohol & tobacco habits, so apparently banks have to rely on interviews. Still, it would be foolish to rely on the GDPR. There are also stories of banks looking at spending data to deny mortgages, which I would guess is happening in a place without privacy safeguards like the US.

I’ll quote the article here as well:

Homebuyers could be forced to provide detailed information about the amount of money they spend on alcohol each month to qualify for a new mortgage under a new clampdown on reckless lending.

In a sweeping review of the mortgage market published today, the Financial Services Authority (FSA) said lenders needed to be far more rigorous about their financial checks of potential borrowers.

It said lenders should delve deeper into homebuyers’ personal spending including the amount they spend on alcohol and tobacco.

Spending on shoes, clothes and childcare could also be assessed under a new, industry-wide “affordability test”.

At present, the FSA does not prescribe rules about assessing a consumers’ ability to repay a mortgage and practices vary from one lender to the next.

In its document, the City regulator said: “There is clearly a responsibility on all lenders to extend credit only where a consumer can afford it and, in our view, a robust assessment of both income and expenditure is key to ensuring affordable mortgages.

“We propose to require all lenders to assess the level of a consumer’s expenditure in determining the affordability of a mortgage product, to ensure that lending decisions are based on a consumer’s free disposable income.”

It conceded though that there were some flaws with its plan with consumers potentially underestimating their spend or “failing to incorporate past experiences into their budgeting”.

The new measures, which aim to stamp out risky lending that has been criticised for compounding the financial crisis and tipping hundreds of thousands of homebuyers into negative equity, also include a plan to ban self-certified mortgages, dubbed “liar’s loans”, and to stop lenders from exploiting consumers who have fallen behind on their mortgage payments.

It also proposed that the FSA should regulate mortgages for landlords for the first time.

Self-certification mortgages were aimed at self-employed people with irregular incomes. The mortgages, which did not require proof of income, accounted for one third of new loans in 2007.

Their proposed banning was first revealed in The Times last week.

But the FSA stopped short of ruling out “supersized mortgages” by introducing caps on loan-to-value, loan-to-income or debt-to-income multiples.

Such mortgages were typified by Northern Rock which, at the height of the housing boom, offered 125 per cent home loan deals.

Gordon Brown wrote in a newspaper article at the weekend that it was “critical we end reckless banking practices that have left so many people worried about their finances”.

Jon Pain, managing director of supervision at the FSA, said: “The mortgage market has seen extraordinary upheaval over the past 18 months and while it has worked well for the vast majority of borrowers, some have suffered great financial distress. We recognise that we need to bring about a step change in regulation.”

He said there had been a “mutual assumption by too many borrowers and lenders that the good times could not end.”

The new reforms, he said, would ensure firms “only lend to people who can afford to pay back the money”.

But mortgage experts questioned the ease of imposing some of the new measures and expressed concern about the possible impact on homebuyers.

Ray Boulger, mortgage expert at John Charcol, said the new affordability test could prove difficult to implement. “I think it will be very difficult in practice to go into too much detail,” he said.

Homebuyers, he said, often forget the detail of their spending. “They will remember the weekly shop but not the £3 they spend on a sandwich each day.”

Paul Broadhead, head of mortgage policy at the Building Societies Association, said he had “significant reservations about the possible unintended consequences of some of the ideas.”

He said: “We believe that home ownership is something that should be encouraged, and it is vital that lenders retain the flexibility to respond to the very individual financial circumstances of individual borrowers.”

He added that self-certification mortgages were suitable for a minority of people and that an outright ban was “not appropriate.”

The Council of Mortgage Lenders said it was “important that the principle of consumer responsibility is not lost in such a regulatory environment, as it is a basic tenet upon which transactions of all kinds between firms and consumers rely”.

The report said there was a “clear and non-controversial case” for banning self-certification mortgages, instead compelling lenders to insist that customers provide evidence of their income.

“Our analysis shows that self-cert borrowers take out larger loan amounts than borrowers with standard products and fall into arrears much more frequently. To address these issues we propose to require verification of income for all mortgage applications,” it said.

The loans have been vilified as a significant contributor to the banks’ toxic loans problem because some customers have lied about their income. Defaults on self-cert repayments have been at much higher rates than the industry average.

HBOS and Bradford & Bingley were among the biggest self-cert lenders. HBOS was sold to Lloyds TSB in a rescue deal in September last year and B&B collapsed and had to be partially nationalised.

The plan to bring mortgages for landlords into the FSA’s scope for the first time was necessary the regulator said because of the big part the industry had played in “fuelling property price appreciation”

The FSA said: “As well as being a general contributor, buy-to-let funding funding has particularly helped to inflate prices of certain property types and locations such as city centre apartments.

“The overall impact on house prices inevitably has implications for our interest in the sustainability of the mortgage market.”

The market for buy-to-let mortgages has grown rapidly. Gross advances grew from £3.1 billion in 1999 to £44.6 billion in 2007.

The paper has been put out for consultation until early next year with a “feedback statement” to be published in March.

The article is normally paywalled but I prefixed 12ft.io/ to it, which worked for me. Google supposedly quit caching websites but old caches are still reachable with 12ft.io.

The UK’s GDPR might make it hard for banks to use people’s purchase data to derive their alcohol & tobacco habits, so apparently banks have to rely on interviews. Still, it would be foolish to rely on the GDPR. There are also stories of banks looking at spending data to deny mortgages, which I would guess is happening in a place without privacy safeguards like the US.

I’ll quote the article here as well:

Homebuyers could be forced to provide detailed information about the amount of money they spend on alcohol each month to qualify for a new mortgage under a new clampdown on reckless lending.

In a sweeping review of the mortgage market published today, the Financial Services Authority (FSA) said lenders needed to be far more rigorous about their financial checks of potential borrowers.

It said lenders should delve deeper into homebuyers’ personal spending including the amount they spend on alcohol and tobacco.

Spending on shoes, clothes and childcare could also be assessed under a new, industry-wide “affordability test”.

At present, the FSA does not prescribe rules about assessing a consumers’ ability to repay a mortgage and practices vary from one lender to the next.

In its document, the City regulator said: “There is clearly a responsibility on all lenders to extend credit only where a consumer can afford it and, in our view, a robust assessment of both income and expenditure is key to ensuring affordable mortgages.

“We propose to require all lenders to assess the level of a consumer’s expenditure in determining the affordability of a mortgage product, to ensure that lending decisions are based on a consumer’s free disposable income.”

It conceded though that there were some flaws with its plan with consumers potentially underestimating their spend or “failing to incorporate past experiences into their budgeting”.

The new measures, which aim to stamp out risky lending that has been criticised for compounding the financial crisis and tipping hundreds of thousands of homebuyers into negative equity, also include a plan to ban self-certified mortgages, dubbed “liar’s loans”, and to stop lenders from exploiting consumers who have fallen behind on their mortgage payments.

It also proposed that the FSA should regulate mortgages for landlords for the first time.

Self-certification mortgages were aimed at self-employed people with irregular incomes. The mortgages, which did not require proof of income, accounted for one third of new loans in 2007.

Their proposed banning was first revealed in The Times last week.

But the FSA stopped short of ruling out “supersized mortgages” by introducing caps on loan-to-value, loan-to-income or debt-to-income multiples.

Such mortgages were typified by Northern Rock which, at the height of the housing boom, offered 125 per cent home loan deals.

Gordon Brown wrote in a newspaper article at the weekend that it was “critical we end reckless banking practices that have left so many people worried about their finances”.

Jon Pain, managing director of supervision at the FSA, said: “The mortgage market has seen extraordinary upheaval over the past 18 months and while it has worked well for the vast majority of borrowers, some have suffered great financial distress. We recognise that we need to bring about a step change in regulation.”

He said there had been a “mutual assumption by too many borrowers and lenders that the good times could not end.”

The new reforms, he said, would ensure firms “only lend to people who can afford to pay back the money”.

But mortgage experts questioned the ease of imposing some of the new measures and expressed concern about the possible impact on homebuyers.

Ray Boulger, mortgage expert at John Charcol, said the new affordability test could prove difficult to implement. “I think it will be very difficult in practice to go into too much detail,” he said.

Homebuyers, he said, often forget the detail of their spending. “They will remember the weekly shop but not the £3 they spend on a sandwich each day.”

Paul Broadhead, head of mortgage policy at the Building Societies Association, said he had “significant reservations about the possible unintended consequences of some of the ideas.”

He said: “We believe that home ownership is something that should be encouraged, and it is vital that lenders retain the flexibility to respond to the very individual financial circumstances of individual borrowers.”

He added that self-certification mortgages were suitable for a minority of people and that an outright ban was “not appropriate.”

The Council of Mortgage Lenders said it was “important that the principle of consumer responsibility is not lost in such a regulatory environment, as it is a basic tenet upon which transactions of all kinds between firms and consumers rely”.

The report said there was a “clear and non-controversial case” for banning self-certification mortgages, instead compelling lenders to insist that customers provide evidence of their income.

“Our analysis shows that self-cert borrowers take out larger loan amounts than borrowers with standard products and fall into arrears much more frequently. To address these issues we propose to require verification of income for all mortgage applications,” it said.

The loans have been vilified as a significant contributor to the banks’ toxic loans problem because some customers have lied about their income. Defaults on self-cert repayments have been at much higher rates than the industry average.

HBOS and Bradford & Bingley were among the biggest self-cert lenders. HBOS was sold to Lloyds TSB in a rescue deal in September last year and B&B collapsed and had to be partially nationalised.

The plan to bring mortgages for landlords into the FSA’s scope for the first time was necessary the regulator said because of the big part the industry had played in “fuelling property price appreciation”

The FSA said: “As well as being a general contributor, buy-to-let funding funding has particularly helped to inflate prices of certain property types and locations such as city centre apartments.

“The overall impact on house prices inevitably has implications for our interest in the sustainability of the mortgage market.”

The market for buy-to-let mortgages has grown rapidly. Gross advances grew from £3.1 billion in 1999 to £44.6 billion in 2007.

The paper has been put out for consultation until early next year with a “feedback statement” to be published in March.

These environment variables designate a parameter that holds the value of a HTTP proxy:

• http_proxy
• https_proxy
• HTTP_PROXY
• HTTPS_PROXY

It’s a convention, but the name “HTTP proxy” can only imply HTTP proxy, not a SOCKS proxy. The golang¹ standard libraries expect the above HTTP proxy parameters to specify a SOCKS proxy. How embarrassing is that? So any Go app that offers a proxy feature replicates getting the proxy kind backwards. Such as hydroxide, which requires passing a SOCKS proxy as a HTTP proxy.

¹ “Go” is such a shitty unsearchable name for a language. It’s no surprise that the developers of the language infra itself struggle with the nuances of natural language. HTTP≠SOCKS. And IIUC, this language is a product of Google. WTF. It’s the kind of amateurish screwup you would expect to come from some teenager’s mom’s basement, not a fortune 500 company among the world’s biggest tech giants.

(edit)
It’s a bit amusing and simultaneously disasappointing that reporting bugs and suggesting enhancements to Google’s language requires using Microsoft’s platform:

https://github.com/golang/proposal#the-proposal-process

FOSS developers: plz avoid Golang - it’s a shit show.