@[email protected] - not sure if you will see this. I saw your reply but only when not viewing via fedia.io – which means I cannot reply to you directly.

I appreciate the link. But I must say, that list shows only 18 stations in Brussels, when there is more like 75. I can only find partial lists of stations in Brussels. Which is bizarre, because I would expect radio broadcast to be tightly regulated and for the gov to be aware of all stations, which I would expect them to be required to share with the public.

Europe is also an unwise choice. As is Canada and the UK. Some of my recent threads on this:

• The spread of travel authorisations (🇺🇸→🇬🇧→🇪🇺) has scrapped our visa-free travel rights. Also resulting in privacy loss and suppression of speech
• What if Europeans want to petition Europe to negotiate for visa-free travel to the UK and Canada? Do petitions ever attempt to change the policy of 3rd countries?
• UK imposes ETAs on EU citizens too, now. (the money grab: £16/2yrs)
• Travel authorisation (ETA) scams – both legal and illegal scams target Americans, and Europeans

It should be a place that has ETA-free travel, not just visa-free, if they want global attendees.

I hope it won’t run bank apps. When my bank tries to shut down their website and force me onto a smartphone (which is inherently not a smart move for privacy and security), I want to be able to show them that their app won’t run on my linux phone so there is pressure to keep the website running.

Fuck phone banking. Let’s have some separation of church and state.

boot lickers who want to run corporate spyware → Android or iOS
freedom seekers who want to keep their dignity and autonomy → linux

Worth noting that banks deliberately block alternative platforms. Some detect whether they are running in an emulator and refuse to run. And “emulator” is very loose. I saw a bank app refuse to run on a laptop that natively ran Android.

Wow, what utopian government is that?

The shitshow with online gov docs in recent decades is they have been converted to apps¹, and they are structured as multi-page interviews. If you do not supply your name, email address, etc on the first page, you cannot even see the rest of the “document”. So you don’t even get to see what interrogation is coming without incrementally giving some data online.

The EU is an example. The have-your-say portal and the “Resolvit” mechanism have no offline forms. No static HTML or PDF form to print out. The Belgians even legally mandate form submissions that are sometimes exclusively online, and with a red asterisk next to the email field (meaning you cannot submit the form without providing an email address that enables all the data to traverse Microsoft’s servers).

With the EU, there are undocumented channels. You can ad-hoc write a freestyle letter, guess about what information is required, and then guess about what physical address to send it to. With various member states, sometimes the physical address is not even published. You have to read the legal statutes to find out what agency oversees the agency you need to contact, then submit an open data request to the oversight agency’s postal address, then wait a month for their response just to get the address – if they respond at all. Sometimes they ignore these requests, then you have to complain to the ombudsman just to pressure the oversight agency just to disclose an address.

¹ Simple static HTML is a document. As soon as JavaScript is required, it’s no longer a document – it’s an app that requires execution.

Interesting about the typo. That’s actually a software defect. My text had “19”, but Lemmy apparently decided I wanted a sequential itemised list. To force it, I had to make the 19 literal (using ticks), which now causes it to indent and become part of item 12.

(edit) found a better workaround: introduced a blank line.

The US demands social media accounts to snoop through as part of the travel authorsation procedure. Someone coming from a developing country got the opportunity of a lifetime: entry into an Ivy league university like Harvard. When he landed in the US, ICE could not find any dirt on him. So they snooped through the social media comments of his /friends/. One of his friends said something critical of the US. So the guy was denied entry. Harvard was blocked.

If you claim to have no social media accounts, they don’t believe you. And they don’t have to. Border control has discretion to bounce any non-citizen they want.

I’m not sure what snooping the UK does but the cost alone is a deterrant for me.

The travel auth is required just for passing through a country. So a Moroccan whose route stops in Madrid, then London, then New York, before landing in Canada, will have to pay: €20+£16+$21, despite not staying in any of those places. There are 3 opportunities in that case for a country to find something disloyal they in the traveler’s social media acct. If blocked, is there a refund? No. It’s a gamble of both time and money. For security theatre.

Article 77 is just making this explicit: You complain where you are living (even cross country!), where you work or where the suspected violation took place. It doesn’t say anything more.

Indeed I am exploiting that option. I have lost confidence in my country of residence. The EDPB reports show that most DPAs are understaffed and up to their necks in work. Germany was an exception. Germany has far more resources for GDPR complaints than most of Europe.

Because of this there is no standard form to fill out: it depends on the agency itself where you choose to enter your complaint.

So Germany does not have a nationwide form? Each of the 17 agencies have their own? I guess I have to work out which region I am dealing with first.

But before that, I need to know if the federal agency is who I am working with. The data controller referred me to the Federal agency, but that seems off… from what I have read, the Federal agency is just a single point of contact for the EDPB. I see nothing about the fed handling GDPR complaints.

(edit) I found the relevent region. I think I’ll distrust the controller’s referral to the federal office and use the regional. Which has its own form.

Thanks. I noticed that but I would have to wait till I have a decent connection and then I wouldn’t understand the German anyway.

Just commenting based on the title since I am blocked from YT and also don’t speak German. (An English transcript would be useful)

Ditching Gmail is trivially easy. Boycotting gmail is where the interesting conversation is, because often you need to reach someone who uses gmail. You can do an MX lookup on the domain of the recipient’s email address, but that only works about 70% of the time. If they use an email firewall like Barracuda or a forwarding address, then there is no way to know where the email route ends.

If I cannot get confidence from an MX lookup, then the recipient is getting a fax or postal letter from me. Google could still end up in the loop, but as long as you don’t reveal an email address to the recipient, at least you remain in control over what Google collects and profits from.

thanks but it does not solve my problem. My internet is capped so i can’t do streaming.

Not sure that’s a sufficient explanation. So I will elaborate for the OP:

Some designs are called a “wet floor”, which means the whole bathroom floor is sloped toward a drain even outside the shower and beyond the showerpan. It’s seems to be a design in cheaper establishments, like cheap hostels. It works but it can be annoying when the floor is still wet when later entering the bathroom in socks or something.

Some designs are more luxury, and have a really big shower pan. A big area is sloped within the shower as an elegant “curbless” design which is great for elderly and handicapped people who might struggle to step over a shower curb. The shower pan is big enough that if the drain is slow or clogged, a fair amount of water can build up without overspilling into the rest of the bathroom.

I’m not sure what you want a source for. You mean a vendor who will sell one? XO-4 Touch was apparently the last model. I just had a look at laptop.org and the site looks useless now. It used to be full of wikis with copious details about the hardware and software of the OLPC.

There are (or were) a variety of NGOs who worked on getting OLPCs into impoverished schools. One of them was https://unleashkids.org/. They are not in the business of selling them but ~15 yrs ago they were kind enough to sell some. The idea was that teachers and developers would need them to help support the OLPC project. I suggest touching base with them and see what they say, since they seem to still be around.

The XO-4 Touch came with “Sugar”, a foss OS just for kids. It was easy to make it boot into Gnome instead (underpinned by RedHat). And someone made an Android OS that could be flashed onto an SD card and booted in the OLPC. I should mention that the OLPC was never 100% FOSS. The usual shit-show of blobs for some of the hardware drivers. I mainly just used it as an e-reader on Gnome.

I’ve always been baffled that these FOSS e-ink laptops did not make it onto the general marketplace, while at the same time there were no commercial makers of anything like it. There was a “Pixel QI” dual-mode screen that could be bought bare and installed in Thinkpads and other machines, but for some reason that never took off either.

OLPC (one-laptop-per-child) is a FOSS e-ink laptop (but small enough to function as an e-reader). Though I think they are no longer made and they were always hard to get.

Here is a way to use open data law to take individual action:

https://lemmy.sdf.org/post/48016373

From the PDF, one of the EU’s concerns is:

However, much of the value generated by open-source projects is exploited outside the EU, often benefiting tech giants.

When tech giants use FOSS, it’s a shame they can extract wealth without compensating the contributors. OTOH, if the baddies become dependent on FOSS, that’s favorable anyway. It means they might contribute code to the projects which otherwise would not happen.

The PDF does not cover public schools specifically. They need to be told that public schools are the most important place to deploy FOSS. Consider a university in Denmark pushes commercial software on students (sadly, they provide that software on a campus webpage improperly titled “Free Software” b/c it is gratis for students). The damage is of course that Denmark educates people to be dependent or clung-onto closed-source software like MATLAB, not GNU Octave. That negative training means the young generations are being conditioned to favor non-free software.

FSFE does not know about this?

The FSFE has a newsletter for “public money → public code”. They have not mentioned this /have your say/ page. Strange.

Downvotes?

I get why the OP was downvoted here… this is a bit off-topic for BuyFromEU. But [email protected] has 4 silent down votes. WTF? I’ve seen that before. ETS seems to be heavily read by opponents of ETS.

That link gives me:

Our system thinks you might be a robot!

The petitions are again something else.

I was indeed alienated by the mention of petitions because in English it usually means asking lawmakers to change policy. I wondered if it meant something different in Germany. And if it means the same thing, it’s apparently wrong for the EU to list that agency as an ombudsman.

I am normally happy to use courts. But I don’t live in Germany, don’t speak German, and financing a lawyer would be a non-starter. I suppose I could try to find a German NGO who would support my case.

Yeah I’m not surprised there are subject matter-specific ombuds offices. I was hoping for one at the top of the tree for when those fail. I just found this page where the EU lists them for each member state:

https://www.ombudsman.europa.eu/en/european-network-of-ombudsmen/members/all-members

And for Germany, this office is given:

https://epetitionen.bundestag.de/epet/peteinreichen.html

The complexity in the description on the EU’s page indeed gives cause for concern.

Nonsense. This is like comparing the price of rice in China to potatoes in Ireland. Process serving is a legal process with liability. Process serving does not allow for dropping a slip in a box and waiting for the served to come to your office and stand in line at the convenience of the process server. Process servers must be resilient to track down a human, who may rarely be home. There is no lax rule of just waiting 2 weeks for the served person to appear and sending it back.

(edit) A registered letter can also be refused. Which amounts to a simple tickbox and returned letter.

BTW, this is not to say process serving is not also overpriced. But process serving /should/ cost much more than registered letter.

(edit 2) Process serving can turn into a man hunt. I’ve seen process servers dig around like private investigators to find out where someone hangs out, in order to track them down and get papers in front of them. And when it all fails, a process server has to publish the circumstance in a local newspaper to then be able to argue in court that the served had an opportunity to become informed that way.

Email delivery has never been designed to be reliable.

Indeed, not inherently. Though it /can/ be reliable only if sent a certain way. Sender emails a “digital notary” service and puts the ultimate destination in a separate header. The digital notary forwards the msg, timestamps it, signs it, and includes the sig of the previously sent transmission (to create a verfiable chain). A service called the UK Timestamper demonstrates this. It proves posting but not reception. There is a RFC (documented open standard) for read receipts whereby the recipient sends a signal when they open the msg. Of course it’s voluntary and relies on a willing recipient.

In the end, Belgium simply declares that a simple email serves as a registered letter.

Your situation, of course, is one you have created entirely by your choice and typically email delivery is very reliable - but the technological underpinnings absolutely are not.

My situation proves how catastrophic it is to presume reliability. I conciously traded off reliability in exchange for privacy (of a certain kind), control, and malice detection. Though I have no way of knowing how much reliability I am trading. Blackholing is borne out of incompetent design. Delivery cannot be guaranteed but a delivery failure should be signaled to one party or the other.

€10 for a registered mail is not extortionate. It is a reasonable price for the service, which also serves the necessary low barrier that prevents abuse.

It’s absurdly extortionate. It first requires prior class. Prior class within Belgium is more than sending prior from Germany to anywhere in the EU. Then they are charging an additional ~€7 just to collect a sig. The postal workers are quick to insert a slip into the mailbox that forces the recipient to go to the post office and wait in line. It’s very streamlined and convenient (for them, not us). In some cases they don’t even bother buzz the doorbell… just drop off the slip with the rest of the mail.

If DIGI comes around to drill into your façade to add another cable, you then have a legal obligation to send DIGI a registered letter every time you renovate your facade in the area of the cables. If you have 8 cables attached to your house, that’s a cost of ~€80.

There is an easy opportunity here for a company like Deliveroo to expand and undercut them.