ciferecaNinjo

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2
Struggling to find the open data laws in Belgium (fedia.io)
 

Starting with the open data EU directive:

https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/NIM/?uri=CELEX%3A32019L1024

I went to "national transposition" on the sidebar, expanded Belgium, and I see lots of Wallonia-specific statutes. The Brussels specific laws would be interesting but what I fetched was not a complete body of current law. It was a long list of modifications of past law along the lines of “change this word… replace that word..”, etc.

Does anyone have a link to the full current open data law? Preferably in french because that works best for machine translation.

5
Member states must “facilitate cross-linguistic document searches” (fedia.io)
 

I was startled to find this gem in EU directive 2019/1024 Art.9 ¶1:

Where possible, Member States shall facilitate the cross-linguistic search for documents, in particular by enabling metadata aggregation at Union level.

Even if you neglect the “cross-linguistic” specification, merely making public documents searchable is a huge leap of progress in the EU. And I think all member states are currently breaking that law for the most part, as we are generally forced to rely on private sector ad surveillance garbage from Google and Bing to find most public sector docs.

Sure there are a few scattered search tools for some very specific collections of documents. But most public documents are not at all indexed in any publicly administered search tool.

Of course the “cross-linguistic” specification is quite interesting because document translations are sometimes performed but the result is often not shared and even more often not searchable. E.g., for some reason a university or institution in Belgium (possibly public sector) went to the effort of creating a good English version of a big piece of the Belgian Economic Code. I was lucky to stumble into it out in the wild. Per the directive (which is hopefully transposed into national law), someone who searches for that section of Belgian economic code should get a reference to the unofficial English version along with the French and Dutch versions. But they certainly do not because the national legal statutes search site is hard-coded for just French and Dutch.

This touches on a recent question I asked. If the EU were to obtain an English version of transposed directives, in principle they should be furnishing that to the public. There’s one snag here though: the open data directive seems to exclude the EU itself from Art.9.

4
Belgium’s apparent flagship website on open data has access restrictions - SDF Chatter (lemmy.sdf.org)
 

I could not reach the site from Tor. The linked page is the archive.org cached version, which actually is open to all.

1
Belgium’s apparent flagship website on open data has access restrictions (web.archive.org)
 

I could not reach the site from Tor. The linked page is the archive.org cached version, which actually is open to all.

Belgian banks demand proof of cash sources, while German ATMS do not print receipts in c/Belgium@europe.pub
[–] ciferecaNinjo@fedia.io 1 points 1 week ago (1 children)

That does not seem to be the reality down on the ground. A guy was complaining about his 50 EUR cash deposit being refused because he could not prove the source.

Maybe you are thinking what the law mandates, in a situation where banks are free to be more extreme than the law? A lot of banks generally try to be “overachievers” when it comes to legal compliance because consumers are pushovers and regulators only care about the legal infringements that concern the state and not consumers. Some banks refuse cash deposits entirely and outright. So if that’s legal, why would it not be legal to demand proof of source on a deposit of €50?

BTW, if you find a bank that minimally complies with the law and gives the full legally permissible amount of privacy to customers (and respects GDPR data minimisation laws), please let us know! I don’t think such a thing exists.

3
Belgian banks demand proof of cash sources, while German ATMS do not print receipts (slrpnk.net)
 

Belgian banks have gone to the Orwellian extremes of outright refusing cash deposits without proof of source, even for small amounts as low as €50! The war on cash (war on privacy) is in full swing in Belgium.

At the same time, German ATMs are not producing receipts. My understanding of EU law is that the ATM must print a receipt if there is a currency exchange on the ATM’s side of the transaction (please correct me if I’m wrong). But I see no EU law requiring ATMs to print receipts generally. Some ATMs in Germany don’t even have printers; no slot for dispensing receipts. By extension, I suppose such ATMs must not be capable of offering dynamic currency conversion (which is bizarre because that’s where the most profit is in the ATM business).

In any case, it seems a bit off that you can get cash from a German ATM, get denied a receipt (you don’t know in advance that a receipt will not be given), and then you cannot deposit that cash in Belgium due to their nannying.

Or can you? What if you write down the ATM machine’s number, location, time, date, and amount. Would a log of that information serve to document the source of the cash to legal standards?

6
Belgian banks demand proof of cash sources, while German ATMS do not print receipts (slrpnk.net)
 

Belgian banks have gone to the Orwellian extremes of outright refusing cash deposits without proof of source, even for small amounts as low as €50! The war on cash (war on privacy) is in full swing in Belgium.

At the same time, German ATMs are not producing receipts. My understanding of EU law is that the ATM must print a receipt if there is a currency exchange on the ATM’s side of the transaction (please correct me if I’m wrong). But I see no EU law requiring ATMs to print receipts generally. Some ATMs in Germany don’t even have printers; no slot for dispensing receipts. By extension, I suppose such ATMs must not be capable of offering dynamic currency conversion (which is bizarre because that’s where the most profit is in the ATM business).

In any case, it seems a bit off that you can get cash from a German ATM, get denied a receipt (you don’t know in advance that a receipt will not be given), and then you cannot deposit that cash in Belgium due to their nannying.

Or can you? What if you write down the ATM machine’s number, location, time, date, and amount. Would a log of that information serve to document the source of the cash to legal standards?

7
Are bad actors on Tor all really from the general public? Or are they anti-Tor people looking to maintain a stigma? (fedia.io)
 

A Turk was telling me about a peaceful demonstration he attended, in Turkey. He said police surrounded the protest. Then someone in plain clothes threw a stone at the police. One of the demonstrators noticed that the guy who threw the stone had handcuffs in his back pocket. IOW, a cop posing as a demonstrator threw a stone in order to justify the police tagging the protest as “violent” so they could shut it down.

So of course the question is, to what extent are bad actors on Tor actually boot lickers who are working to ruin Tor for everyone?

Fedia.io performance issues and blocking anonymous access in c/fedia@fedia.io
[–] ciferecaNinjo@fedia.io 1 points 1 week ago

the site isn’t useful if I keep it locked down like it is now

I’d say it’s crippled but not useless, just as old-fashioned non-federated forums are still useful despite limitations. And as it is now we still have some of the fedi benefits.

bug 1

One bug comes to mind, which should perhaps be reported against kbin. Is the current locked down state something that is facilitated by the software, or did you hack it to redirect outsiders to login screens? If it’s the former, then the software is disservicing users who unwittingly post a link back to the access-restricted resource. If I cross-post by posting a link to fedia.io/yadayada, I should ideally get a warning to say “are you sure you want to post a link that is inaccessible to outsiders?”

bug 2 (more of an enhancement)

One work around is for a Fedia user to create a post, wait for a non-fedia response, then dig up the cached version on the non-fedia host and publicise that link in other places. That’s already possible with a bit of navigation effort. It would be useful if users could obtain a link farm of cached versions of any post or comment. Not just for the situation at hand but with small hosts coming and going coupled with censorship as well, users of mastodon, lemmy, and [km]bin all suffer from dataloss. A sophisticated client could use caching info to locally build/recover a complete thread, as well as track points of data loss.

Anyway, just brainstorming here.

8
The Tor community needs a resource that tests and publishes a report whether a website is “open access” (fedia.io)
 

There are many situations where gov-distributed public information is legally required to be open access. Yet they block Tor.

To worsen matters, the general public largely and naively believes it’s correct to call something as “open access” when in fact there are access restrictions in place.

The resource should work like this:

  1. User supplies an URL
  2. Robot tries to access that page from a variety of different countries, residential and datacenter IPs, Tor, various VPNs, different user-agent strings, etc.
  3. Report is generated that reports the site as “openly accessible” if no obsticles (like 403s) were detected. Otherwise tags the site as “restricted access” and lists the excluded demographics of people.

The report should be dated and downloadable as PDF so that activists can send it to the org behind site with a letter saying: “your website is not open access -- please fix”.

This need somewhat aligns with the mission of the OONI project, but they are not doing this AFAICT.

Update

I just read an announcement about Belgium’s “open data” law, which is basically a summary. It said something like “there should be no unnecessary access restrictions”. I’m not sure to what extent that accurately reflects the law, but it’s an example of what one country considers “open”, fwiw. From there, I would say most Tor blockades are not necessary but rather some lazy sysadmin looking for an easy job. They of course would then like to argue that it’s “necessary” to keep the baddies out.

Update 2

The Open Knowledge Foundation Network defines open data to be completely free from restrictions:

https://okfn.org/en/library/what-is-open/

EU directives must be implemented in each EU member state, which the EU then verifies. Is that done in English? in c/Europe@europe.pub
[–] ciferecaNinjo@fedia.io 2 points 2 weeks ago

I don't know the Belgian case, but I think it's the same thing in many member states; the publishing of laws online is done by private for-profit companies, and comes with weird restrictions.

Belgium has an open data law obligating the state to make available to the public generally all information that the state has, with some reasonable restrictions w.r.t private info about individuals. Legal statutes themselves would obviously have to be openly accessible under that law. That law was even used to force publication of train routes and schedules. I’ve not read the law but I guess it’s likely sloppy about what constitutes “open”, because the state’s own website is access restricted (e.g. Tor IPs are blocked).

Fedia.io performance issues and blocking anonymous access in c/fedia@fedia.io
[–] ciferecaNinjo@fedia.io 2 points 2 weeks ago (2 children)

I’ve always appreciated your competence and diligence in setting a good example of responsible hosting without resorting to shitty technofeudal fiefdoms like Cloudflare. Nice to see you are standing your ground and not selling the users out (unlike lemmy world and many other boot licking hosts).

I must say there is a notable side-effect to this. Since mbin does not have a cross-posting feature, I have been cross-posting by creating a link post to my original post from other relevant magazines. Now all of those links are unreachable to outsiders. To outsiders, I polluted their magazine with access-restricted links.

I can think of only two workarounds:

  1. Make the original post on a publicly open forum, then link to that from other forums. This means the original post can never be on Fedia (which has the side-effect of reducing fedia publicity); and/or
  2. Copy/paste the payload of the original msg into the cross-post.

Fix 1 is impossible for existing past threads. Fix 2 is tedious and it’s a maintenance burden esp. if a post needs edits or updates. Fix 2 is also problematic because if I withold the original link, users cannot find other discussions that are scattered; but if I supply the original link, then non-Fedia readers cannot reach the OP anyway.

That will mean we don't show up in search engines and whatnot, which for some will considered a good thing and will likely cause others to leave.

Worth mentioning that paywall sites handle this by giving crawlers special treatment. I’m not necessarily suggesting that though.

There is a remaining problem related to the login form. Calls to the login page are breathtakingly expensive,

The login form loads must be through the roof because whenever a non-fedia user follows a cross-post into fedia, they are redirected to a login form which did not happen before.

There would be some relief if Mbin would implement a cross-post feature that automatically copies the OP text into the body, which would cut down on the number of visits. At the same time, I’ve always considered that a sloppy approach because edits are not sychronised. So in principle the threadiverse probably needs a smarter API specifically for cross-posts.

The use of 3rd-party clients would obviously give relief on the login form loading. But I have not found any decent 3rd-party clients for Lemmy or [km]bin - (perhaps because I’m fussy… I could really use a text UI in linux that stores content locally).

EU directives must be implemented in each EU member state, which the EU then verifies. Is that done in English? in c/Europe@europe.pub
[–] ciferecaNinjo@fedia.io -2 points 2 weeks ago

If a resource blocks certain IP addresses, that is not open access. It is access restricted. It is a deliberate blockade against a demographic of people.

“Open data” has different meanings in different bodies of law, so your comment is meaningless without context. But in any case, we can call shenanigans whenever an “open data” legal definition fails to thwart access restrictions in an Emporer wears no clothes type of attempt.

IOW, you cannot claim that an access restriction ceases to exist on some emotional plea that you believe the access restriction is just, appropriate, or necessary. An access restriction is an access restriction. “Open” implies open to all people, not some select demographics.

EU directives must be implemented in each EU member state, which the EU then verifies. Is that done in English? in c/Europe@europe.pub
[–] ciferecaNinjo@fedia.io 2 points 2 weeks ago

Yes I understood that but it is not correct. We choose to use Tor for privacy, not to lose access to resources. There is no exclusion on the Tor side of this.

EU directives must be implemented in each EU member state, which the EU then verifies. Is that done in English? in c/Europe@europe.pub
[–] ciferecaNinjo@fedia.io 1 points 2 weeks ago (4 children)

You don’t know how Tor works. The Tor community has exit nodes on the clearnet which give them inclusion. When a tor user is blocked, the exclusion is done by the resource, not from the Tor side. The tor network in no way excludes people from accessing legal publications.

EU directives must be implemented in each EU member state, which the EU then verifies. Is that done in English? in c/Europe@europe.pub
[–] ciferecaNinjo@fedia.io 1 points 2 weeks ago (2 children)

I mentioned that, along with the problem of that. As well as the problem of searching using private sector tools.

We should not be pushed to use private search engines like Google, Bing, or their syndicates to find public resources. Public administrations have an “open data” obligation to some extent. Certainly the EU knows where the member state’s implementations are.

EU directives must be implemented in each EU member state, which the EU then verifies. Is that done in English? in c/Europe@europe.pub
[–] ciferecaNinjo@fedia.io 1 points 2 weeks ago (10 children)

This is generally saying if you are being discriminated against, change whatever your demographic is that is subject to discrimination. Putting oneself inside the included group does nothing to remedy the fact that there is an excluded group of people.

It’s also wrong to assume everyone has clearnet access. At this very moment I am using a machine that does not have clearnet access.

GDPR tactic: “forum shopping”, by choosing a data controller’s HQ.. does this work? in c/Europe@europe.pub
[–] ciferecaNinjo@fedia.io 1 points 2 weeks ago

What an anti-feature. Thanks for pointing that out! Should be corrected now.

8
EU directives must be implemented in each EU member state, which the EU then verifies. Is that done in English? (fedia.io)
 

Take the anti-spam directive, for example:

https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/?uri=CELEX%3A32002L0058&qid=1747912567106

The website gives us the directive but makes no references to the member state’s implementations of that. It seems a bit sloppy that visitors have to try manually searching using some private-sector surveillance advertising search tool to find a member state’s version. In Belgium it’s especially a mess because many of the official websites that “publish” laws are access restricted (e.g. Tor users often denied access). Only some segments of the public can reach some websites. We have Moniteur Belge but that involves digging a law out of a large PDF that globs together many unrelated laws and publications.

According to the EC website, the EC has a duty to verify whether the member state’s version was implemented timely and correctly. Is that done in English, or does the EU have native speakers of all languages on staff doing the verification?

I ask because if there is a translation step, then the EU would perhaps have a good quality English translation of member states laws

which I would like access to. To date, I do machine translations which is tedious. And if the source language is Dutch, the translation tends to be quite poor.

Update: perhaps the biggest shit show is this site:

https://www.stradalex.com/

Visiting from a tor exit node with uMatrix installed, that site is in some kind of endless loop. No idea what kind of shitty JavaScript causes this, but it reloads itself non-stop and never renders. Opening the uMatrix UI shows 3rd party js rows popping up and disappearing faster than you can click to give perms. These people should not be allowed to do web service for legal information.

update 2

This page gives some general links to member state’s law pubs, but you are still left with having to dig around for the implementation that corresponds to the EU directive -- if you can get access.

update 3

Found something useful.. this page is openly accessible and has a “National Transposition” link. From there we can do an /advanced search/ and limit the collection to national transposition and search on 32002L0058, for example.

Then it finds no results, which seems a bit broken. But if I simply do a quick search on 32002L0058 then use the “national transposition” link on the left bar, that seems to work. But then in this test case I followed it all the way to a page that said “ Text is not available.”

In fact, “Text is not available” is what I got on 3 of 3 samples. So it’s a crapshoot. Hopefully the EC folks who verify national implementations are not relying on this same mechanism.

French DPA: forcing SNCF customers to specify “Mr.” or “Mrs.” when buying a train ticket does not violate data minimisation... in c/gdpr@sopuli.xyz
[–] ciferecaNinjo@fedia.io 2 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

Well that rationale doesn’t withstand the fact that people can change their gender identity without updating their ID docs. Recipe for disaster.

7
French DPA: forcing SNCF customers to specify “Mr.” or “Mrs.” when buying a train ticket does not violate data minimisation... (www.vbb.com)
 

Wow, so that’s bizarre. I wonder why the French DPA would think it’s okay to force customers to reveal their gender. Luckily the CJEU overruled them and made it right in the end. But of course it’s still disturbing when a DPA is working against privacy rights.

0
Dude could not simply deposit €50 cash into his Belgian bank account (fedia.io)
What kind of cuisine uses malt vinegar (besides UK and US)? in c/food@slrpnk.net
[–] ciferecaNinjo@fedia.io 2 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

I was thinking about doing that. I read that mother of vineger is not necessary, but it speeds up the process. I also read that results are only good with certain beers like brown ales.. and I think IPA was given as an example of a bad result (i’m assuming due to the hoppy bitterness).

8
“Due to a court order in Belgium requiring the implementation of blocking measures to prevent access within Belgium to certain domains, the OpenDNS service is not currently available to users in Belgi (fedia.io)
 

wtf.. we cannot simply do an NS lookup in Belgium?

$ dig @"$(tor-resolve resolver1.opendns.com)" -t ns -q europeangreens-eu.mail.protection.outlook.com +tcp +nocomments +nostats +nosearch +noclass +dnssec +noauth +noquestion +nocmd

europeangreens-eu.mail.protection.outlook.com. 0 TXT "Effective April 11, 2025: Due to a court order in Belgium requiring the implementation of blocking measures to prevent access within Belgium to certain domains, the OpenDNS service is not currently available to users in Belgium"

Update

Seems relevant:

Belgian Constitution Article 25:
The press is free; censorship can never be introduced; no security can be demanded from authors, publishers or printers. When the author is known and resident in Belgium, neither the publisher, the printer nor the distributor can be prosecuted.

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