That sounds like a good option for regular users and locals. Can that card be bought anonymous non-residents using cash? It would seem to eliminate a lot cases of non-phone users getting screwed but I guess there would still be tourist cases where the 50€ is unjustified. Like if someone is just passing through and needs to change airports (though I guess those are also not the cases where someone would be forced to use a phone app).
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To me it is a bit confusing what you are looking for exactly.
It’s research for this article → https://thefreeworld.noblogs.org/post/2024/03/20/comparison-of-the-human-disempowerment-severity-of-3-walled-gardens-facebook-google-and-cloudflare/
and do not have any Google account (or any GAMAM account)
That stumped me for a second. I guess #GAFAM is now being called #GAMAM? I hate to accept the renaming as “Meta” hijacked a normal word to inject their brand into normal conversation unrelated to them. But OTOH, it’s more accurate, sadly enough, since Meta owns the Facebook subsidiary.
I don’t get the 911/112 example. But maybe it’s because I’m generally confused about what you are trying to find out exactly.
Contacting emergency services is an important human right on many levels:
- right to live
- right to healthcare
- right to equal access to public services
So forcing people to patronize Google in order to install the app means people are trapped in Google’s walled garden in order to maintain their human rights. Some say “you can simply dial 112/911, no app needed”. But the app is useful in more situations as it transmits name and address instantly and supports text when you cannot speak.
Here’s a quite interesting story where someone is being denied medical service for not patronizing Google or Apple:
The fun aspect to this is that some banks have forced customers to use an Android for all their banking ops. So:
① You’re late paying a bill② Creditor locks your phone③ You cannot access your bank to make the payment because your phone is locked
Brilliant.
Ebikes and electric devices, however, sound to me like something futuristic
There are kits enabling you to convert a muscle bike (push bike) into an e-bike. If you get one with a torque sensor, then it will detect how hard you push on the pedals and drive the motor proportional to that force. So you still must pedal but it amplifies your effort which preserves the natural feel and control of pedaling. It essentially makes the hills go away; a hilly place becomes a flat place.
IMO part of the fix for that is liberating psychedelics. There has been some research finding that if someone takes psilocybin (shrooms) before they reach the age of 35, they are significantly more open minded for the rest of their life. Though I’m not sure how they controlled for the question as to whether the drug makes people more psychologically flexible or whether they are more psychologically flexible in the first place if they are willing to try it.
Either way, it seems to naturally follow that conservatives proportionally tend to avoid psychedelics. It’s anecdotal but my fellow psychonauts are all liberal.
Might be a fun social experiment to propose a public gun lending armory. Like a library, you can walk in and check-out an AK-47 for a day or week for free. But just like the library charges for printed pages, you would have to pay for the ammo.
I don’t think a car-free city actually exists. The article mentions Copenhagen:
“[London] has avoided the kind of outright car bans seen elsewhere in Europe, such as in Copenhagen”
I’ve been to Copenhagen. There are cars throughout the city. There are some cycle-only paths that connect to intersections with cars. I cycled along side cars all over the city. Apparently Wired is calling car-reduced cities and cities with small car-free regions a “car-free city”.
Exceptionally, Brussels is a car-free city but for only one day out of the year. And car-free day falls on a Sunday. On that day it becomes illegal to drive a car in the city center without a special pass after showing you have good reason to use a car on that day. But even on that day, the outer region of Brussels is unaffected.
I’ve ditched email for the reason you mention. If I need to email a private sector entity, I might check their MX server and attempt to send a message if the receiving server is not Google or MS. But generally I nix whatever company I would otherwise want to reach. If I need to reach them (e.g. to get support for a product I already own and I’m stuck with), then I use snail mail. Same for public offices. Most government offices use Microsoft for email which is a non-starter for me. If they use MS then they’re getting snail mail from me.
What’s TAN?
(edit)Regarding the train svc, the carsharing, Netflix, etc, I generally draw a line and say all the private sector stuff can be disregarded apart from life essentials like groceries. So in your list, the train service is a good point because that’s a public service which invokes human rights (equal access to public service). Since you mention Germany, I happen to recall some Germans saying that the train app can access tickets and fares that are otherwise unreachable, perhaps in part because some stations have no kiosk.
Don’t need Google account to access my bank. How does that work exactly?
Like most banks, a bank pushed an app exclusively via Google Playstore or Apple’s store. At the same time, that bank shut down their website and closed their walk-in over-the-counter service. Customers then had 3 choices to access their account: join Google’s walled garden, join Apple’s walled garden, or make an appointment for every single transaction which incurs fees. Alternatively, the Android app can be obtained using an app called Aurora and violate Google’s ToS by using a shared account to download the app.
I think that particular bank started making their app available in Huawei’s app store, so there is an alternative walled garden for Android users in that case. But Huawei is an uncommon option as more and more banks trend in the direction of forced-Google-patronage.
Never needed an app to dial 911…the whole point of 911/999 is that it’s easy to remember, easy to dial. Also, I haven’t dialed 911 in 25 years, but I’m pretty sure opening the dialer and pressing 3 buttons isn’t too difficult. Also, I don’t see how having a Google account is required to dial 911 (or use an app? ) to do so.
A 911 app was hypothetical but a 112 app certainly exists. You populate the app with important details like name and address. The app is capable of both voice and text (SMS) and IIRC can also connect via wi-fi if there is no GSM signal. If you can’t speak for some reason (choking, throat cut or you’re hiding from an intruder and must be silent) the app transmits all the data you configured plus whatever you can type.
update
Someone in a crossposted thread said it’s not just Playstore that marries people to Google but also an API library for financial transactions:
Having a bug tracker in that walled garden is the biggest problem. It demonstrates what I’m talking about: digital rights being disregarded.
Git itself is not proprietary so all the projects can survive without GitHub if the need arises. Ad
You’re neglecting the exclusion that’s inherent in Github when the need to bounce does NOT arise.
Also worth adding that during the war in Gaza some of us boycott Israel. Which implies boycotting Microsoft.
Additionally, you don’t need an account to view the repository or its discussions.
Advocating read-only access is comparable to endorsing only freedom 1 and 2, not freedom 0 or 4. Which is precisely what I’m talking about: FOSS projects that discard digital rights and partake in digital exclusion for some convenience frills.
There is of course a walled garden for participation and it is an issue, however it doesn’t compare to discord, which is much, much worse.
Bug trackers have more of a monopoly on bug reports than discord has on discussions. There are countless decentralized discussions about free software all over the place -- threadiverse, probably facebook, ad hoc phpbb forums, IRC, usenet, mastodon, mailing lists, conferences like FOSDEM … and rightfully so. Discussions don’t need the centralization that bug trackers do. General discussions also do not have the degree of importance to QA that bug tracking does.
Case in point, when bugs are reported outside of Github, they don’t get noticed by developers and triaged.
There’s not really much point in using a self hosted gitea or codeberg or sourcehut if you want the barrier of entry to be as low as possible for potential contributors.
But GitHub has more features (like discussions), provides better hosting and ease of use.
Bingo. Prioritizing convenience features above digital rights principles is exactly why Github’s walled garden dominates over forges that have a lower barrier of entry.
The focus of any open source project should be on development of the software, not the software which supports its development.
Again, people to setting aside their principles is exactly what I’m talking about.
I give a shit.
There are not enough of you. Evidenced by ~95%+ of noteworthy FOSS projects being jailed in Github’s walled garden.
from the article:
In short, using Discord for your free software/open source (FOSS) software project is a very bad idea. Free software matters — that’s why you’re writing it, after all. Using Discord partitions your community on either side of a walled garden, with one side that’s willing to use the proprietary Discord client, and one side that isn’t. It sets up users who are passionate about free software — i.e. your most passionate contributors or potential contributors — as second-class citizens.
Interesting to do a “s/Discord/Github/” replace on the above. Same situation yet hardly anyone gives a shit.
So yes, Drew DeVault is right. But he overestimates people’s commitment to free world digital rights principles and consistency thereof.
The OS is not the issue. It’s that apps are exclusively distributed in the Playstore which requires a Google account to reach. People running homebrew stuff tend to use Aurora, but that app still needs Google creds to use Google’s API. The anonymous option supported by Aurora violates Google’s ToS, so it’s not a legal option that anyone could point to as an official escape from the walled garden.
I personally will not use Aurora, even anonymously, because use of the app in most cases signals to the server that they were successful in getting the app to someone and connecting. It rewards them nonetheless.