ciferecaNinjo

joined 2 years ago
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5
Belgian telecoms can drill façades w/out consent and they do not have to offer you service. Home owners also must finance reg. letters to announce renovations. (fedia.io)
 

Digi is a new ISP who recently drilled into façades of people’s homes without notice or consent. Anyone registered with BIPT as a telecom operator does not need consent for the act of attaching their cable to the façade, but they are required to inform home owners before the work and obtain consent on the way that they run the cable.

Digi simply showed up unannounced with workers in plain clothes who drilled into façades spontaneously. Digi also neglected to say anything about it after the fact.

Proximus and Digi both neglected to give advance notice when they did this. Proximus at least left a letter in mailboxes stating what happened and offered free installation of service.

Both Proximus and Digi are also exclusive services. That is, they do not accept cash payments and thus exclude unbanked people (~3% of the population). It’s extra evil on the part of Proximus because they have physical shops all over which obligates cash acceptance and could serve that purpose.

There is in fact no law obligating Belgian telecom operators to offer service to those whose properties involuntarily host their cables. They can be as exclusive as they want.

And worse, home owners who renovate their façade have a legal obligation to send bPost registered letters to each and every cable owner who uses their façade -- currently a hit of €10 per letter. So if there are 7 cables attached, you are effectively legally obligated to spend €70 to give advance notice before working on your own façade.

Does it have to be this way?

No, because they can run their fiber under the sidewalk. They choose to uglify people’s façades to save money. As such, the law effectively strips the people of their bargaining power. In principle, the ISPs should need to entice consumers with a deal that passes some of the savings of using façades onto them. If you have a strip of terraced houses and one house does not take the deal, then it’s not a problem. The sidewalk just needs to be dug up for the house that refuses the offer.

If you look around, sometimes you will see a terraced house that has buried the cables, perhaps because they want a nice looking façade.

This could even be fixed going forward. In principle, every sidewalk will eventually be dug up again, by Vivaqua doing what Vivaqua does. Such moments would be a good opportunity for telecoms to move their cables under the sidewalk, coordinated with whoever digs up the sidewalk for other purposes. Thereafter, homeowners would not have to send 7+ registered letters every time they need to renovate their façades. But our rights and that opportunity has been squandered.

1
banknotes in the UK changing… AGAIN (fedia.io)
 

It’s disturbing to hear the UK is /again/ changing the banknotes (according to BBC WS). Does this in any way shorten any deadline to trade-in the previous notes? Will it be possible to trade in notes that are 2 generations old?

I have a couple thousand GBP banknotes. These are the previous style and no longer legal tender. I would get burnt if I tried to exchange them for my local currency because the exchange service cannot sell them (they must send them to England). I believe I can still travel to the UK and exchange them fairly legal tender at post offices, correct?

6
Proliferation of gatekeepers of /physical/ buildings in Brussels thwart access to lawyers, journalists, NGOs, etc…, often by imposing Microsoft or Google (fedia.io)
 

In Brussels we are increasingly reaching a point where we can no longer talk to people face-to-face without technical hurdles and blockades. It’s clear why the Gang of Angry Elders are angry.

I simply entered a law office as a prospective customer. The door man said all visitors must register on the touchscreen tablet they had mounted on the desk, which made email and phone number a required field in order to advance to the next screen before submitting the registration. This is in Belgium, where the GDPR has a data minimisation protection in Article 5. You must surrender an email address (likely to a Microsoft user) as a precondition to sitting in the same room with someone.

Law offices, press offices, banks, and NGOs (some of which protect human rights) have put these security gatekeepers in their lobbies to prevent people talking to people. You ask to talk to someone and the response is always “do you have an appointment”? When the answer is “no”, they are helplessly incapable of making an appointment then and there. It’s a new level of human dysfunctionality.

Some Dexia branches have a very narrow time slot for people without appointments. You must get there early in hopes to get a queing position that does not get cut off at the end of the time slot.

The concept of a supplier that is subservient to the customer’s needs has been lost. It has flipped because too many boot-licking consumers are simply willing to be a doormat.

The persistence of CAPTCHAs proves this. If enough people were wise enough to refuse to solve CAPTCHAs, the CAPTCHAs would natrually be discontinued. But CAPTCHAs remain because too many boot-lickers are serving their corporate masters.

Belgium Rules Sharing Americans’ Bank Data Violates Privacy Law in c/europe@feddit.org
[–] ciferecaNinjo@fedia.io 2 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Well, it wouldn’t require lying but certainly it seems tricky. You can deregister before you leave the country and neglect to provide an address for where you are going -- because you wouldn’t necessarily know in advance and you cannot provide information that does not exist. So they clear your address from your id card which then just has an empty address.

Correct me if I’m wrong, but you don’t have a specific legal obligation to state where you live abroad.

Though one snag is that you have a legal obligation to vote in elections and you must vote in the nearest embassy, which requires giving an address to get on the voting roster. However, voting is not strictly enforced. If you fail to vote there is a small fine but I don’t think they actually hit unregistered people abroad with that. If you do not vote in 3 consecutive elections, then you could lose your voting rights for a few years, I think.

I do not believe the bank gets a notification that you have deregistered. But at some point your ID card on the bank’s files will expire and they will expect an updated copy and freeze your account until they receive it.

If you walk into an embassy to “renew” your passport, do they demand an address? I would think you would pick up your passport at the embassy a week later. Or do they mail it?

Anyway, I can understand giving in to surveillance and disclosing US ties, but OTOH it seems like a nightmare to do what’s expected as well.. to be tagged as a toxic US person. It’s a mess either way. Perhaps the wisest move is to “move” to Canada, stay there a couple months, setup residency, then move to the US and just neglect to mention it. Get mail forwarding from Canada.

Belgium Rules Sharing Americans’ Bank Data Violates Privacy Law in c/europe@feddit.org
[–] ciferecaNinjo@fedia.io 1 points 2 months ago (3 children)

Half their internet banking site is off-limits to me

Mind elaborating? Did they restrict your account specifically, or does the website simply treat logins from the US differently? I’m surprised you wouldn’t retain full cloud access so long as your account exists under the terms you signed up for.

I don’t understand why you would tell your Belgian bank that you left Belgium, particularly when your new residence is the US which flags you as a toxic asset that requires special handling. That could only work against you. Surely you would be better off not telling them you moved and use a VPN to Belgium to access your acct.

Belgium Rules Sharing Americans’ Bank Data Violates Privacy Law in c/europe@feddit.org
[–] ciferecaNinjo@fedia.io 1 points 2 months ago

Bingo. This is true even across EU borders. Rabobank in Netherlands does not exchange info with Rabobank in Belgium, IIUC. (but note I think Rabobank quit doing business in Belgium eventually anyway)

German ATMs do not give receipts. This goes against intl law, no? And what about fee transparency? Upside: they give big notes, but how do you know in advance? in c/germany@feddit.org
[–] ciferecaNinjo@fedia.io 1 points 3 months 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.

German ATMs do not give receipts. This goes against intl law, no? And what about fee transparency? Upside: they give big notes, but how do you know in advance? in c/germany@feddit.org
[–] ciferecaNinjo@fedia.io 1 points 3 months 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

6
German ATMs do not give receipts. This goes against intl law, no? And what about fee transparency? Upside: they give big notes, but how do you know in advance? (fedia.io)
 

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?

1
What kind of cuisine uses malt vinegar (besides UK and US)? (fedia.io)
 

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.

Making a payment in cash to a recipient outside Germany -- possible? in c/germany@feddit.org
[–] ciferecaNinjo@fedia.io -2 points 6 months ago (1 children)

(deleted -- I wrote from the notifications timeline without context)

Making a payment in cash to a recipient outside Germany -- possible? in c/germany@feddit.org
[–] ciferecaNinjo@fedia.io -1 points 6 months ago (2 children)

No, it must land on an account electronically, as directed using an IBAN. Post offices double as banks in Europe, so I brought up the post office because their banking service tends to cover this need.

(edit) but regarding your comment that no courier guarantees cash, I thought FedEx did and that people used FedEx for cash for that reason. But then there was a recent scandal in the US where a big FedEx hub allowed cops with sniffer dogs trained specifically to sniff for cash, and the police were simply confiscating banknotes without cause (arbitrarily without a crime). I have to wonder how the insurance claims play out in that case.

Making a payment in cash to a recipient outside Germany -- possible? in c/germany@feddit.org
[–] ciferecaNinjo@fedia.io -2 points 6 months ago (4 children)

Do all accounts support cash deposits?

In Belgium, banks can refuse you an account for any reason unless you open a “basic” account which they cannot refuse. But cash deposits are banned from basic accounts (which is possibly a Belgian-specific constraint). What about basic accounts in Germany?

Making a payment in cash to a recipient outside Germany -- possible? in c/germany@feddit.org
[–] ciferecaNinjo@fedia.io -3 points 6 months ago (6 children)

No, it’s nannying. When the hunt for criminals interferes with law-abiding people, it’s oppression.

Forced banking and anti-cash policy is definately something that varies from one country to the next. There is an “EU recommendation” that all debts be payable in cash. Belgium is not following the recommendation and it causes problems. Germany has a reputation for respecting people’s privacy, autonomy, and ability to use cash. Hence why I thought Germany might have a decent option.

You can make an account in Germany without being a resident, better try this

I do not want an account. I could fill a book with reasons.

Normally post office’s demand ID. I am fine with that as long as my ID is accepted (which I’m not sure if it would be if it’s not German, although in principle any EU resident should have equal access to any EU service).

5
Do human rights protect vegans and other forms of boycott? Art.18 perhaps? (fedia.io)
Wi-Fi in EU-based libraries expected to become more exclusive in c/libraries@literature.cafe
[–] ciferecaNinjo@fedia.io 1 points 9 months ago

I’m not sure how it works but it may still conform to standards (just not conventional norms). E.g. consider eduroam which is common in EU schools. You need a special app for eduroam but it’s possibly combining various authentication standards with wi-fi standards. Before using eduroam I skimmed through all 1000+ SLOC of the bash script before deciding to trust it. I was revolted that I had to inspect all that code just to safely connect to campus wi-fi with confidence.

That said, I have no idea how wifi4eu works. It could be similar to eduroam and perhaps a FOSS app will eventually emerge. But until then, all we get is an all-rights-reserved copyrighted black box and no specs (AFAIK). So yes, it’s a shit show of exclusivity and privacy surrender nonetheless.

17
Wi-Fi in EU-based libraries expected to become more exclusive (fedia.io)
 

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.

EDPS decentralised social media pilot: the end of a successful story in c/europe@feddit.org
[–] ciferecaNinjo@fedia.io 0 points 9 months ago

Wojciech Wiewiórowski was intent on calling mastodon a failure for political reasons. When pressed on the harms of public services using Twitter and Facebook, he defends them on the basis of content moderation. Of course what’s despicable about that stance is that a private sector surveillance advertiser is not who should be moderating who gets to say what to their representatives. Twitter, for example, denies access to people who do not disclose their mobile phone number to Twitter, which obviously also marginalises those who have no mobile phone subscription to begin with.

Effectively, the government has outsourced the duty of governance to private corporations -- without rules. Under capitalism.

The lack of funding on the free world platforms was due to lack of engagement. When the public service does not get much engagement they react by shrinking the funding.

We need the Facebook and Twitter users to stop engaging with gov agencies on those shitty platforms. Which obviously would not happen. Those pushover boot-licking addicts would never do that.

tl;dr: is it a good idea to put Elon Musk in control of who gets to talk to their government?

Lemmy vs. PieFed vs. Mbin in c/fediverse@lemmy.ml
[–] ciferecaNinjo@fedia.io 1 points 10 months ago

Thanks for the insights. I was looking for a client not a server. So maybe this can’t help me. A server somewhat hints that it would be bandwidth heavy. I’m looking to escape the stock JS web client. At the same time, I am on a very limited uplink. To give an idea, I browse web with images disabled because they would suck my quota dry.

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français → anglais translation help wanted for a paragraph of legal text (fedia.io)
10
[answered] Electricity prices are more than double gas prices in Belgium (so why do Belgians overwhelmingly favor electric ovens?) (fedia.io)
submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by ciferecaNinjo@fedia.io to c/europe@feddit.de
33 comments fedilink
3
The cost of avoiding a email & CAPTCHA in Belgium: €2.66 (EU postage) (fedia.io)
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Belgian law & EU law: /merchants/ must handle warranty service for 2 yrs, or more? (fedia.io)
submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by ciferecaNinjo@fedia.io to c/europe@feddit.de
12 comments fedilink
 

The rumor I heard was that if you buy a product that fails before the warranty ends, you do not need to contact the manufacturer (in #Belgium). You can simply return the product to the merchant and the merchant must deal with the warranty service.

A store manager refused to accept my return of a device that died after 2yrs+2 months, which was covered under a 3 year warranty. He said I must deal directly with the manufacturer. I threatened to complain officially and the manager gave in. But then as he was angrily returning money to me, he said he is only required to handle warranty service for the 1st two years and that he is making an exception for me. I figured he was confused because 2 years happens to be the length of the EU implied warranty. I had not heard that it was also a limit of the store’s obligation as an intermediary.

To complicate matters, the product was marked down on liquidation because the store apparently severed ties with that manufacturer. Though I doubt that’s relevant to my situation because it would not void the warranty. But the article also says merchants must accept returns for any reason in the first 14 days, yet the store makes that zero days for liquidated goods. Does that break EU law?

Anyway, I need answers. Maybe I owe the manager a bottle of wine. The EU article indeed confirms sellers must handle warranty returns for up to 2 years. But that’s EU-wide #law. What about #Belgian national law?

Next question, out of curiousity: normally manufacturers have a choice whether to replace, repair or refund. Is that choice passed through to merchants? Or are merchants required to handle this with one instant transaction (thus no repair as the consumer would have to return to the store later)?

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When /some/ YT videos get special download-resistent treatment but not others (fedia.io)
submitted 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) by ciferecaNinjo@fedia.io to c/piracy@lemmy.dbzer0.com
12 comments fedilink
 

For example, this invidious instance offers a download option for a YoutTube video, as that instance does for all YT videos:

~~https://invidious.fdn.fr/watch?v=lU4vv7qCQvg~~ (see update)

Exceptionally, if you opt to download it it merely opens a player to watch realtime. While other downloads from the same invidious instance have no issues. Why is this one getting different treatment?

update Apparently it’s an instance-specific problem with that particular video:

works → https://invidious.fdn.fr/watch?v=lU4vv7qCQvg

broken → https://iv.ggtyler.dev/watch?v=lU4vv7qCQvg

I’ve seen other instances where this particular video download is broken. AFAIK, invidious.fdn.fr is the only place where it works as expected.

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