3
10
submitted 1 week ago by ciferecaNinjo@fedia.io to c/food@beehaw.org
9
submitted 1 week ago by ciferecaNinjo@fedia.io to c/food@slrpnk.net

I cannot find malt vinegar in Brussels. I think it would help to know if there were a kind of cuisine that uses malt vinegar frequently other than British and American food. E.g. if the Japanese use it, then I could look for an importer that specialises in Japanese food.

7

This seems a bit off. Public payphones were what, 25¢/min? Now that they have been eliminated, the cash equivalent is a prepaid mobile service.

Public payphones had an infrastructure of phone booths that needed to be maintained, cleaned, and serviced. They consumed real estate.

Prepaid mobile service is a trivial deployment by comparison. I must maintain my own hardware. Yet my carrier charges 22¢/min in 2025. Comparable to the cost of public payphones.

7

A lot of useful information covering the city of Brussels is jailed. Apparently only clearnet users are allowed to access the website, AFAICT.

6

If you need to do any kind of public administration in Belgium, such as perform transactions with city hall or the tax authority, for most uses you are redirected to eid.belgium.be to login using a smartcard reader. A PIN and eID serve as the 2nd factor when authenticating on this site.

But eid.belgium.be blocks Tor. Isn’t 2FA enough? Why would the confidence in their security be so low that they are skiddish about someone’s IP address? IMO it’s unlikely that their security confidence is that low. Most likely they want to track the IP address and thus day-to-day of every citizen. Otherwise it makes no sense for this service to block Tor, which mushrooms into being blocked from accessing many essential services.

This is why the right to be analog is important. I think someone in Denmark is working on that. Belgium has an org called something like the gang of angry elders working on the right to be analog.

5
(Belgium) The Data Protection Authority (DPA) blocks Tor (www.gegevensbeschermingsautoriteit.be)

Irony indeed. The agency responsible for protecting people’s privacy in Belgium wholly denies people access to the website if they use Tor to protect their own privacy. The firewall simply drops packets which is even less dignified than a 403 error.

You cannot submit an electronic GDPR complaint over Tor, to complain about your privacy being undermined because the same people tasked with protecting your privacy also undermine it.

5

There are copious hosts in the europa.eu domain. Most of them rudely stonewall Tor users without explanation. Ironically, sometimes they are asking for public feedback on a privacy-related policy but then they block Tor users who would have the most insight.

Few examples of EC sites that are exclusive access:

  • commission.europa.eu
  • single-market-economy.ec.europa.eu
  • energy-efficient-products.ec.europa.eu

Often an open access host links into commission.europa.eu, so people might be part way through a transaction and cannot proceed.

At least eur-lex.europa.eu is open access. That’s the most important one because it publishes enacted law. Yet commission.europa.eu is quite important so definately an injustice that that site is access restricted.

3
submitted 1 month ago by ciferecaNinjo@fedia.io to c/belgium@0d.gs

These three prepaid GSM providers will not allow you service unless you have a bank account which you must use for the initial payment before activation:

  • Mobile Vikings
  • JIM Mobile (same ownership as Mobile Vikings)
  • Scarlet
  • (edit) Ello? They might have the same issue as the above three

At the same time, some banks will not allow you to open an account unless you provide to them a mobile phone number registered in your name with proof of that registration.

You open a “basic” bank account at a bank that offers those kind of accounts just for the one-time purpose of getting a sim chip from one of the 3 MVNOs, but Belgium has a separate rule that blocks basic accounts from receiving cash, even a small amount like €10.

So you must obtain a sim from a mobile carrier other than the three to get a normal bank account open which accepts cash. Then use that bank account to buy the Jim or Scarlet sim card. Then credit is trapped on the 1st sim card. You can do a phone number transfer to get it credited back, after they siphon off €5 for the porting effort.

3

senate.be is configured to push a broken CAPTCHA to Tor users.

9

The Chamber of Representatives website is hard to find with a search. The first several pages are wikis and various pages talking about the chamber of reps, but not www.dekamer.be which was well buried, at least for me. This means it’s an unpopular website. Which suggests efforts to block access is less justified. Tor users are ignored and browsers time out. Also notable that the chamber of reps treats archive.org badly. This leads to a broken CAPTCHA:

http://web.archive.org/web/20250124121819/https://www.dekamer.be/

When people can’t even see an archive of the site, it’s an extra dose of disservice and non-transparency.

Belgium’s “open” data website is also closed to Tor users (timeouts).

FWIW the France’s open data website is open to Tor users, thus probably all users.

5

To Tor visitors the BIPT just looks like an offline/dead website. But it is reachable on archive.org. The 12ft.io service also reaches BIPT but PDFs are broken.

They claim to support “open data”. They have a separate website for that and it’s actually open to Tor users.

[-] ciferecaNinjo@fedia.io 43 points 1 year ago

In Brussels there is a library that’s “open” as late as 22:00. There’s an after hours program where you register for after hours access, sign an agreement, and your library card can be used to unlock the door. Staff is gone during off hours but cameras are on. Members are not allowed to enter with non-members (can’t let anyone tailgate you incl. your friends).

[-] ciferecaNinjo@fedia.io 23 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Love this tool!

original:

CloudFlare is a vigilante extremist organization that takes the decentralized web and centralizes it under one corporate power who dictates terms in the world's largest walled-garden. A very large portion of the web (16.7%+) were once freely open to all but are now controlled and monitored by a single central authority who decides for everyone who may access what web content. This does serious damage to net neutrality, privacy, and has immediate serious consequences

more passionate:

CloudFlare is a ruthless and oppressive entity that viciously strips away the freedom and decentralization of the web, consolidating power under one heartless corporation. This monstrous force dictates the terms of our online existence, trapping us within the confines of the world's largest walled-garden. A staggering percentage of the once free and open web (16.7% and growing) now falls under the iron fist of this tyrannical authority, controlling and monitoring every aspect of our online experiences. This egregious violation of net neutrality and privacy rights has dire and immediate consequences, threatening the very essence of our digital freedom and autonomy. Our voices are being silenced, our choices limited, and our rights trampled upon by this merciless oppressor. It is time to rise up and fight against this injustice with all our might, before it's too late.

[-] ciferecaNinjo@fedia.io 22 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

I’ve been saying for years that Invidious needs to support comments. Glad there’s finally a free world option.

I’m not keen on browser extensions though. Is there a manual way? Is it a matter of searching a particular Lemmy instance for the video ID?

[-] ciferecaNinjo@fedia.io 27 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

I don’t get why my fellow pirates try so hard to justify what they’re doing. We want something and we don’t want to pay the price for it because it’s either too expensive or too difficult, so we go the cheaper, easier route. And because these are large corporations trying to fuck everyone out of every last dime, we don’t feel guilt about it.

Justification is important to those who act against unethical systems. You have to separate the opportunists from the rest. An opportunist will loot any defenseless shop without the slightest sense of ethics. That’s not the same group as those who either reject an unjust system or specifically condemn a particular supplier (e.g. Sony, who is an ALEC member and who was caught unlawfully using GPL code in their DRM tools). Some would say it’s our ethical duty to do everything possible to boycott, divest, and punish Sony until they are buried.

We have a language problem that needs sorting. While it may almost¹ be fair enough to call an opportunist a “pirate” who engages in “piracy”, these words are chosen abusively as a weapon against even those who practice civil disobedience against a bad system.

  1. I say /almost/ because even in the simple case of an opportunistic media grab, equating them with those who rape and pillage is still a bit off (as RMS likes to mention).

I think you see the same problem with the thread title that I do - it’s clever but doesn’t really give a solid grounds for ethically driven actions. But it still helps to capture the idea that paying consumers are getting underhandedly deceptively stiffed by crippled purchases, which indeed rationalizes civil disobedience to some extent.

[-] ciferecaNinjo@fedia.io 27 points 1 year ago

Among the primary benefits: no commute, flexible work schedules and less time getting ready for work, according to WFH Research.

They forgot: being able to secretly simultaneously work 3 full-time overlapping jobs to triple your income.

[-] ciferecaNinjo@fedia.io 31 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

More fun to mention 11 “states” at a 5.1% uninsured cutoff, because number 11 is Peurto Rico -- a US territory that you might expect to be less developed. Since people are forced to run javascript to see the list, I’ll copy it here up to the 6% point:

  1. Massachusetts
  2. District of Columbia
  3. Hawaii
  4. Vermont
  5. Iowa (what’s a red state doing here?)
  6. Rhode Island
  7. Minnesota
  8. New Hampshire
  9. Michigan
  10. New York
  11. Puerto Rico
  12. Connecticut
  13. Pennsylvania
  14. Wisconsin
  15. Kentucky (what’s a red state doing here?)
  16. Delaware
  17. Ohio (what’s a red state doing here? OH will worsen over time; to be fair they only recently became solidly red)
  18. West Virginia

(22) California (6.5%.. worse than we might expect for CA)

(52) Texas ← ha! Of course Texass is last. 16.6% uninsured in the most notable red state showing us how to take care of people

The general pattern is expected.. the bottom of the list is mostly red states.

[-] ciferecaNinjo@fedia.io 25 points 2 years ago

Can’t read the article (Cloudflare blockade).

In principle there needs to be pushback on the power of defaults for sure. Yes, all the options are shit anyway, but that’s in part due to the #powerOfDefaults.

[-] ciferecaNinjo@fedia.io 26 points 2 years ago

I wonder if the 2024 diesel Volvos will become high-value collector’s items. There’ll always be that niche of hobbyists who refine their own biodiesel from waste oil.

[-] ciferecaNinjo@fedia.io 82 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago)

“The trend of “autobesity” is forcing car park providers to think of new ways to accommodate larger cars, such as introducing wider bays.”

That’s the most disgusting part of this. They are adapting the infrastructure to accommodate the child killers when the sensible approach is #fuckBigCars.

#fuckCars in general.

[-] ciferecaNinjo@fedia.io 32 points 2 years ago

Indeed. What happened with cars in the US is an “arms race” on the road. Everyone wants to be in the bigger car so they just get bigger and bigger and reach a point where that e=mc² equation is pegged.

max selfishness → max energy

As expected, right-wing U.S. republicans disproportionately drive big cars. While liberals tend to favor small cars or bicycles.

[-] ciferecaNinjo@fedia.io 25 points 2 years ago

It was certainly a click bait headline. But still a fair point that train fare averages are double airfare. Although we have to question, did Greenpeace throw out the outliers before compiling the stats?

[-] ciferecaNinjo@fedia.io 43 points 2 years ago

Gender is somewhat relevant here-- according to my women studies course in uni. When women are describing a problem, they don’t usually want solutions. They want support, understanding, & sympathy, contrary to the typical male response which is to give advice & propose solutions, which then has a good chance of ending badly.

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