freedomPusher

cross-posted from: https://sopuli.xyz/post/13133455

It used to be that you could insert a coin into a washing machine and it would simply work. Now some Danish and German apartment owners have decided it’s a good idea to remove the cash payment option. So you have to visit a website and top-up your laundry account before using the laundry room.

Is this wise?

Points of failure with traditional coin-fed systems:

1. your coin gets stuck
2. you don’t have the right denomination of coins

Points of failure with this KYC cashless gung-ho digital transformation system:

1. your internet service goes down
2. the internet service of the laundry room goes down
3. the website is incompatible with your browser
4. the website forces 3rd party JavaScript that’s either broken or you don’t trust it
5. you cannot (or will not) solve CAPTCHA
6. the website rejects your IP address because it is a shared IP
7. the payment processor rejects your IP address because it is a shared IP
8. the bank rejects your IP address because it is a shared IP
9. the payment processor is Paypal and you do not want to share sensitive financial data with 600 corporations
10. the accepted payment forms do not match your payment cards
11. the accepted payment form matches, but your card is still rejected anyway for one of many undisclosed reasons:
    • your card is on the same network but foreign cards are refused
    • the payment processor does not like your IP address
    • the copy of your ID doc on file with the bank expired, and the bank’s way of telling you is to freeze your card
    • it’s one of these new online-only bank cards with no CVV code printed on the card so to get your CVV code you must install their app from Google’s Playstore (this expands into 20+ more points of failure)
12. your bank account is literally below the top-up minimum because you only have cash and your cashless bank does not accept cash deposits; so you cannot do laundry until you get a paycheck or arrange for an electronic transfer from a foreign bank at the cost of an extortionate exchange rate
13. you cannot open a bank account because Danish banks refuse to serve people who do not yet have their CPR number (a process that takes at least 1 month).
14. you are unbanked because of one of 24 reasons that Bruce Schneier does not know about
15. the internet works when you start the wash load, but fails sometime during the program so you cannot use the dryers; in which case you suddenly have to run out and buy hanging mechanisms as your wet clothes sit.
16. (edit) the app of your bank and/or the laundry service demands a newer phone OS than you have, and your phone maker quit offering updates.

In my case, I was hit with point of failure number 11. Payment processors never tell you why your payment is refused. They either give a uselessly vague error, or the web UI just refuses to move forward with no error, or the error is an intentional lie. Because e.g. if your payment is refused you are presumed to be a criminal unworthy of being informed.

Danish apartment management’s response to complaints: We are not obligated to serve you. Read the terms of your lease. There is a coin-operated laundromat 1km away.

Question: are we all being forced into this shitty cashless situation in order to ease the hunt for criminals?

The cost of sending a registered letter has become extortionate (as has the cost of postage in general). So I have started delivering documents by hand instead of using the post. I have my own database of numbers just like the post office. I print the unique number of the article on the article and also on a custom form for which the recipient must sign to receive.

For example, I print “livraison recommandée n°003” on the envelope and “Recommandé N°003” on the form they sign. Someone complained saying “this is not a recommandé”. My French is dysfunctional so I have no idea how I should be referring to this number. Is “recommandée” a word reserved for the post office? What phrase should I be using?

Should I just drop the “recommandée” and say “livraison n°003”? Sometimes instead of using my own form I use the post offices form which has on it “Recommandé N°”. Should I strike out “Recommandé” and write something else?

update

I tried context.reverso.net and found these translations in an effort to distinguish a “registered letter” from “recorded delivery”:

①
(en) Any claims must be presented within 30 days of the service provided by registered letter with recorded delivery.
→ (fr) Toute réclamation doit être adressée sous 30 jours après la prestation par courrier recommandé avec accusé de réception.

②
(en) All eventual complaints concerning the non-conformity of services in relation to contractual engagements may be indicated by registered mail with recorded delivery or email to Parc Résidentiel de Loisirs L'Escapade.
→ (fr) Toute réclamation éventuelle concernant la non-conformité des prestations par rapport aux engagements contractuels peut être signalée par courrier recommandé avec avis de réception ou e-mail au PRL L'ESCAPADE.

So I think “accusé de réception” or “d'avis de réception” is the phrase I need. Can any francophones confirm? Is one phrase better than the other?

Nano Garden was a node for the Nano cryptocurrency. There is was a “cashless society” community which is now a ghost community:

https://sopuli.xyz/c/cashless_society@nano.garden

I would normally say refugees should move to !cash@slrpnk.net, but it looks like there aren’t many refugees. It always was relatively dead. Which is a shame. There needs to be more people talking about the consequences of #forcedBanking.

cross-posted from: https://sopuli.xyz/post/13133455

It used to be that you could insert a coin into a washing machine and it would simply work. Now some Danish and German apartment owners have decided it’s a good idea to remove the cash payment option. So you have to visit a website and top-up your laundry account before using the laundry room.

Is this wise?

Points of failure with traditional coin-fed systems:

1. your coin gets stuck
2. you don’t have the right denomination of coins

Points of failure with this KYC cashless gung-ho digital transformation system:

1. your internet service goes down
2. the internet service of the laundry room goes down
3. the website is incompatible with your browser
4. the website forces 3rd party JavaScript that’s either broken or you don’t trust it
5. you cannot (or will not) solve CAPTCHA
6. the website rejects your IP address because it is a shared IP
7. the payment processor rejects your IP address because it is a shared IP
8. the bank rejects your IP address because it is a shared IP
9. the payment processor is Paypal and you do not want to share sensitive financial data with 600 corporations
10. the accepted payment forms do not match your payment cards
11. the accepted payment form matches, but your card is still rejected anyway for one of many undisclosed reasons:
    • your card is on the same network but foreign cards are refused
    • the payment processor does not like your IP address
    • the copy of your ID doc on file with the bank expired, and the bank’s way of telling you is to freeze your card
    • it’s one of these new online-only bank cards with no CVV code printed on the card so to get your CVV code you must install their app from Google’s Playstore (this expands into 20+ more points of failure)
12. your bank account is literally below the top-up minimum because you only have cash and your cashless bank does not accept cash deposits; so you cannot do laundry until you get a paycheck or arrange for an electronic transfer from a foreign bank at the cost of an extortionate exchange rate
13. you cannot open a bank account because Danish banks refuse to serve people who do not yet have their CPR number (a process that takes at least 1 month).
14. you are unbanked because of one of 24 reasons that Bruce Schneier does not know about
15. the internet works when you start the wash load, but fails sometime during the program so you cannot use the dryers; in which case you suddenly have to run out and buy hanging mechanisms as your wet clothes sit.

In my case, I was hit with point of failure number 11. Payment processors never tell you why your payment is refused. They either give a uselessly vague error, or the web UI just refuses to move forward with no error, or the error is an intentional lie. Because e.g. if your payment is refused you are presumed to be a criminal unworthy of being informed.

Danish apartment management’s response to complaints: We are not obligated to serve you. Read the terms of your lease. There is a coin-operated laundromat 1km away.

Question: are we all being forced into this shitty cashless situation in order to ease the hunt for criminals?

It used to be that you could insert a coin into a washing machine and it would simply work. Now some Danish and German apartment owners have decided it’s a good idea to remove the cash payment option. So you have to visit a website and top-up your laundry account before using the laundry room.

Is this wise?

Points of failure with traditional coin-fed systems:

1. your coin gets stuck
2. you don’t have the right denomination of coins

Points of failure with this KYC cashless gung-ho digital transformation system:

1. your internet service goes down
2. the internet service of the laundry room goes down
3. the website is incompatible with your browser
4. the website forces 3rd party JavaScript that’s either broken or you don’t trust it
5. you cannot (or will not) solve CAPTCHA
6. the website rejects your IP address because it is a shared IP
7. the payment processor rejects your IP address because it is a shared IP
8. the bank rejects your IP address because it is a shared IP
9. the payment processor is Paypal and you do not want to share sensitive financial data with 600 corporations
10. the accepted payment forms do not match your payment cards
11. the accepted payment form matches, but your card is still rejected anyway for one of many undisclosed reasons:
    • your card is on the same network but foreign cards are refused
    • the payment processor does not like your IP address
    • the copy of your ID doc on file with the bank expired, and the bank’s way of telling you is to freeze your card
    • it’s one of these new online-only bank cards with no CVV code printed on the card so to get your CVV code you must install their app from Google’s Playstore (this expands into 20+ more points of failure)
12. your bank account is literally below the top-up minimum because you only have cash and your cashless bank does not accept cash deposits; so you cannot do laundry until you get a paycheck or arrange for an electronic transfer from a foreign bank at the cost of an extortionate exchange rate
13. you cannot open a bank account because Danish banks refuse to serve people who do not yet have their CPR number (a process that takes at least 1 month).
14. you are unbanked because of one of 24 reasons that Bruce Schneier does not know about
15. the internet works when you start the wash load, but fails sometime during the program so you cannot use the dryers; in which case you suddenly have to run out and buy hanging mechanisms as your wet clothes sit.
16. (edit) the app of your bank and/or the laundry service demands a newer phone OS than you have, and your phone maker quit offering updates.

In my case, I was hit with point of failure number 11. Payment processors never tell you why your payment is refused. They either give a uselessly vague error, or the web UI just refuses to move forward with no error, or the error is an intentional lie. Because e.g. if your payment is refused you are presumed to be a criminal unworthy of being informed.

Danish apartment management’s response to complaints: We are not obligated to serve you. Read the terms of your lease. There is a coin-operated laundromat 1km away.

Question: are we all being forced into this shitty cashless situation in order to ease the hunt for criminals?

I’ve noticed that if you try to contact corp or gov offices the old fashioned way, they simply ignore you. They want to force you to use email or solve a CAPTCHA. The fix I have in mind is a tweak on this idea:

https://sopuli.xyz/post/12919557

but the first contact you make with an office need not even be GDPR¹ related. If you contact a gov or corp for any purpose and they ignore it, your next request can and should include an access request for records on how they handled your initial correspondence.

¹ GDPR isn’t the only game in town. Brazil and California supposedly have some privacy law similar to the GDPR which I assume includes a right of access. Hence why they were also mentioned in the title.

#fuckEmail

It was a Lemmy service that centered on law. Now it gives a 404.

The threadiverse is starving for small decentralized nodes with a theme focus. There are far too many general purpose nodes. It’s a shame the law node is gone. There is nothing to replace it.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.