[-] ciferecaNinjo@fedia.io 1 points 4 days ago

I don't know of any such law or even which organization would be able to make such a law.

Regulation (EU) 2021/1230 covers ATMs to some extent. I think there was a law even broader than EU law but I’ve lost track of it -- or just have a bad memory.

(found the bit about receipts being required)

Article 4
Currency conversion charges related to card-based transactions

  1. With regard to the information requirements on currency conversion charges and the applicable exchange rate, as set out in Article 45(1), Article 52, point (3), and Article 59(2) of Directive (EU) 2015/2366, payment service providers and parties providing currency conversion services at an automated teller machine (ATM) or at the point of sale, as referred to in Article 59(2) of that Directive, shall express the total currency conversion charges as a percentage mark-up over the latest available euro foreign exchange reference rates issued by the European Central Bank (ECB). That mark-up shall be disclosed to the payer prior to the initiation of the payment transaction.
  2. Payment service providers shall also make the mark-up referred to in paragraph 1 public in a comprehensible and easily accessible manner on a broadly available and easily accessible electronic platform.
  3. In addition to the information referred to in paragraph 1, a party providing a currency conversion service at an ATM or at the point of sale shall provide the payer with the following information prior to the initiation of the payment transaction: (a) the amount to be paid to the payee in the currency used by the payee; (b) the amount to be paid by the payer in the currency of the payer’s account.
  4. A party providing currency conversion services at an ATM or at the point of sale shall clearly display the information referred to in paragraph 1 at the ATM or at the point of sale. Prior to the initiation of the payment transaction, that party shall also inform the payer of the possibility of paying in the currency used by the payee and having the currency conversion subsequently performed by the payer’s payment service provider. The information referred to in paragraphs 1 and 3 shall also be made available to the payer on a durable medium following the initiation of the payment transaction.

….

What I find shitty about this wording is it’s unclear if the receipt is only required in the case of currency conversion by the ATM. Apparently yes.. apparently if DCC is not offered the the ATM is off the hook for giving a receipt. Several ATMs did not have DCC, but the machie that did not even have a receipt printer offered a DCC option, which seems to be illegal.

Fee structure is indeed extremely intransparent in most cases. Generally, I have too look up ATM fees in my online banking access and I never know them beforehand. Iiuc, your bank and the ATM-operating bank roll the dice to find out the fees they each want to charge as part of the process of handing out your cash anyway.

The fee structure is indeed very well concealed. Before approaching an ATM the fees are undisclosed and many ATMs demand your PIN as the very 1st step. It’s a shit show for sure. But at least they must inform you of fees before you commit to the transaction, per 2021/1230.

In any case, no store wants to receive notes above €100 because politicians and media have successfully created mental associations between those notes and money laundry/corruption/organized crime.

Yeah I heard Germany has no cash acceptance obligation whatsoever, which by extension supports your narrative that they can be fussy about banknotes, as in France.

This contrasts with Belgium where brick and mortar merchants must accept banknotes. They can reject money that is disportionately sized if they want. E.g. they can reject a €200 note on a transaction of €20 but not on a transaction of €175. Or they can reject a shit ton of coins on a 3+ figure transaction.

[-] ciferecaNinjo@fedia.io 1 points 4 days ago

I would say mostly true. And that much is driven by Regulation (EU) 2021/1230. If an ATM offers DCC¹, it must show the exchange rate and fees, and it must give a comparison to a non-DCC option, which must be offered (iow, there must be an opt out).

A common practice is to charge a flat transaction fee when DCC is not used, and to charge no fee when DCC is used, because the exchange rate is so terrible they are profitting hand over fist if you use DCC. But the ATMs often do not expressly state that the fee is waived in the DCC case -- they simply make no mention of the fee you would /otherwise/ pay had you not taken DCC. This is because (IMO) the ATM operator does not want users to relise that the exchange rate builds the fee into their fat margin.

I avoid DCC. But then my bank statement only shows how much was taken from my account in the account’s currency, not the ATM’s currency. The ATM receipt (which apparently does not exist in Germany) gives the local currency you pulled out. These two figures leaves you having trust them as far as the fees go. Some ATMs bundle the fee with the withdrawal amount and the drafting bank has no way of knowing what portion was for the fee. And of course neither do you, unless the machine properly informed you. But what if it didn’t? There is not enough information for the end customer to work out what the overhead was in some cases because the exchange rate applied by the account’s custodian is undisclosed.

¹ DCC: dynamic currency conversion

7

no receipts

ATMs in Germany did not ask if I wanted a receipt. Then they simply neglected to print a receipt. I noticed one ATM did not even have a printer.. no slot to output a receipt.

Not too long ago I came across some international law regarding ATMs. One of the requirements was that ATMs provide a receipt. How is Germany getting around that law? Or did the law change?

no mention of fees

Every ATM I have encountered outside of Germany (w/the exception of 1 machine) mentions a fee for non-SEPA cards, which is then printed on the receipt. The transparency is also an obligation imposed by international law. Is it safe to assume German ATMs do not charge a fee to non-SEPA cards? Or did I just get lucky on the ATMs I encountered? I think I once used an ATM in France which did not charge a fee on a non-SEPA card.. so they do exist but I’ve found it to be quite rare before traveling to Germany.

Ideally there would be a list of ATMs somewhere that are wholly fee-free. AFAICT, it’s a crapshoot.

banknotes

I heard some German ATMs will dispense bills as big as €200. But banknote availibility is never disclosed until you do a transaction. Some ATMs only went up to €50 and some €100 but I never got a bigger note than that. What bank or ATM operator has €200?

tailgating to reach an ATM

There was a locked ATM room. I did not try my card to open the door because it was not of that bank. But luckily there was enough traffic that I could tailgate someone in to access the ATMs. That’s a bit bizarre, no? Anything wrong with tailgating? Is it setup that way to be a kind of VIP privilege to enter for just that particular bank’s customers?

5
submitted 4 days ago by ciferecaNinjo@fedia.io to c/ETS@europe.pub

If you send an email to a recipient whose email account is hosted by Microsoft, or you share you email address with such entities, you are part of the problem.

I refuse to be part of the problem. So before contacting a recipient (gov agencies in particular), I do an MX lookup on their email address. It almost always points to MS servers.

So snail mail it is. Otherwise sending them email serves as a signal to the recipient that MS is okay for email.

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 2 months 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.

[-] 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 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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ciferecaNinjo

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