Nevermind. Later terminated the process and restarted and it worked. So it’s not likely a blockade of any kind.
(edit) I tried to change the title to: ~~Library blocks Tor Browser but not Tor (wtf?)~~ nevermind but sdf blocks me with a popup saying “language”.
I avoid the grocery stores that have ‘loyalty programs’
I have that option but it leads to other problems. The grocers who are so small that they have no loyalty program have a different problem: they have limited choice of brands for their small spaces and they tend to choose poorly. E.g. a small store close to me only has Kellogg’s-branded cereal, which I boycott. Their soaps are all Unilever or Proctor & Gamble. They choose the most popular brands for a lot of stuff. So to practice my boycotts against (probably hundreds of) brands requires a store big enough to carry generic nonames.
In some regions creditors and merchants have an obligation to accept cash and they are simply ignoring the law. But the gov does not enforce the cash acceptance law. It’s bizarre. Even more bizarre that people just go along with it. There was a case where a group went to an illegally cashless cafe. They ordered food and drinks and when the bill came they said “we only have cash”. The shop threatened to call the police. The customers said: please, we will wait. Police came. Customers explained that thier cash was refused. Police said: well, nothing for us to do here.. you’re free to go.
We need more people to exploit unlawfully cashless situations. People should be happy to benefit while also doing a community service. Of course it’s not for folks who are afraid of cops and courts.
Denmark has this problem too. There are some university resources that are unreachable to students who cannot do an SMS 2FA verification.
Indeed it needs to be fought.
I’m with @DougHolland@lemmy.world in that I oppose surviellance advertising anyway, so if the loyalty tracking were taking place without a special app (e.g. scanning a bar code from plastic/paper), I would still not register.
In some cases we can do better than Doug. E.g. grab a paper loyalty application form (if they are available), scan the barcode or QR code, return the blank form to the top of the pile. Someone else will activate that bar code with their personal details later. You can regenerate the barcode, store it on your phone (which need not be subscribed to GSM service), or print it on paper, and use the barcode for discounts (& pay cash of course). You obviously corrupt their surveillance advertising DB and also get the discounts.
Win-win for me. But I guess it’s questionable to what extent the DB is being corrupted. My own purchases are still aggregated together which supports advertising. OTOH, it’s all aggregated to a different person, which to some extent corrupts the info. It’s unclear if this is overall more or less harmful to advertising.
Ideas? Perhaps we could create a barcode-sharing platform whereby some people take a hit for the team and register, then share their barcode for others. The volunteer would at least gain the benefit of their data being littered with data of other people.
That looks like a separate program, which Debian does not have. Apparently something added to Ubuntu that was not inherited from Debian.
Is that a separate installation? Imagemagick was my first attempt. It did not recognize XCF.
“Renamed” seems like an understatement. I heard Digital Services was completely hallowed out. If you dump the people and change the name, what’s left? The chairs and keyboards?
Musk is not personally present in the infiltration. He sent DOGE staff.
Knee-jerk fix: we make a FOIA request for the data that was removed.
But the shame of it is that FOIA reqs are not gratis, which means we have to pay again for the data. Elon’s DOGE office would just see it as a success that they are getting extra compensation for the data.
If anyone is writing or maintaining a playbook/handbook for how to run an authoritarian regime, removing open data would be a play to add.
cross-posted from: https://lemmy.sdf.org/post/28580567
Love the irony and simultaneous foreshadowed embarrassment of Elon denying availability and service as a way to be more efficient.
The irony
Cloudflare enables web admins to be extremely bloated. Admins of Cloudflared websites have no incentive to produce lean or efficient websites because Cloudflare does the heavy lifting for free (but at the cost of reduced availability to marginalized communities like Tor, VPNs, CGNAT, etc). So they litter their website with images and take little care to choose lean file formats or appropriate resolutions. Cloudflare is the #1 cause of web inefficiency.
Cloudflare also pushes countless graphical CAPTCHAs with reckless disregard which needlessly wastes resources and substantially increases traffic bloat -- all to attack bots (and by side-effect text-based users) who do not fetch images and thus are the most lean consumers of web content.
The embarrassment
This is a perfect foreshadowing of what we will see from this department. “Efficiency” will be achieved by killing off service and reducing availability. Certain demographics of people will lose service in the name of “efficiency”.
It’s worth noting that DOGE is not using Cloudflare’s default configuration. They have outright proactively blacklisted Tor IPs to ensure hard-and-fast fully denied service to that demographic of people. Perhaps their PR person would try to claim CAPTCHA avoidance is efficient :)
The other embarrassment is that they are using Cloudflare for just a single tiny image. They don’t even have enough competency to avoid CF in the normal state & switch it on demand at peak traffic moments.
The discussion
More chatter here.
Love the irony and simultaneous foreshadowed embarrassment of Elon denying availability and service as a way to be more efficient.
Cloudflare enables web admins to be extremely bloated. Admins of Cloudflared websites have no incentive to produce lean or efficient websites because Cloudflare does the heavy lifting for free (but at the cost of reduced availability to marginalized communities like Tor, VPNs, CGNAT, etc). So they litter their website with images and take little care to choose lean file formats or appropriate resolutions. Cloudflare is the #1 cause of web inefficiency.
Cloudflare also pushes countless graphical CAPTCHAs with reckless disregard which needlessly wastes resources and substantially increases traffic bloat -- all to attack bots (and by side-effect text-based users) who do not fetch images and thus are the most lean consumers of web content.
This is a perfect foreshadowing of what we will see from this department. “Efficiency” will be achieved by killing off service and reducing availability. Certain demographics of people will lose service in the name of “efficiency”.
It’s worth noting that DOGE is not using Cloudflare’s default configuration. They have outright proactively blacklisted Tor IPs to ensure hard-and-fast fully denied service to that demographic of people. Perhaps their PR person would try to spin this as CAPTCHA avoidance is efficient :)
The other embarrassment is that they are using Cloudflare for just a single tiny image. They don’t even have enough competency to avoid CF in the normal state & switch it on demand at peak traffic moments.
Microblog chatter here.
The main landing site for the FCC blocks Tor users with a 403. This means their contact page is also exclusive access, along with a number of otherwise pubilc access databases.
At least their consumer complaints site open to all, including those with a privacy complaint:
It’s one of the ugliest most undignified forms of service refusal. They just simply drop packets from Tor. Not even enough courtesy to send a 403 forbidden. So visitors are left guessing whether the website is down, slow, or giving deliberate mistreatment. People then have to try different browsers with different timeout thresholds to investigate.
There is no apparent mirror or alternative site hosting Florida statutes. Archive.org has a cache of some laws but FL state gets zero credit for that.
(update) in fact there are two state sites for legal statutes and both block tor:
I would love it if someone would successfully argue in court “sorry I broke that law but I could not inform myself of the law because every time I tried to reach the state’s website for statutes it just timed out” -- and get away with it.
Indeed the IRS website blocks Tor users from accessing tax information, as if tor users don’t need tax information. Important legal guidance exists on irs.gov, so it’s obviously an injustice to block people from becoming informed about their rights and obligations.
(edit)
What’s the fix? Would it be effective to make a FOIA request on paper so the IRS must send the info on paper via USPS? Or would that require compensation to offset their burden?
I think that’s nearly impossible. Some people use the Tor network and govs tend to block it. For me, “robust” means being strong enough to handle Tor traffic, but I don’t think anti-Tor ignorance could ever be flushed out.
Some people also use very OLD devices, like myself, and refuse to contribute e-waste to landfills. That crowd is also hard to cater for. For me, “robust” also means working with
lynxbrowser, but I don’t think the chase-the-shiny incompetence of only supporting new devices could ever be flushed out.So I must ultimately disagree because if the gov were to achieve what they believe is robust, it would be a recipe for ending analog transactions that everyone excluded from their digital systems rely on. They should strive for robustness, but never call it robust. They should recognise that digital tech always excludes some people and so analog systems are still needed.
That is exactly the problem. My mail server runs on a residential IP -- deliberately so. My comment stands: it’s naive to make a sender responsible for email landing in a spam folder when the sender has no control or even transparency over the operation of the recipient’s mail server.