Boycotts✊📣

Most (if not all) color printer makers are printing unique tracking dots on every printed page. But some of them are transparent about it and disclose it to consumers.¹

In any case, in the mid-1980s Xerox and Canon developed the anti-consumer feature decades before it became known to the public in 2004. So certainly we can blame them for surreptitiously assaulting our privacy.

It’s the surreptitious element of this that is the most infuriating. Transparently disclosing the feature to consumers is the socially responsible approach because at least informed consumers know they are signing up for:

• reduction of print quality
• higher cost of consumables (more yellow consumption)
• loss of privacy
• inability to print a black document when yellow ink/toner is empty

Xerox and Canon should be boycotted not just for the anti-consumer feature but for concealing it.

¹ citation needed.. I don’t recall where I read that some printer makers are transparent about it. I would like to know which ones are transparent just from a standpoint of knowing where the integrity is.

Update- other threads on this topic:

• (law) https://lemmy.sdf.org/post/45605675
• (asshole design) https://lemmy.sdf.org/post/45653037
• (FOSS request for circumvention) https://lemmy.sdf.org/post/45652622

This resource combines information from a variety of sources (check the Sources tab). It's intent is to be comprehensive, yet user friendly. It's not perfect but its the best I can do and IMO is better than the alternatives.

Each listing shows the reason for inclusion (donating to Trump, assisting ICE, advertised on Fox News, etc).

Check https://www.chicodemocracy.com/boycotts.html for additional boycott resources and alternatives.

Europe’s block on boycotting banks

No law directly prohibits boycotting banks AFAIK, but it’s effectively illegal to boycott banks because:

• It is illegal to be paid wages in cash in some (all?) countries.
• Some EU countries governments insist on tax payments by bank transfer. This is for all kinds of tax (income tax, property tax, and other forms of tax).
• EU level: all cash transactions above €10k are illegal in the whole of Europe. Most of western Europe reduces that limit to €1—3k.

Belgium’s ban on boycotting energy suppliers

Offgrid energy is illegal.

Denmark: you cannot boycott email, as of this year

Denmark eliminates the postal service this year. This essentially means you cannot boycott email because the snail mail option is generally gone. Exceptionally, you can perhaps send letters using UPS or FedEx, but that’s not really affordable if you are boycotting email. Not sure if hand-delivery is an option. Consider Germany, where postal boxes are not always public access and couriers are given a key to the lobby. If that happens in Denmark, then hand-delivery cannot be relied on.

US ban on boycotting Israel

You can boycott the US in the US if you want, but you cannot boycott Israel if your job is from the US government. This tyranny was showcased in Texas when a Palestinian school contractor who taught kids how to speak Arabic had to renew her contract. The new contract required her to agree to not boycott Israel. She could not in good conscious sign such a bizarrely oppressive contract, so she was let go.

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.

cross-posted from: https://slrpnk.net/post/24727109

The right to be analog is a critical 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.

If you're boycotting Avelo Airlines due to their contract with the U.S. Department of Homeland Security to operate deportation flights...here's some info that may make it easier for you to let them know.

• CEO of Avelo: Andrew Levy: alevy@aveloair.com
• Vice President, Airports & Customer Support at Avelo: Blaine Nicholas: bnicholas@aveloair.com

The email I sent; feel free to steal as needed:

Dear Mr. Levy and Mr. Nicholas,

We were so excited when you started your [city]>[city] route. My family flies to [state] multiple times per year, and sometimes friends go up to visit us there as well. This new route was so much more convenient than flying into [city]!

Sad to say, this past week we took our final flight on Avelo. We just can't support an airline that will be helping the current administration deport people without due process, flout birthright citizenship, and even break up families just to prove a point.

We enjoyed your fast flights and kind employees and are sorry to go...but we're happy to suffer a minor inconvenience to avoid supporting authoritarianism in the U.S.

Thanks for listening,

I hope you find this helpful! I also have a free book on how to disengage from Amazon, Meta, Google, and other surveillance capitalists. No tracking, no email needed, no affiliate links. I'm a former journalist and this was my passion project.

DISENGAGE: Opting Out—and Finding New Options—to Reclaim Your Life from Spammers, Scammers, Intrusive Marketers and Big Tech--

P.S. If my email is too mild to express what you're really thinking, write your own letter and sprinkle it with these words and phrases, from least to most angry:

• unconscionable
• unbelievable
• poor business practice
• horrifying
• unconstitutional
• pitiful
• disgusting
• criminal
• losers
• jagoffs
• buh-bye, assholes
• see ya, shitbags
• fuck you and your airline
• burn in hell

Boycott of Target is making an impact on Target's numbers.

Inspired by acquisition of power yesterday by a corrupt tyrant and his possie of xenophobic chronies, people should be reminded that the voting is not over because you can vote in the consumer market every day for the next 4 years. Everyone in the world can participate in this voting process (despite ALEC’s effort to reduce democracy).

ALEC¹ is the extreme right lobby and bill mill. This org writes bills for Congress conservatives to:

• reduce environmental protection and neuter the EPA
• fight immigration, push xenophobia
• proliferate and privatize prisons
• privatize education
• reduce public healthcare
• reduce tax regs (individual & corp)
• neuter the CFPB
• suppress voting (e.g. tightening id rules)
• weaken labor unions
• reduce gun control
• mask corporate tampering in politics

They have a close hand-in-hand relationship with the NRA and they finance republican war chests.

These are some of the well-known ALEC members, all of whome I boycott:

• AmEx (American Express)
• Anheuser Busch
• Boeing ← also rampant safety scandals
• Bose
• Century Link
• Charter Communications
• Chevron ← also caught financing the cloakroom project to hide meetings between republican politicians and corporations; also uses AI from Microsoft to find oil
• Farmers/Foremost
• FedEx ← also known to ship shark fins, hunting trophies, and slave dolphins
• Geico
• LMG (Liberty Mutual/Safeco)
• Marlboro (Philip Morris)
• Motorola ← also equips the Israeli Defense Forces
• Nationwide Insurance
• PNC bank
• Sony ← also caught using GPL code in their DRM code
• State Farm
• Texaco
• TimeWarner (Spectrum)
• UPS

Most of these ALEC members finance ALEC particularly for its anti-union lobby. But it’s a package deal. They finance thw whole of ALEC and all its activity.

There was also a “grab your wallet” project to track all Trump’s assets for boycotting Trump directly, but I don’t know if that’s being updated anymore. There is a link to a google docs spreadsheet (yikes!) but I think it’s a decade old by now.

¹American Legislative Exchange Council

cross-posted from: https://hexbear.net/post/880059

And I can’t even imagine it’s an intentional addition, it’s just become part of boiler plate legal documents here in the deep south.

The wiki on anti-BDS laws

cross-posted from: https://infosec.pub/post/8862635

“Only because of that official investigation did Canadians learn that ‘over 5 million nonconsenting Canadians’ were scanned into Cadillac Fairview's database”. Wow.

This Wired article is contradictory. The spokesperson says:

“an individual person cannot be identified using the technology in the machines. The technology acts as a motion sensor that detects faces, so the machine knows when to activate the purchasing interface”

I suppose it’s possible that a sloppy developer would name an executable Invenda.Vending.FacialRecognitionApp.exe which merely senses the presence of a face. But it seems like a baldfaced lie when you consider that:

“Invenda sales brochures that promised ‘the machines are capable of sending estimated ages and genders’ of every person who used the machines—without ever requesting consent.”

Boycott Mars

I already boycott Mars because they are a GMA member and they spent ~$500k lobbying against #GMO labeling -- and they have been blackballed for using child slave labor -- and Mars supports Russia. This is another good reason to #boycottMars.

Update

Apparently a LemmyBug replaced the article URL with a picture URL. The article is here:

https://www.wired.com/story/facial-recognition-vending-machine-error-investigation/

The vending machine pic is here:

https://infosec.pub/pictrs/image/2041d717-7cd7-4393-94f3-96aa87817aa7.jpeg

Cloudflare is the most harmful fiefdom amoung our technofeudalist walled gardens. Unlike Facebook, Cloudflare is largely inescapable because over 30% of the web has become restricted access under Cloudflare. Government agencies have started jailing public resources in Cloudflare. In some cases naively obligating people to use websites that they are blocked from, if they find themselves in a demographic that Cloudflare has shut out. People are being denied electronic access to medical information, voting information, credit histories, etc.

People who are not blocked are unwittingly sharing all their sensitive info with an (essentially invisible) tech giant in a country without privacy safeguards.

Even in the Lemmy network, some of us are fucked because the biggest instances (Lemmy World and [ironically named] sh.itjust works) make some content unreachable to those on the more liberated hosts. It’s a centralized walled garden in the middle of our otherwise decentralized network.

In addition to the linked article, there is also:

• Comparison of the human disempowerment severity of 3 walled gardens (Facebook, Google, and Cloudflare)
• Cloudflare has created the largest most rigidly exclusive walled garden in the world