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activistPnk

@ activistPnk @slrpnk.net

Posts
85
Comments
173
Joined
2 yr. ago

  • Why aren't Linux based mobile OSes more popular?

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  • Corporations certainly would bend to consumer demand if consumers were wise enough to boycott and make demands. But the question is whether consumer wisdom would ever advance on a scale to make that happen. I think I have little hope of seeing it in my lifetime.

  • Why aren't Linux based mobile OSes more popular?

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  • There are 35 million Mexican adults (38%) without a bank account. So living unbanked is at least an option, and more than ⅓ find it viable.

    Nonetheless, it’s interesting to hear that all banks in Mexico are digital and that not a single one offers offline service. And that not a single digital bank offers logins w/out 2FA, or 2FA by SMS (which includes feature phones), or 2FA by using a card reader. If all that is true, consider posting about it in !smartphone_required@lemmy.sdf.org.

  • Why aren't Linux based mobile OSes more popular?

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  • This is extremely reductive and oblivious to the actual realities of banking in various countries.

    I think you will be hard-pressed to find a country that does not have a single bank that can serve those w/out smartphones. If you find such a country, plz post about it in !smartphone_required@lemmy.sdf.org and send me the link. Then we may be able to make a case for ppl in that specific country not being boot-lickers, if at the same time being unbanked is illegal.

    If you think it’s easy to be “unbanked” then I would suggest that you try it yourself first.

    I have been simulating an unbanked life for years now. 5 creditors are threatening lawsuits for non-payment after refusing my cash. One took me to court and it was an easy win for me. I just appeared without a lawyer and pointed to the law.

    It’s also worth noting that unbanked is more extreme that simply choosing a bank that does not require a smartphone.

  • Why aren't Linux based mobile OSes more popular?

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  • It’s banking:

    https://slrpnk.net/post/28294479

    The army of corporate boot lickers in the mobile phone context is largely composed of people who think banking on a smartphone is wise, despite the attack surface and despite the bank being empowered to monitor their customers more closely. Banking apps are the most significant culprit for gluing people to Android.

    We may never see the day when more than 5% of the population realises the importance of FOSS enough to shake free of their addiction to convenience.

  • zerowaste @slrpnk.net
    activistPnk @slrpnk.net

    Looks like the EU somewhat wants to start to interfere with Amazon’s habit of trashing unsold goods. If you work in an Amazon EU warehouse, get your whistle ready.

  • PeerTube @lemmy.wtf
    activistPnk @slrpnk.net
    Locked

    Please consider removing *@lemmy.world from the sidebar

  • Can Albania really become a cashless economy?

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  • Sounds like Paypal, who is “not a bank”, but who operates on the basis that you must link a bank or interact with a bank to do transactions. But you say unbanked people can use it? How do you get cash loaded onto it?

    I suppose it’s still far from being something I could find useable because apps that reject rooted phones would be closed-source (read: untrustworthy; misplaced control).

  • Can Albania really become a cashless economy?

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  • Wow, wtf! I would not expect that degree of mass surveillance to be economically viable. And so overtly stark in the face of the GDPR. In principle, we should be able to make a GDPR access request to the central bank to ask them where we shop with cash and which ATMs we used.

  • Can Albania really become a cashless economy?

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  • I don’t get why “QR” is described as a “payment option”. It’s still a bank account transaction in the end which is exclusively for banked people. And worse, it excludes people without recent smartphones and the Google Playstore account needed to get the closed-source app that violates our software freedom.

    I have a hard time giving a shit about the novelty of not carrying a plastic card in the big scheme of things, when forced-banking is being oppressively shoved in our faces and privacy is toast, while also being vulnerable to systemic denial of service in the event of cyberattacks as acts of war. While violating our human rights (banks treat different people differently based on where they come from).

  • Can Albania really become a cashless economy?

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  • Europeans are fucked as far as privacy goes. The GDPR is unenforced. But even if were enforced, the GDPR’s data minimisation (article 5) rule only obligates data controllers to consider options that are available.

    We know from all the cashless bars in Amsterdam how naive and flippant consumers are about privacy. Creating a digital footprint of alcohol consumption is one of the most foolish things consumers can do, particularly in light of that Scandinavian guy who was denied a mortgage on the basis of his drinking habits, which were known to the bank by his purchase history.

    Privacy aside, there is a human rights issue because banks treat different demographics of people differently. It’s disturbing how the human rights problem is so overlooked.

    In any case, Albania cannot join the EU while being cashless unless Albania keeps their own currency.

  • Right to Repair @discuss.tchncs.de
    activistPnk @slrpnk.net

    anti-repair tactic: h/w support s/w ships as a download manager instead of an actual app (Transcend HDDs)

  • Why Higher Beef Prices Aren’t Actually Good News for Climate Change

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  • I skimmed through it.

    Less beef supply in the US with no change in demand means more imported beef (despite Trump’s trade wars?)

    The imported beef has a higher GHG footprint. But what seems unexplained is that if the demand and consumption in the US is the same, and production is lower, those imports is beef that would otherwise be consumed outside the US, no? So it seems like less beef production globally.

    I will only buy beef if it is on the edge of waste and they are forced to mark it down 50% being sold on the day of expiry. I figure the beef industry taking a 50% cut on my purchase can’t be good for the industry. Folks buying non-expired beef then have to pay a higher price to subsidize me, which is good b/c it drives up prices.

    But the article seems to say driving up prices does not put people off it. Like gasoline.. people will pay whatever price they must to get it. As the price increases, they get angrier, but don’t change their habit. That’s a shame. There must be a breaking point where their rage turns into non-consumption.

  • Fediverse @hilariouschaos.com
    activistPnk @slrpnk.net

    Lemmyverse is not decentralised. It’s neutral at best.

  • Fediverse @hilariouschaos.com
    activistPnk @slrpnk.net

    There is a “Cathedral and Bazaar” within the fediverse that manifests as utilitarian users and deontological users, respectively

  • Fediverse @hilariouschaos.com
    activistPnk @slrpnk.net

    Wrote a script to find decentralised communities w/in the fedi. It selects nodes w/active users < avg+2σ. Is that a good approach? Check my math plz.

  • Practical Retrofitting for Obsolete Devices | Much like classic cars can be fitted with an EV motor, it is possible to retrofit older devices in order to make them usable again in a connected world

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  • Nice that the link ultimately leads to a PDF, for those of us who have ditched residential Internet but like to collect stuff for offline reading.

    the wii

    The wii was mentioned in the PDF but not in any detail. I was able to install some FOSS apps on an otherwise useless wii (which was designed to be dependent on a cloud store which has been unplugged). One useful app converted the wii into a media player that could access Samba shares on the network. So if you are lucky enough to have non-“smart” TVs (read: non-snooping TVs), you can use a wii to access your video library -- which can be fed by MythTV.

    Roku (not mentioned in the PDF)

    Roku abandoned the consumers just like Nintendo did with the wii. But you can also install a FOSS app that makes the Roku into a media player that you control, which can be fed by MythTV content for example.

    TomTom (not mentioned in the PDF)

    There is OpenTom.

    The problem -- it’s all glitchy

    The shame of it is that so few people are interested in keeping old hardware going that projects to liberate devices are half-baked and fizzle out with no persistent maintainers. Someone starts a work of passion but these one-man shows never get the traction they need.

  • Looking for some (re-)use cases for older Android smartphones

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  • No, I have no links or guides. It was an off-the-cuff idea. But speculatively, I would assume you could start by following one of many guides on how to configure an Android as a functional hotspot, such as:

    Then cut off the uplink by removing the SIM chip or going into airplane mode (then re-enable wi-fi). I’ve not tested that. From there, if that works, you would need a web server. F-droid has a few prospects:

    Ideally you would also have a redirection mechanism that acts like a captive portal and redirects all traffic to your server. That’s getting a bit beyond me.. perhaps a firewall like Netguard or AFwall could do that, but I’m not sure.

  • Solarpunk instance going offline for awhile was like a true solarpunk experience

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  • Downtime by a freedom-respecting trully decentralised node like slrpnk.net really exposes how Lemmy clients leave a LOT to be desired.

    The prospect of data loss is gutting. A proper client would be syncing threads of interest between the server and my PC, so during downtime I can still at least locally access past content. No proper clients exist for Lemmy.

  • Solarpunk instance going offline for awhile was like a true solarpunk experience

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  • Indeed. The instances that have solid uptime have, in most cases, sold their soul to the devil (aka Cloudflare, which is a centralised threat on the free world and all things good).

  • Is this Instance Down? @infosec.pub
    activistPnk @slrpnk.net

    linkage.ds8.zone has been “temporarily” down for days now

  • XMPP @slrpnk.net
    activistPnk @slrpnk.net

    Vcard 4-- Unable to include the /fingerprint/ of an OMEMO encryption key

  • degoogle @europe.pub
    activistPnk @slrpnk.net

    How can I send a GDPR request to Google if I am not a user/patron? How can Google ID me to process my request if I do not want them to have my name or mailing address?

  • How old TomTom and Garmin Satnavs could be useful, instead of e-waste (but OSMand and Organic Maps need to improve)

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  • If you can root your phone

    Only certain phones. I tried several different hacks out in the wild for my version and they failed. It’s also an off-brand phone that gets no notice by any of the alternate OS projects so flashing is not an option either.

    you can install whatever location mocking app from fdroid,

    What exactly are you referring to? The stock AOS already supports mock locations. And I’ve used it. But not many apps are designed to make use of the mock location. I vaguely recall coming across an app that hacked the official GPS API to use the mock location in order to fool apps that are naive about mock locations, but of course that bit only works on rooted phones.

    It’s a shit show all around. But in any case since not all phones are rootable, apps need to be written to specifically read the mock location feed as a GPS alternative.

    Network based location is available via other ways, not just by the goog, if you install microg

    I heard of microg before; looked into it, and went no further. I don’t recall what the problem was, but I vaguely recall that it still requires some kind of ties to Google.

    (edit) MicroG is proposed as an alternative to playstore. I used to use Raccoon, a desktop app to fetch playstore junk. It still required a Google login to use Google’s API. The circumvention was to use a shared account. I imagine that’s also how microg must work. But I eventually decided Playstore garbage does not belong on my phone anyway. I will only use apps I can obtain outside of playstore.

    or only its location part unifiednlp, you can get quick rough location from celltowers and even crowd sourced wifi based location, formerly collected by mozilla, nowadays by poziton.

    If there is some way of getting that info using an unrooted phone that has been Google-neutered to the full unrooted extent, I would be interested. I could not remove most of the Google infra but I could disable it. I had it in my notes to check out Unified Network Location Provider and forgot about it. Thanks for the reminder.

    My notes also mention this app, which only works on recent phones (not mine):

    https://f-droid.org/en/packages/net.wigle.wigleandroid/

    Not sure if that was the barrier that stopped me looking further.

    In any case, there is still a role for old TomToms to play here. Using cell towers and wifi APs requires your navigation phone to have those radios powered on, which need energy.

  • We need a piracy exception written into law for service manuals and wiring diagrams -- and we need repair pros to share the docs. How can local govs make this happen?

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  • I agree. But you have to start somewhere. The guideline has been converted into legislation in Belgium since last week.

    Do you have more detail on what was implemented? I could only find this repairability index, which I suspect won’t be much more useful than energy indexes and nutrition indexes.

  • zerowaste @slrpnk.net
    activistPnk @slrpnk.net

    How old TomTom and Garmin Satnavs could be useful, instead of e-waste (but OSMand and Organic Maps need to improve)

  • We need a piracy exception written into law for service manuals and wiring diagrams -- and we need repair pros to share the docs. How can local govs make this happen?

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  • This is why I said at the local level. City council cannot change federal laws.

  • Petitioning for local govs to open up junk yards

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  • Also when people would dig through the piles they would often throw shit everywhere

    The problem is that they are in piles to begin with. I have climbed on piles of appliance waste stacked ~5 meters high. These are not neat stacks but randomly dropped/tossed things which roll when you step on them. I fell once and got bruised but was lucky I did not get impaled. I’ve been kicked out of junk yards ½ dozen times.

    The problem with the chain of disposal is the public tosses something out and the privately-operated metal recovery business immediately claims it as their property to be cashed in for its melt value. They immediately treat the incoming appliances as garbage. A middle step is missing. The middle step should not involve a massive pile of junk that is dangerous to climb. Large appliances should all be on the ground with space around them to inspect. The metal recovery business should not have a claim on the property before this middle step.

  • We need a piracy exception written into law for service manuals and wiring diagrams -- and we need repair pros to share the docs. How can local govs make this happen?

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  • The EU has been grappling with right to repair laws for over 10 years now. It’s a complete shit show.

    At the moment, a washing machine maker in the EU is only required to release repair documentation to professional repairers who are insured, not consumers. And they only have to do it in the 1st 10 years, not in the time period that things actually break. At the 10 year mark, they automatically lose the docs and stop making parts.

    The law you reference is not yet in force AFAIK. But when it comes into force and each member state eventually legislates, look at what we are getting-- from your reference:

    A European information form can be offered to consumers to help them assess and compare repair services (detailing the nature of the defect, price and duration of the repair). To make the repair process easier, a European online platform with national sections will be set up to help consumers easily find local repair shops, sellers of refurbished goods, buyers of defective items or community-led repair initiatives, such as repair cafes.

    That’s crap. It’s fuck all. Consumers are not getting service manuals. They are just being told where they can go to get someone else to do the work. We can of course already find repair cafes because they publish their own location. But repairers at repair cafes are just winging it. You cannot bring them a large appliance like a washer. They don’t even have water and drain hookups. And even if one repair cafe made an exception for large appliances, their repairers are not insured and thus cannot legally get access to service manuals.

    Everything at the state/fed/intl levels is a total shitshow. This is why I asked in the OP what can be done at the local level.

  • We need a piracy exception written into law for service manuals and wiring diagrams -- and we need repair pros to share the docs. How can local govs make this happen?

    Jump

  • I should have linked the parent thread. Federal laws are a shit show. In the US, most states have paltry R2R protections typically only covering cars, wheel chairs, and farm equipment.

    This is why I am collecting ideas for what we might petition LOCAL govs to do, like city councils.

  • Buy it for Life @slrpnk.net
    activistPnk @slrpnk.net

    Accidental nearly BiFL goods; tracking prolonged static design consistency and parts compatibility -- Thinkpads & Whirlpool vs. short-lived competitor designs

  • degoogle @europe.pub
    activistPnk @slrpnk.net

    Repairers face an ultamatim: lick Google’s boots or create e-waste. How can local govs fix this problem?

  • zerowaste @slrpnk.net
    activistPnk @slrpnk.net

    Petitioning for local govs to open up junk yards

  • zerowaste @slrpnk.net
    activistPnk @slrpnk.net

    Should local govs establish a centralized DB to track discarded appliances and notify repairers?

  • Piracy: ꜱᴀɪʟ ᴛʜᴇ ʜɪɢʜ ꜱᴇᴀꜱ @lemmy.dbzer0.com
    activistPnk @slrpnk.net

    We need a piracy exception written into law for service manuals and wiring diagrams -- and we need repair pros to share the docs. How can local govs make this happen?

  • zerowaste @slrpnk.net
    activistPnk @slrpnk.net

    wisdom of button batteries -- anyone think they are a good idea?

  • Is this Instance Down? @infosec.pub
    activistPnk @slrpnk.net

    (shell) st0rage.org down for good

    st0rage.org
  • Buy it for Life @slrpnk.net
    activistPnk @slrpnk.net

    New community to track non-BifL goods

  • Is this Instance Down? @infosec.pub
    activistPnk @slrpnk.net

    lemmy.sdf.org is down

    lemmy.sdf.org
  • Green Energy @slrpnk.net
    activistPnk @slrpnk.net

    Solar panels are gratis in my region (to borrow). But 10× normal prices to buy. What’s going on here?