Right to be Offline / Offgrid / Analog / Unplugged 🔌📪📖📟📝

The concept of "sabotage" here appears to include simply refusing to use AI.

After decades of living in a linux-FOSS world, I noticed these games at a 2nd-hand street market:

• Starcraft (few different versions/themes)
• Age of Empires (few different versions/themes)
• Civilization

They were a dollar each, so why not. I grabbed. Got home, installed win7 on a machine someone dumped on a curb, but could not install any of the games b/c I live offline. Fucking hell.

When I last played Starcraft well over a decade ago, I lived online and probably thought nothing of it. But it seems clear this shitty requirement is an anti-sharing policy because these games do not inherently need Internet. You can play against the machine or on a LAN. It’s not just the elitist exclusive WAN requirement that pisses me off.. there’s a privacy issue too. And what happens when I enter the product key of a used CD? They probably have a tolerance on how many times that can happen, perhaps dependant on whether the hardware changes. Fuck the nannying.

Also consider that Blizzard and Microsoft servers are not going to run forever. They can pull the plug at any time and then no one can install their game. Should be illegal to make installation needlessly dependant on a service. Forced obsolescence.

Some of these games also require a CD to be inserted, which means you must have a fucking noisey CD drive attached at all times. Back when these games were made it was no big deal because all laptops and desktops had CD drives. Not anymore. I’m mostly annoyed by having to insert the disc, wait for it to spin, then I have to hear the loud spin as I play which also wastes power. So I installed Alcohol 120 to image the Warcraft 3 disc (which I still had from yrs past). It has 3 different versions of the crack for the particular shitty scheme used on WC3. None of the images work.

Obviously if I want to play these games I will need warez versions. How good are those dodgy distros these days? I can imagine some are just the original content but you still enter a product key (which I have anyway). But if they still need a WAN that won’t cut it for me. Do the warez versions overcome all these issues? Are they still in circulation?

Alternatively, I should ask, have there been any versions of these games repackaged and re-released for the retro gamers which don’t impose the shitty protections and server dependencies?

If not, I must say unlicensed cracked versions would be the most ethical ones:

• designed obsolescence thwarted
• privacy kept
• more inclusive (offline ppl and those without CD drives)
• better UX (no fiddling with discs and hearing the spin)

Krefel and Electro Depot have TVs on display, but they have no ability to demo TV tuning ability. Electro Depot even sells indoor and outdoor antennas. Sales people said they actually are /not allowed/ to show anything on the screens other than the OEM demo video. WTF? Sales people are actually micromanaged by this constraint that prevents them doing their job.

I’m like: “sell me this TV.. show me that it has a working tuner.”
Sales: “can’t do that”

Electro Depot should be embarassed because they sell antennas too. Yet they cannot show that they actually work in their showroom.

Then I went to Vandan Borre. Same situation, but even more embarrassing: their demo radios are not powered. So you cannot even see whether a DAB radio decodes the album art and shows it. You cannot even hear how it sounds.

Vanden Borre staff: go see the FNAC showroom.

LOL. Are you fucking kidding me?

Also Vanden Borre staff: “broadcast TV does not exist in Belgium. It was eliminated. You have to subscribe to a provider (Telenet, Proximus, etc).”

This seems to explain my problem. But then why is Electro Depot selling antennas? The antennas cover both TV and radio ranges, so it could be for radio, but it’s obviously a bit off that they have no sign posting or disclosure to say TV tuning is impossible in Belgium.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.today/post/49434861

This wiki can be a good place to get instructions on building and using low tech systems that will make you more self-sufficient and less dependent on centralized systems that could fail or deny you service.

(crossposted from !humanrights)

The US can be credited with starting the Orwellian idea of forcing all “visa-free” visitors to file an ETA¹. It’s not just a money grab for us$ 20. It’s a snooping mechanism to link people to social media accounts, and then perform a background check on travelers to look for any speech that’s critical of the US.

Someone from Lebanon got a scholarship for Harvard. Then he was blocked at the border by border control. The cause: a friend linked to him on social media said something critical of the US. Even though the aspiring student did not himself criticise the US, being associated with someone who did was sufficient to block his entry. (He eventually made it back after some hassle and back and forth on flights).

Then the UK decided decided to impose travel authorisations as well, thus doing a money grab of £16. Initially it seemed to just be a retaliation against the US. But recently the UK decided to target Europeans.

So now the EU has decided to follow suit. In 2027, the loss of visa-free travel hits Europe. Even those who merely have a connecting flight in Europe will have to pay €20 and pass the background check. You need not even leave the airport to be subjected to this.

Of course it’s bullshit to continue calling this “visa-free travel”. They hope a technical semantical spin will fool people into accepting unfunded background checks coupled with surcharges as still “visa-free”.

¹ Electronic Travel Authorisation

Human rights

Do we still have privacy and free speech, as guaranteed in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Article 12 and 19, which states (respectively):

1. “No one shall be subjected to arbitrary interference with his privacy, family, home or correspondence, nor to attacks upon his honour and reputation. Everyone has the right to the protection of the law against such interference or attacks.”
   …

1. “Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers.”

?

Yes, those rights are protected -- but only if you stay in your homeland. Only if you do not expect to simultaneously exercise your Article 13 rights, which states:

“1. Everyone has the right to freedom of movement and residence within the borders of each State.
2. Everyone has the right to leave any country, including his own, and to return to his country.”

What other UDHR-signatory countries have joined this ETA shit-show?

Is this also a loss of a right to be analog?

Cross-posting to !right_to_unplug because:

1. the “E” in ETA is electronic, thus implying that there is no offline mechanism for unplugged people and unbanked people (correct me if I am wrong)
2. those who declare not having a social media account are distrusted, presumed nefarious, and potentially denied entry (e.g. entering the US with a new/clean phone has triggered suspicion and ultimately entry refusals)

PDF24 used to be a way to send a fax to European fax numbers. It was a gratis service. It’s still advertised as such but it’s broken now.

The US is covered by faxzero.com, but for faxing outside the US they charge an absurd $2.09 per fax (more than postage in a lot of places). They are also Paypal-only. Fuck paypal.

Any suggestions?

From over at https://sopuli.xyz/post/31041713

!unix_surrealism@lemmy.sdf.org

As someone who pulled the plug on residential Internet, I have naturally clung onto broadcast radio. It occurs to me that tuning into broadcast content gives a rare media source where you are not tracked. There is no digital footprint on your listening.

Tor (along with a couple even more obscure technologies like i2p) are the only viable cloud-sourced ways to escape consumption tracking. Tor is indispensible but it’s not as traceless as tuning broadcast signals. And Tor users are plagued with access discrimination.

Yet broadcast radio must be struggling. They likely lost copious listeners to the Internet. Seems like there is a missed opportunity to promote their stations and privacy along with it. Radio stations should inform people that tracking online is not just to advertise but it’s also used for personalised political manipulation.

Duckduckgo’s privacy theatre demonstrates that privacy promotion works. But DDG relies on trust and it’s rife with scandals. OTA¹ broadcasts do not rely on trust. Promoting privacy would have a long-term self-promotion effect. That is, as listeners come to develop their value of privacy more, their listenership becomes stronger.

Some (most?) stations likely also stream online. But they could still play a different jingle on the broadcast service, no?

¹ OTA: over the air

cross-posted from: https://beehaw.org/post/23925690

the problem

The web is littered with enshitified Tor-hostile resources generally deployed with the naive idea that Tor users are criminals. The Tor community can barely function. The web is broken in countless ways and it’s not always obvious whether Tor users are targeted by the marginalisation because firewalls never state why they are blocking. Sometimes they block based on geolocation or user-agent strings, and sometimes a resource is simply down for everyone. Tor users are left assuming their exit node IP is the culprit.

Also a problem: some people actually have no Internet at home. For some it is temporary and for others it is a permanent way of living a mostly analog life.

the solution (for many cases)

Use the clearnet at a cafe with open access. Of course it’s unreasonable to haul a desktop computer into a cafe or to carry a laptop at all times, so it would be useful to send fetch orders from your PC to your phone. When the phone connects to public Wi-Fi, you tap to execute the queue of fetch orders. Then when back at your PC you download the fulfilled orders from the phone.

This could even be useful within the home, since the block or malfunction can be a number of things. A smartphone could try to execute fetch orders over Orbot, which may or may not fail. And if it fails, it remains an unfulfilled order to retry in a cafe.

Aria2 would be perfect for the underlying heavy lifting because it supports many protocols (HTTP, FTP, bittorrent), and it exists on both the PC and Android. The Android code is apparently just a backend. It’s broken or useless on its own and needs a controller such as the app proposed here.

insufficient alternatives

The usual workarounds have compromises. A VPN may or may not work but it’s still a bit far from anonimity. The VPN provider is essentially like another ISP who can snoop on you.

Download managers already exist on smartphones, but there is no seamless PC interoperability. And (AFAIK) they are just for simple files, not for webpages or Youtube videos.

There is Newpipe but it has no PC interoperability. You must search YT using the Newpipe UI.

Every bank, shitty giant social media platform and countless websites demand a phone number. It’s foolish to give them a voice number (esp. mobile) unless you actually welcome calls from them, their partners, whoever they sell your data to, and whoever exfiltrates it. The best move with all these untrustworthy data-sharing-happy businesses is to give them a pure fax number which is answered only by a fax machine.

In the rare case where reaching you is so important that they would use the number to send you a fax, then it’s probably a message you want to receive anyway (and best to have it in writing). I kept a gratis fax number for decades and never got fax spam.

One extra perk to this is if customer files have fax-only numbers, it could give some pause before a company decides to ditch their fax line.

My unsolved problem:

J2.com no longer gives free fax numbers. I can only find providers who charge a flat subscription of ~$15—25/month (which includes an allowance on outbound faxes). I don’t really need a fax sending svc. I wouldn’t mind paying <$10/year just to have a number that emails faxes to me, even if there is some small measured rate when it actually gets used. A pay-per-fax service like that is hard to find. Any tips would be appreciated.

℻ numbers are dropping like flies. This is a disaster for the very few of us who will not lick the boots of Microsoft or Google, unlike the 99%¹ of the population who is happy to use email (which traverses MS or Google servers in a vast majority of non-p2p comms).

So FAX numbers are disappearing. Some are removed from websites and stationary (letterheads), but still exist. Some fax numbers persist in publications, but the plug has been pulled. Not enough people are using fax to say “please plugin your fax machine”.

the race condition

Corps, NGOs, and govs likely ditch the fax after it idles for a long time with no activity. It’s a use-it-or-lose-it scenario. Part of the problem is someone’s rare will to send a fax is hindered by lack of info. If we had reliable access to fax numbers, we could do our part to keep them active.

open data remedy?

When a gov has an open data policy, one possible solution is to make open data requests for the fax numbers of gov offices.

previous posts

• https://sopuli.xyz/post/12970199

¹ made-up figure obviously, but likely accurate enough nonetheless

It’s as if humanity is dying off. They don’t want to see you in person so physical addresses are being withheld from contact pages. I now must dig into the privacy policy or ToS to find an address. It’s really a shitshow because a data protection officer or whoever handles privacy requests could be entirely outsourced to someone who has nothing to do with an org.

It boils down to nannying. They don’t even want to enable people to write snail-mail letters -- which is king for escaping enshitification and the digital transformation.

The question can be broken into two parts:

1. would people use it?
2. is it appropriate for a library to have a media room?

I have no TV and I suspect with so many people subscribing to streaming services lately as their sole source (from surveillance capitalists), probably not many people even have antennas to pick up local broadcast TV anymore. Is that a safe assumption?

A couple years ago I setup a MythTV for someone. Their local broadcasts were completely different from what I recall from decades past-- mostly educational (documentaries and how-to shows) and mostly commercial-free. It seemed to be largely fed by tax-funded public broadcast service. It used to be rife with commercials but commercial interests seem to have abandoned it.

Where I live now, I am offline and also lack equipment to see what’s broadcast locally. Not sure it’s justified to buy gear just to see what there is. And I have never seen what free satellite signals are like anywhere.

On the one hand, I could see it turning into an entertainment/cinema type of space with people bringing in popcorn.. which is perhaps a deviation from the library’s purpose. OTOH, it could be information focused to give access to locally aired educational broadcasts and to (perhaps more importantly) show people what content exists locally and to experience MythTV. Library users could even schedule shows to be recorded for them (as the library is not open 24/7). The MythTV PCs would of course be running Linux, which would be a covert way to promote the escape from proprietary OSs.

As I ask myself whether this is all crazy talk, a local library has Arduinos for people to experiment with.. which has nothing to do with books or media.

A parallel mission could be to get the library to run an Invideous instance to try to liberate people from Google’s stranglehold and their ads. Google would probably block the library’s instance but the blockade would then serve to inform people about Google’s politics. I guess the question is whether Invidious is too much in the legal gray area for libraries to seriously consider.

An equity or brokerage sent proxy voting forms which arrived 1 day before the deadline that they needed the filled ballot back in their hands. There is of course and electronic way of voting. E-voters are the only investors who can actually vote due to the schedule and mailing date. Impossible for offline investors to vote.

This is probably a boring post. I don’t vote anyway because I can’t be bothered to do the research. But it’s another instance of marginalisation of offline people. I thought it should be recorded somewhere that this is happening in case someone cares.

I’ve been trying to work out how so many people got to be obsessed with smartphones to the point of using the tiny screens for tasks where it makes no sense. There are many Lemmy apps for smartphones but just a couple half-assed ones for the desktop.

It’s banks. Banks have been cattle-herding security-naive people onto smartphones designed for obsolescence with huge attack surfaces to push their closed-source app which requires licking Google’s boot to obtain. This seems to strike a parallel with Zuckerberg’s comment: “I don’t know why those dumb fucks give me all their data”.

The number of people willing to resist banks can probably be counted on one hand. From there, most people are easy enough to just say “fuck it, I’ll run the app”. This is what drives the “must have a recent phone at all times” brain malfunction. Most of the population is trapped on this shit like caged animals that can’t see the cage bars.

Many don’t bother owning a PC now. They want an all-in-one device. Then they read large amounts of text on that tiny display. So every industry has to cator for smartphone pawns to stay relevant.

Consumers wise enough to keep the GSM SIM slot empty and use smartphones just for innocuous tasks like offline navigation face this onslaught of app-pushers. Some public operations between ppl and government are becoming “app only”.

We are losing our human right to self-determination and autonomy. Normally we could let fools be fools and carry on. But there is a critical mass threshold by which the foolish consumption of many triggers oppression of the few who had enough sense to avoid it.

The offline alternatives and FOSS alternatives are being silently driven out of existence.

I was an early adopter (AOS 2.2). Thought: great, Android is linux based and under FOSS licensing. I am liberated. Got my update to AOS 2.3. Then I was abandoned. I saw right away the shit show I was baited into. Being at the vendor’s mercy for upgrades sent a stark msg to me that I learned from. And apparently not many others.

I wouldn’t care about the foolish decisions of consumers to keep buying new phones if it only affected them. But it’s fucking up the world.

Many train tickets in Europe are available exclusively online. In other cases the online price is lower. So to chase up why this happens, I found the following law:

Article 11 Availability of tickets and reservations

1. Railway undertakings, ticket vendors and tour operators shall offer tickets and, where available, through-tickets and reservations.
2. Without prejudice to paragraphs 3 and 4, railway undertakings shall sell, either directly or through ticket vendors or tour operators, tickets to passengers via at least one of the following means of sale: (a) ticket offices, other points of sale or ticketing machines; (b) telephone, the internet or any other widely available information technology; (c) on board trains. The competent authorities, as defined in point (b) of Article 2 of Regulation (EC) No 1370/2007, may require railway undertakings to offer tickets for services provided under public service contracts via more than one means of sale.

Key wording: “at least ONE of the following means of sale”

Since it’s easiest to sell tickets online, they are effectively encouraging train ticket vendors to marginalise offline people and unbanked people. Further down the statute it says people with disabilities get an exceptional option to buy tickets on the train at no extra cost if there is no ticket office or machine. But no one else is entitled to that option.

Folks— Most Lemmy client apps are on the phone. I am looking for a FOSS phone app that works offline. That is, the phone has no data plan and only occasionally connects to public wifi hotspots. I do not want to be entering login passwords and reading and writing posts when I am connected. Reading and writing posts interactively needs to happen offline. Typical workflow: when I meet people at a bar/cafe, I need the app to sync over the public wi-fi without using my attention. It should post my comments and fetch threads for which I am active, for offline access later. It needs to support multiple accounts spanning multiple instances.

Does anything like this exist? Or do all Lemmy/kbin/mbin phone apps demand your realtime attention when connected?

cross-posted from: https://slrpnk.net/post/26435334

A Transcend Storejet external HDD has this software:

• RecoveRx_v2.6.zip
• RecoveRx_Win_4.3_setup.exe
• SecureEraseTool_Win_v1.10_setup.exe
• TranscendElite_Win_v4.28_setup.exe

I am offline, so I went to a public library to fetch the above files. Early in the installation process the piece of shit tries to connect to the Internet and craps out when it discovers there is no Internet connection. WTF?

It’s a nasty trend. I’ve seen other drivers and various hardware support tools pull this shit in recent years.

Is it legal? Seems questionable considering:

• They use deception. The packaging for the harddrive probably does not have an “Internet required” disclosure, nor would any reasonable buyer expect Internet to be required to use a hard drive. Then they use deception again when you download the tools. I am led to believe I am downloading a “SecureEraseTool” and a “TranscendElite” software package, but in fact these are just proprietary download managers pretending to be tools.
• (GDPR regions) By forcing you to needlessly access the cloud with their proprietary tool, they collect your IP address and whatever else that download manager collects to share with them. This does not seem compliant with data minimization.

Tech discussion unrelated to the forum topic

Why are those tools needed (you might wonder). The drive is in a shitty state. It’s in a usb3 enclosure and was usb-attached to 3 different machines:

• linux laptop with usb3 expresscard, attached both with and without supplemental power. The drive spins, LED on the enclosure blinks rapidly, it gets a device handle and /var/log/kern.log shows it was detected okay. Running fdisk on the unmounted drive just hangs for ~10—15′ before timing out. Reattaching and trying to mount it also causes a long ~10—15′ hang before it gives up.
• win7 one two different machines: spins forever, LED blinking rapidly. Windows never gives up and it never gets recognized or mounted.

So I wanted to first try the official tools to see how they react to the drive. Since they turned out to be a piece of shit, I will probably try next:

• Remove the drive from the enclosure and attaching directly to a real SATA bus (not one of those shitty SATA-USB adapters and not a SATA-PATA drive bay adapter, even though those would be easier. I will put it on a proper SATA bus because the SMART diag stuff is often crippled when going over a bus adapter of some kind.
• Run the DOS Ultimate Boot CD, which (IIRC) is still the king of disk diagnostic tools.
• See what smartctl does.
• Try zero-filling with dd

⚠ Avoid Transcend products for being anti-consumer

Anyway, the main point of this thread is to expose the shit Transcend pulls by shipping download managers that masquerade as tools. It’s a shitty practice because:

• The tools are forever dependent on the supplier keeping a host running. Not only to snoop on you but so to do a sneaky form of designed obsolescence. When your drive model is old enough to need the tools, that is when they will pull the plug. You only think you have the software, until it’s game over. You lose autonomy and control over your own product without knowing it.
• Discriminates against offline people.
• Discriminates against tech illiterates, who rely on the easy tools and cannot handle tools like dd, smartctl, and UBCD.
• Assaults right to repair. No right to repair laws are good enough to think of this kind of dark pattern.
• Obsolescence by design. If you cannot install the tools you need to keep the device running, they are effectively bullying you into buying your way out of the problem.

Solar events as well as nuclear can cause an EMF pulse that destroys all transistors, thus inherently all DAB radios. Or has someone managed to build an EMF-proof DAB transmitter and receiver using vacuum tubes?

Post-Internet, radio has surely lost listenership. From there, I think it’s fair to say that emergency/apolyptic scenarios that would kill both household Internet and TVs, essentially making analog radio quite important. If FM is decommissioned, do we compromise the option of broadcasting to survivalists who have tubes receivers?

Consider that in extreme events like an EMF pulse, Denmark is fucked. They eliminate their postal service this year and they will eliminate FM radio. They seem to have no concept of minimising points of failure for any sort of robust engineering, as they create apartment building laundry rooms with washing machines that cannot function without the cloud and electronic payment. Denmark apparently sets a good example of what /not/ to do in the face of digital transformation.

I write a lot of snail-mail paper letters. Why? Two primary drivers:

• Enshitification. If the digital path has CAPTCHAs or dark patterns, I refuse to serve as an enabler. I don’t do CAPTCHAs.
• Boycotts. I boycott both Microsoft and Google. When a recipient’s email provider is one of them, an honest boycott entails not feeding data to those surveillance advertisers who profit from the data.

Government offices sometimes just ignore the letters -- letters which require a response.

The insideous nature of being ignored is you are also naturally blocked from knowing why you were ignored. Maybe the mail was trully lost - you don’t know. Or maybe they are ignoring paper letters because young workers (born with Internet) don’t know how to write paper letters, or can’t be bothered. Ignoring letters is common in the US because there is usually no oversight. That is, there is no easy escalation option when a state secretary ignores a request. You’re simply fucked unless you’re willing to sue them (and likely lose, but at least you’ll have a chance at getting an answer on why you were ignored).

Europe is structurally more competent. Most¹ NEBs² and other gov agencies have an oversight authority like an ombudsman, where you can complain that your complaint was ignored. Sometimes I strangely find that my complaint actually was being silently treated or investigated, but the agency was just not competent enough to acknowledge the complaint. Other times, they simply ignore. Nonetheless, it’s a shit-show. There is rarely an ultimate answer and the original non-compliance you were reporting goes uncorrected. You don’t even get an apology, generally.

European agencies and ombudsmen are competent as far as keeping stats on the data they process. Complaints get categorised, counted, and stats reported annually. But there is no stat on the number of submissions that get ignored.

We need a federal agency to simply take reports of ignored correspondence, and investigate why it was ignored.

¹ Exceptionally, there is no effective oversight above the data protection authorities. You have no recourse when they ignore you. Same problem with federal ombudsmen.
² NEB: National Enforcement Body

The right to be analog is a critical intrinsic enabler to the power to boycott.

Suppose you boycott Microsoft and Google. If you need to reach a gov office who uses MS or Google for email, then you are writing a snail mail letter. Denmark has eliminated the national postal service. The loss of an important analog option forces Danes to use the digital mechanism. No one in Denmark can say: “hold on, I am boycotting Microsoft, so I cannot be obligated to correspond with your office”.

No country gives its people either rights. That is, there is no country that gives you a right to boycott or the right be analog. In principle, we could loosely claim to derive those rights through the human rights to autonomy, dignity, and self-determination. But that won’t hold up in court, as human rights are generally disregarded in court. Abstract human rights like that are really a long-shot as well. Even if a court were to concede to human rights, you’ve already lost if you have to go to court because in Europe you cannot generally recover all damages even if the judge takes your side.

I believe a window of opportunity is passing us by. If we do not establish a right to be analog hard and fast, it will be too late once mechanisms supporting our analog refuge are gone.

Europe is quietly removing the cash option. Europeans are boiling frogs. They don’t see that they have already lost the option to be free from banks. Forced banking is already in force. This enables banks to gradually force you onto their enshitified digital platforms.

What I find most disturbing is how a vast majority are blind to this.

As some might recall, I am offline by choice. I still have to make periodic trips to public hotspots to send and fetch msgs, and to write this post herein for example.

I can theoretically improve on that using a Wi-Fi AP. I could run a webserver without Internet, which is only accessible to those in Wi-Fi range of my residence. They could connect via Wi-Fi and a captive portal kind of mechanism could force the traffic to a website that I run. The website could have a msg like:

“Please tell Alice@wherever that I like her idea and want to meet”

or something like:

“Please post to freecycle that I have an air fryer to give away if someone wants it”

Of course, that’s just a half-baked brainstorm to give an idea. That would not be a manual labor intensive procedure and a non-starter. But in principle I should be able to broadcast an encrypted personal msg to Alice and someone more connected should be able to run an app on their phone that automatically grabs their neighbor’s msgs and sends them.

I think there even already exists an Android app that exchanges msgs with other devices over wifi or bluetooth, which works without Internet. I forgot the name of it but I had the impression it was a system of its own that does not use other protocols like email or activitypub.

UPDATE: I need to look into some of these apps:

https://www.geckoandfly.com/22562/chat-without-internet-connection-mesh-network/

In Brussels we are increasingly reaching a point where we can no longer talk to people face-to-face without technical hurdles and blockades. It’s clear why the Gang of Angry Elders are angry.

I simply entered a law office as a prospective customer. The door man said all visitors must register on the touchscreen tablet they had mounted on the desk, which made email and phone number a required field in order to advance to the next screen before submitting the registration. This is in Belgium, where the GDPR has a data minimisation protection in Article 5. You must surrender an email address (likely to a Microsoft user) as a precondition to sitting in the same room with someone.

Law offices, press offices, banks, and NGOs (some of which protect human rights) have put these security gatekeepers in their lobbies to prevent people talking to people. You ask to talk to someone and the response is always “do you have an appointment”? When the answer is “no”, they are helplessly incapable of making an appointment then and there. It’s a new level of human dysfunctionality.

Some Dexia branches have a very narrow time slot for people without appointments. You must get there early in hopes to get a queing position that does not get cut off at the end of the time slot.

The concept of a supplier that is subservient to the customer’s needs has been lost. It has flipped because too many boot-licking consumers are simply willing to be a doormat.

The persistence of CAPTCHAs proves this. If enough people were wise enough to refuse to solve CAPTCHAs, the CAPTCHAs would natrually be discontinued. But CAPTCHAs remain because too many boot-lickers are serving their corporate masters.

I’m working on a campaign against the use of Facebook by gov administrations. So far I have like 20 or so pages covering human rights violations by the gov when they impose the use of Facebook. But I have not yet written anything about addiction or mental health in this context.

I have never used Facebook myself, so I’m working somewhat blind. The question is whether Facebook is addictive and ultimately to what extent can it be faulted for mental health issues. I mean, of course it’s addictive to some extent, as is just about everything and anything. But the question is whether it can reasonably be argued that when a government pushes the use of Facebook onto people, is the gov significantly undermining people’s human right to living in good health? Or is that a far-fetched or crazy enough that it would actually dilute the campaign against gov-forced use of FB?

geteilt von: https://slrpnk.net/post/23278154

Smartphones are making us unhealthy, miserable, antisocial, and less free. If we can’t yet nationalize the attention economy, maybe it’s time to abolish its primary tool — before it finishes abolishing us.