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

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.

I’ve pulled the plug on the Internet. After a few months of being offline, these are my findings:

• Love DAB radio; even in a region with only one English station, it’s enough to get my news. Very grateful for BBC!
• Great to exercise the power of boycott and say “fuck you” to shitty ISPs. In the US, most ISPs support the republicans. And most ISPs worldwide do not accept cash payments (thus support the oppression of forced-banking).
• Very grateful for some¹ public libraries with truly open and anonymous wi-fi. (¹ some is stressed b/c sadly most public libraries outsource Internet to shitty big corps and are elitist enough to deny wi-fi to those who lack a GSM subscription [i.e. those who most need wi-fi], and some libs also block egress Tor [indeed they are naïve about how liability and accountability works])
• Web enshitification has less of an impact when just getting the web in small doses as a periodic library visit.
• No more wasting time doom scrolling.
• Money saving. Broadband costs are unreasonable in most parts of the world.
• Sending postal mail instead of e-mail is liberating, as it cuts Microsoft out of the loop (almost all businesses and gov offices use MS email). Also fun to typeset letters in LaTeX.
• ArgosTranslate enables offline people to machine-translate documents. This is great for privacy anyway, because it’s a bad idea to trust the cloud with translating personal docs you get in the mail.

Shortcomings -- and what we need to make this lifestyle easier:

• Severe lack of offline apps. In the 90s and 2000s when many people had spotty access, apps were more accommodating of that. There are no Mastodon, Lemmy, or Kbin apps to facilitate offline reading and writing, and periodic syncing.
• Most websites are now designed to assume everyone has 24/7 access. Coupled with an unhealthy and short-sighted hostility toward bots, webpages are rich with JS. They are a shit-show to download and tend not to make content easily fetchable for later consumption.
• Can be tedious to find open hotspots outside of libraries where you can make enough noise to make a VOIP call. (UPDATE: fortunately hospitals tend to have open wi-fi access and generally no noise constraints. Some libraries have a lobby where VOIP calls can be made)

I could really use a way to synchronize posts and messages (XMPP, Lemmy, Mastodon, e-mail) with a smartphone, and then to synchronize the phone with a PC. This would really cut down on having to lug a laptop around. An Android app would serve the most people, but it’d perhaps be easier to implement on a linux-based phone like PostmarketOS.

Advice if you want to try unplugging, in baby steps

A non-stop broadband contract with continuous billing setup is designed to be inconvenient to stop. Perhaps there is a threat of startup costs if you want to return to their service, and pains of returning equipment. Bear in mind they are exploiting your auto-pilot comfort by giving startup discounts to new customers but not to their loyal boot-lickers. You can probably save money if you’re willing to bounce around to other providers anyway.

Find a cheap prepaid mobile data package and make your phone a hotspot. Or if you are more advanced get an LTE USB modem that plugs into a router that supports a GSM uplink. “Cheap” in this case does not mean cheap per meg -- it means cheaper per month if you can greatly reduce your consumption by doing things like killing the graphics on your web browser. If you have enough discipline you can get by on ~5gb/month for probably around $5—10. It’s enough for basic comms.

When your 5gb (or whatever) of mobile data runs out, don’t topup right away. See how long you can hold out. Use the library wifi. I would have a week of offline time after my data runs out before topping up. Then each cycle that timespan grew. Now I have been offline for months.

Prepaid mobile broadband is a good middle step because you are not pushed to stay on an auto-pilot plan. It’s actually the opposite.. you have the inconvenience of topping up each time you need to continue your access, which is perfect for a progression into offlineness.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.sdf.org/post/36391484

Broadcast TV has their shit together, at least in the US. You can setup MythTV to fetch TV schedules without Internet access. It can grab the schedules from the broadcast signals. You can also subscribe to Internet services that give TV scheduling far into the future, but that’s a non-gratis frill. The in-band scheduling info goes a few days out which is good enough.

Radio listeners are screwed on this. FM and DAB+ both have no scheduling info. And worse, there is no Internet service that produces an aggregated radio schedule. You must find websites hosted by each radio station individually and navigate in their shitty user interfaces. Sometimes the programs are too vague to be useful.

Apparently it was completely overlooked in the drafting of the DAB specs. In principle, a clever broadcaster could embed schedule info into the album art using stegonography, or stego on the audio content, but then no appliances would decode such hacks.

I have no idea if satellite radio is on the ball. I think satellite radio is a US-specific option as DAB is nearly non-existent in the US. Vice-versa in Europe.

As someone who has pulled the plug on the residential Internet, I cling to the radio more than most. If DAB would were to include metadata and if there were a DAB-capable PC card, it would be great to have a MythTV-like setup to record radio programs. As it stands, we are driven to do a lot of channel surfing, which is worse on DAB than on FM because of the 2½ second delay with each channel change to decode a chunk of data (so surfing 10 channels has 25 seconds of silent timewaste).

I’m sure radio broadcasters would get more market share if DARs (digital audio recorders) were a thing. That sort of utility might even enable more people to be willing to experiment with unplugging from the Internet.

Update

The scheduling info is in fact part of a standard called SPI:

https://lemmy.sdf.org/post/36391484/20629029

It’s just that device makers are not bothering to implement it, apparently.

Tl;dr: deliver snail-mail by hand

Most corporations and gov agencies have outsourced email service to a highly unethical corporation (Microsoft). Every time you send an email to a recipient who uses MS for email service, you feed profitable data to a surveillance advertiser who snoops on email payloads for profit. You also reveal to the recipient your email address which they can use to feed profitable data to the surveillance advertiser beyond your control for an indefinite time.

It’s baffling how many people think this is a good idea.

As a Microsoft boycotter, I have naturally reverted back to old-fashioned snail mail. If the recipient is in my city, I personally hand-deliver the letter to their mailbox. Costs me nearly nothing. The recipient who is typically a gov agency or corporation is generally forced to respond using the national postal service (as I withhold email addresses from the correspondence). And rightfully so. It’s an extra perk that they pay a built-in postage penalty for poorly choosing their email provider.

This has been working well for me¹. I spend nothing if the recipient is in cycling range, and the recipient helps fund the national postal service when they respond using an option that is increasingly under the threat of mass digitization by privacy adversaries (MS and Google). Case in point: Denmark ends postal service this year, so it’s already too late there.

To verify whether the recipient’s email traverses a surveillance advertiser:

torsocks dig @8.20.247.20 -t mx -q "$domain" +noclass +nocomments +nostats +short +tcp +nosearch

where $domain is the domain portion of their email address. This command will check whether their vanity address is Microsoft or Google in disguise -- which is usually the case. It will usually output “yada yada outlook yada yada” to indicate Microsoft.

If you live remotely, can’t cycle, etc, then stop being cheap and buy stamps. They are cheaper than your Internet subscription which leaves you feeding surveillance advertisers.

¹ Exceptionally, one recipient went to the trouble of collecting my email address from a 3rd party without my consent in order to respond to my snail mail via email hosted by their surveillance advertiser. They naturally received an instant GDPR Article 17 request to erase my email address at that point along with a notice that they violated Article 5 (data minimisation).

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.

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

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.