• 41 Posts
  • 43 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: August 10th, 2023

help-circle

  • When “such engagement” is required to exercise human rights, I’m not as quick as you to call that optional. I expect to have all of my human rights simultaneously satisfied together in aggregate.

    A mandate can be explicitly written or merely implied. If you need food to survive, for example, and a law were to say all food distributors must refuse cash, you can safely call that an implied mandate to use a bank. Or would you say they are off the hook for the human rights consequences, perhaps on the basis that people can freely refuse to buy food and opt to grow their own food?

    art.4 & art.23 (employment)

    Are you suggesting that the ban on cash wages is not a banking mandate because it’s an “engagement”, despite exercise of human rights articles relying on that engagement? Consider that art.4 entitles people to be free from slavery and couple that with art.23 which states: “Everyone has the right to work, to free choice of employment”. In Belgium, it is illegal for an engineer to receive cash wages. But it is not illegal for a domestic worker to receive cash wages if that has been established as a common practice in that trade.

    Do you see the issue? An unbanked engineer can freely refuse to work and live on welfare (if offered by their gov assuming no disqualifying requirements due to their ability to work), but then they must give up their rights under art.23. And even then, how do they get their welfare payment? See below.

    art.25 (housing & social svcs)

    Consider that no real estate transaction can involve cash, by law. Yet, art.25 states:

    Everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of himself and of his family, including food, clothing, housing and medical care and necessary social services

    I highlighted social services as well as housing because social services in some countries refuse to pay cash to beneficiaries. You cannot get financial aid without a bank account.

    Regarding utilities, is that also what you consider to be an optional engagement? That people do not need water and power service? This may be debatable but I believe the right to housing likely includes a right to energy in regions where a box with walls+roof is insufficient to prevent freezing. I believe housing implies having a warm space. So when the energy supplier refuses cash, is that not a mandate to use a bank? If you are wondering where the gov comes into play in this case, it would be when the utility supplier refuses cash then sues the unbanked consumer in court for non-payment. When the court finds the energy contract to be “legal” and sides with the utility company, that’d essentially be a case of the gov mandating the use of banks.

    It’s also worth noting that the UDHR is not limited to govs. The private sector is also bound by the UDHR.

    Anyway, this is all quite far off from the original question in the OP, which remains unanswered.

    (edit) And what about tax?

    Some govs require taxes to be paid electronically. Tax is by definition a mandate. Both income tax and property tax must be paid electronically. There was a guy in Germany to was denied the option to pay his radio licensing fees in cash. IIUC, that’s like BBC, a mandatory tax. You could perhaps argue that income tax is optional because income is optional, and that property tax is optional because home ownership is optional, but I’m not sure the same can be said for radio fees in Germany.




  • There is a slight renaissance of feature phones (aka dumb phones) lately. The main drive is self-control. People trying to shake free of an addiction. Tech illiterates of course like smart phones as well but you have the security factor backwards. The smartest consumers favor feature phones precisely for their superior security.

    So I believe feature phone users largely fall into the following demographics:

    • social media addicts looking for escape
    • tech-literate street-wise people who understand the vastness of the attack surface and risks of smartphones with knowledge about mass surveillance programs and loss of control (this demographic does their e2ee comms from a PC)
    • tech illiterates

    (edit) To a lesser extent:

    • (policy/child protection)? I think I heard some schools (and districts thereof) are banning smartphones from very young children
    • those who simply have no compelling use case
    • pro-environment ethical consumers who oppose e-waste and the ecocide from the designed obsolescence that impacts all smartphones (even Fairphone needs to make progress here)
    • the extreme poor. The US has a “Lifeline” program to give gratis smartphones to poor people, but I’m not sure they’re all aware of it, or whether the program keeps up with the chronic need for software updates that require hardware replacements (designed obsolescence)











  • It’s a decent approach but incomplete. Couple problems:

    • Lemmy would not host youtube videos. YT transcripts could (and should) be part of the post, but then there is the same problem as the next bullet:
    • w.r.t text content, some people (very few people) indeed copy the content. It’s failing because people are lazy. Too lazy to check whether the link is in a walled garden; too lazy to warn people of the walled garden; also too lazy to copy the text. Sometimes it’s more naivety than lazy, but same problem: you are relying on the masses to make individual decisions that are wise, inclusive, and higher effort.

    A good system is designed with the assumption that users are lazy. As such, Lemmy is poorly designed.

    1 lazy author can inconvenience thousands of readers. Lammy’s design fails to address that.


  • Down-voting every youtube link is indeed the only individual action that can be taken in the current system. It could theoretically lead to a YT link being folded or sunk lower. Tricky though because people should know why their YT links get down-voted. Ideally you would be able to tell them in a response. But I think I know how that would go: people with digital inclusion principles have actually become a diluted small minority in the fedi. A flood of lemmy.world folks who would follow the crowd off a cliff would down-vote your reply and up-vote the YT link in solidarity of their favorite walled gardens.

    You could DM the reason for down-voting. But then the problem does not get the exposure it needs.

    The fedi has evolved like Burning Man. The movement was true to its founding principles early on but as the crowd grew over the years it became enshittified faster than a digital rights subculture could take hold.

    BTW, I should mention that sh.itjust.works is also a centralised Cloudflare node.


  • My point still stands.

    Of course it doesn’t. Your point doesn’t even grasp the problem. You think the problem is that fedi users have (or have not) entitlement to content. It’s a red herring. You cannot begin to solve a problem you do not understand. It does not matter who is “entitled” to the content. The content is exclusive; locked inside a walled-garden with a gatekeeper. The problem is that exclusive access content is being linked on an open content platform and shoved in the face of readers who do not have access to the closed content.

    The moment you are using someone else’s platform

    Again, you still fail to grasp the problem. Using someone else’s platform is not a premise. You can either be on someone else’s node or you can be on your own self-hosted node. Either way, exclusive links are in the reader’s face.

    How can you get so many things wrong… then you claim using one platform inherently revokes rights outside that platform – of course not. Irrelevant regardless, but rights granted on one platform do not diminish rights on another.

    you loose the rights to the content outside of that platform.

    It’s not about “rights”. That’s a legal matter. It’s about digital inclusion (a technical matter). People don’t want to see links that exclude them. It’s just pollution.






  • But at some point to interact with any kind of large company … You could also consider not interacting with large companies at all

    Actually the large corps are more likely to hold the data in-house. Small companies cling to outsourcing. E.g. credit unions are the worst… outsource every service they offer to the same giant suppliers. Everyone thinks only a small company has the data (and consequently that the small dataset does not appeal to cyber criminals) but it’s actually worse because they outsource jobs even as small as printing bank statements to the same few giants most other credit unions use. Then they do the same for bill pay with another company. It’s getting hard to find a credit union that does not put Cloudflare in the loop. So in the end a dozen or so big corps have your data and it’s not even disclosed in the privacy statement.

    Of course it depends on the nature of the business. A large grocery chain is more likely to make sure your offline store purchase history reaches Amazon and Google than a mom & pop grocer who doesn’t even have a loyalty program.

    Whether businesses get copies of information is usually included in a site’s privacy policy,

    I have never seen a privacy policy that lists partners and recipients apart from Paypal, who lists the 600+ corps they share data with for some reason. Apart from bizarre exceptions privacy policies are always too vague to be useful. Even in the GDPR region. If you read them you can often find text that does not even make sense for their business because they just copied someone else’s sufficiently vague policy to use as a template.

    If you really want to limit your information exposure, you either have to audit everyone you do business with this way (because most large companies do this) or hire someone (or a service) to do it.

    The breach happened in a country where companies are not required to respond to audits. No company wants any avg joe’s business badly enough to answer questions about data practices. In the EU, sure, data controllers are obligated to disclose the list of parties they share with (on request, not automatically). And even then, some still refuse. Then you file an article 77 complaint with the DPA where it just sits for years with no enforcement action.

    My approach is a combination of avoiding business entirely, or supplying fake info, or less sensitive info (mailing address instead of residential, mission-specific email, phone number that just goes to a v/m or fax). This is where the battle needs to be fought – at data collection time. Countless banks needlessly demand residential address. That should be rejected by consumers. Data minimization is key.

    In the case at hand, I’m leaning toward opting out of the class action lawsuit and suing them directly in small claims court. I can usually get better compensation that way.














  • The 1st ½ of your comment sounds accurate. But…

    And also in Foss there are highly opinionated software where the devs completely ignore users, ban them from GitHub when they post issues,

    Right, but to be clear non-free s/w is worse - you can’t even reach the devs, generally, and there is no public bug tracker. FOSS is an improvement in this regard because at least there is a reasonable nuclear option (forking). The nuclear option for non-free software is writing it yourself from scratch.


  • That all sounds accurate enough to me… but thought I should comment on this:

    However - in larger enterprises there’s so much more, you get the whole SDL maturity thing going - money is invested into raising the quality of the whole development lifecycle and you get things like code reviews, architects, product planning, external security testing etc. Things that cost time, money and resources.

    It should be mentioned that many see testing as a cost, but in fact testing is a cost savings. In most situations, you only spend some money on testing in order to dodge a bigger cost: customers getting burnt in a costly way that backfires on the supplier. Apart from safety-critical products, this is the only business justification to test. Yet when budgets get tightened, one of the first cuts many companies make is testing – which is foolish assuming they are doing testing right (in a way that saves money by catching bugs early).

    Since the common/general case with FOSS projects is there is no income that’s attached to a quality expectation (thus testing generates no cost savings) - the users are part of the QA process as free labor, in effect :)




  • Yeah this article caught me by surprise. Natural gas is naturally odorless so that probably works against awareness.

    I tend to be lazy about turning on the loud fans which downgrades the ambiance. But I need to change something because grease cakes up on everything near the oven and on the cabinets. My range hood is also the ventless style, which must be totally useless against the benzine byproduct.

    I will certainly put more thought into kitchen design in the future. The gas appliances should probably be in the corner of the room so there are fewer directions to control, and the hood should probably be big, industrial, and vented outside. It’s a shame because I might prefer the gas stove to be in an island layout or at least centrally located.