In Belgium real estate listings mostly omit addresses. This makes it extremely annoying for consumers looking to either buy or rent because they are forced into engagement with the landlord/seller just to find out the address. Very time-wasting. You must register on a site and disclose your email address, then wait for someone to reply with the address (and often they do not, or they want to speak on the phone and hear your voice -- which can go badly if you don’t speak the local language)†.

The published listings tend to only disclose what approximate neighborhood the dwelling is in (useless for my needs because you have no way of knowing if it’s near a tram stop that is relevant). But there are some exceptions. Maybe ~5—10% of listings have an address. I decided to ignore the majority of listings and only consider those with an address. This meant in order to get a decent number of choices I had to scrape every single real estate site that covers my city to harvest just the listings with addresses.

Then I used a geocaching API to convert the addresses to GPS coords. From there, I scraped the public transport websites. For every address in my city the tool would grab all weekday public transport routes from every GPS fix, which includes trams and transfer times. Then it calculated the walk time on both sides to/from the tram stops on every route to derive the shortest door to door time.

I also wanted to be within a certain cycling time from the center of the city, to ensure I don’t get too far from the center. That was calculated using an API.

The tool also accounted for the usual filters, like budget. I ended up selecting the dwelling that was the shortest commute without deviating from the proxity to center constraint.

The only problem with my approach was that one listing used a fake address. So my tool trusted the addresses and some jack ass published bogus info that lead me to a place that was occupied and unavailable. When I called to say “where are you” he said “down the street.. I gave an address that was close but incorrect”.. WTF. It was far enough to screw up the public transport option.

Anyway, this would have been impossible to do without scraping all those websites. I had freedom and power that’s denied to all other consumers who are trapped in the UIs of the real estate sites. But the next time I need a dwelling, the tool is certainly broken due to how rapidly websites change and also how increasingly anti-bot they have become. I think when I built that tool it was during the last moment of time that the web was relatively open access.

Everyone is generally forced to look for a place close to work. But close in terms of straight distance does not translate into a short tram commute because the routes are chaotic. You could be somewhat close but need 2 or 3 transfers. One interesting thing I noticed was a dwelling on the complete opposite side of the city was reasonable because it was close to a train station with no need for transfers. Trains are the fastest with much fewer stops. Also, there are express buses (fewer stops) and normal buses. So intuition is too inaccurate.

† The point of contact is often a real estate agent or property manager who has many listings. So if you call or write to ask for an address of many listings, the same person sees all your requests and ignores all of them because they assume you are not serious. They think: what kind of person looks all over the place.. surely they only want to see one or two neighborhoods. So this bullshit blocks consumers from searching for a place to live in a way that accounts for public transport schedules. They want to force you to choose where to live based on everything other than the address.

I have not been able to track down the Belgian open data law¹ but it seems in principle blocking both Tor users and archive.org from access to the address book of Chamber of Representatives would not be in line with the spirit of open data. They may not have the IT competency to serve Tor users but to treat archive.org like a malicious robot is to underachieve.

¹ I can only find an old archive of the goals of the open data policy (in French), but not the law:

http://web.archive.org/web/20160416034829/http://www.digitalbelgium.be/sites/default/files/content/FR_strategisch_dossier.pdf

The original link was from https://openknowledge.be/ which seems to be a stale website and an inactive project. It feels like open data got started in Belgium but then the ball was dropped.

(original post)

To reach the Belgian datasets of open data from Tor you must go through archive.org:

http://web.archive.org/web/20241003145143/https://data.gov.be

And because the website is interactive and also not completely archived, I ultimately could not even browse through to see what data there is beyond the first page of databases. Thus not entirely “open”.

But the Brussels datasets are open to all.

I could not find the data I was looking for. That is, I wanted to know how many complaints are sent to the various different SPF regulators as well as ombuds people -- and very specifically how many complaints are ignored. Some offices produce annual reports but I have never seen an annual report that exposes the count of ignored complaints.

Anyway, the question I have is what section of legal code covers open data in Belgium?

case 1: account closure

Cashless banks have no vault and no cash services apart from the ATMs. ATMs in Europe never handle denominations smaller than €20. This means that even when you are closing an account at a cashless bank, the most you can pull out is a multiple of €20 from your balance. The bank expects you to open an account somewhere else first and transfer the remainder to the other account. This is to keep people trapped in the banking system.

It seems to violate article 17 ¶2:

1. Everyone has the right to own property alone as well as in association with others.
2. No one shall be arbitrarily deprived of his property.

This is not exactly up there with genocide and torture. It’s perhaps the smallest human rights infraction I can think of. But nonetheless, banks should be structured to comply with human rights no matter how trivial, no? It seems like even a cashless bank should (in effect) be required to keep some petty cash on-hand for account closures.

case 2: withdrawal limits

The same question applies for bigger cases. E.g. a bank (cashless or not) may have a daily withdrawal limit; weekly, and monthly too. Perhaps it is fair enough to have a fee or penalty for exceeding their limits, but if I understand correctly the bank has a human rights obligation to allow you to withdraw all your money. At the moment banks with limits simply refuse to execute withrawals that exceed their limits.

case 3: card refusal

ATMs and shops refuse people access to their money for countless arbitrary reasons.

• When a customer’s ID card copy on the bank’s files expires, some banks do not bother to inform the customer or request an updated copy. They just freeze the account. When money is denied, the customer magically presents themselves to the bank to find out why. Cutting off access to funds is the bank’s way of communicating.
• ATMs reject cards for undisclosed reasons. Sometimes a faulty AI bot falsely triggers and claims a transaction looks fraudulent. Sometimes ATMs are discriminating against people based on their origin (locally issued cards get a higher limit than foreign ones, but the ATM does not tell the customer what the limit is or why their transaction is denied).

The closed-source app is exclusively available in these places:

• Google Playstore
• Apple store
• Huawei store

The app will only run on quite recent phones. So anyone who does not keep their OS up to date (which implies periodically buying new hardware for the shitshow platforms people much choose between) are locked out of their account. Also:

• No walk-in service
• Over the counter service requires appointment and a fee for many staff-assisted operations
• No paper statements. No phone → no statements.

The app requires SMS 2fa, so non-phone or landphone users: don’t even think about trying to use an android emulator.

If you want to close your account to escape this shitshow, you have 2 options:

• In the app use the account closure feature, OR
• Send a shit load of sensitive information (ID/passport, utility bill, bank account numbers to close, account numbers of your new external account to transfer the money to, etc) via Google (gmail) from an IP address that Google accepts.

(edit) Worth mentioning an aspect of these cashless banks that should be embarrassing for them: when you close an account, they have no cash so they cannot pay you your balance. You can pull money from an ATM but obviously only in denominations of paper banknotes. So how do you get the rest out? They expect you to open an account elsewhere and transfer it. How silly is that? Maybe you don’t want another account, or maybe you’re moving to a completely different part of the world and the transfer cost will exceed what remains.

You can hack around this various ways, like dining out and paying an exact amount by card and the rest by cash. But really, banks should be embarrassed they cannot give you cash. They shouldn’t need a vault just to secure €20 or so in change.

The linked “magazine” (community) is where Twitter & FB users can converge with non-Twitter & non-FB users to have their messages to their gov reps relayed. This is a hack to circumvent digital exclusion.

The linked “magazine” (community) is where Twitter & FB users can converge with non-Twitter & non-FB users to have their messages to their gov reps relayed. This is a hack to circumvent digital exclusion.

There is an art competition for original CC-licensed art created using FOSS. Some of you might want to submit your work to try to win a prize (there are 3 prizes).

The EU has implemented a free public wi-fi infrastructure and is pitching this service to various public buildings, including public libraries. This “Wifi4EU” project is limited to people with smartphones, and only those that are running iOS or Android OS. The app needed to connect to the network is closed-source and exclusively available in the walled gardens of Google and Apple. The network is inaccessible without the special app.

AFAICT, these are the excluded demographics of people:

• people with laptops
• people who do not have or carry a smartphone
• people with old non-updatable smartphones (all iOS & AOS devices are designed for obsolescence)
• people with cheap Chinese phones that exclude Google Playstore (which requires licensing with Google that some vendors do not subscribe to)
• people with deGoogled phones
• people with no Google account (i.e. those without the mobile phone number needed to register with Google)
• people who refuse to install and execute non-free closed-source software, and those on FOSS platforms that do not support such software

My concern is that when a public library decides to deploy Wifi4EU, they will discontinue their current wi-fi service, which does not require a special app and which is generally open to more demographics of people. Note that it’s a bit of a shit-show already because some current library wi-fi services already exclude people who cannot overcome the shitty captive portal + SMS verification design. Wifi4EU is even more exclusive.

More political than artistic, and in fact has a bit of a ransom letter feel to it. But a college nonetheless.

If someone wants to make a more artistic version, I can provide the raw material (an SVG file that was created with Inkscape).

What’s going to happen in the EU is public spaces like libraries which already have wi-fi service are going unplug their wi-fi service and take this free wifi4eu option. Then only people who can get the special Google/Apple-only app will have wi-fi access.

So while the project falsely claims to favor digital inclusion, they will actually be making existing networks more exclusive.