FWIW, I’ll just add that Hexbear’s user count is more than 2 standard deviations above the mean. So some would also regard them as somewhat centralised, which goes against fedi principles. OTOH, at least they are not Cloudflared.

IMO being centralised is sufficient for defederating.

Facebook also likely has active communities. I personally would not promote Facebook or Cloudflare or similar technofeudal fiefdoms for any reason. But neglecting that, it might be worded in a way that’s fully informative to let people choose for themselves. E.g. something like this:

For novices who prioritise visibility and engagement above digital sovereignty and decentralisation, you can maximise engagement in Facebook or at !python@programming.dev.

For free world, we have:

• (english) !python@lemmy.sdf.org
• (spanish) !python_es@mander.xyz

I have a script which searches an aggregation of 3 different datasets, and tags them based on freedom and digital sovereignty factors. So instances with “🗽☯” symbolise freedom and balance (thus not so big as to effectively be centralised). Those tagged with a warning (“⚠”) are not in Cloudflare’s walled garden, but they have allowed themselves to grow more than 2 standard deviations above the average node size and thus approach centralised places. Those with a castle 🏰 are in Cloudflare and should simply be avoided by anyone who opposes tech giant tyranny.

Other symbols are either non-lemmy or nodes not known to the dataset that tracks cloudflare. lemm.ee is Cloudflare, btw.

programming.dev is not a good choice because it sends people to Cloudflare. It’s like sending people to Facebook.

When I search for “privacy“, I get:

🗽☯europe.pub/c/privacy (239/463) “Privacy”
🗽☯sopuli.xyz/c/FightForPrivacy (64/455) “Fight For Privacy”
🗽☯diggita.com/c/sicurezza (789/66) “Sicurezza Informatica, Privacy e lotta al capitalismo della sorveglianza”
🗽☯sopuli.xyz/c/privacy (897/53) “Privacy”
🗽☯europe.pub/c/PrivacyGuides (119/28) “Privacy Guides”
🗽☯feddit.it/c/privacypride (391/27) “Privacy Pride”
🗽☯lemmygrad.ml/c/privacy (240/12) “Privacy”
🗽☯sopuli.xyz/c/privacysecurityosint (412/1) “Privacy, Security, and OSINT Show”
🗽☯rqd2.net/c/websafety (1/1) “online safety and privacy, for paras”
🗽☯lemmygrad.ml/c/digitalprivacy (118/1) “Digital Privacy”
🗽☯lemmy.libertarianfellowship.org/c/sap (5/1) “Security Anonymity Privacy”
🗽☯l.posterdati.it/c/privacy (2/1) “Privacy 🕵”
🗽☯feddit.uk/c/privacysecuk (264/1) “Privacy & Security UK”
🗽☯krabb.org/c/privacy (5/0) “Privacy”
🧺fedia.io/emailprivacy “Email Privacy”
🧺fedia.io/privacy “Privacy”
📰!privacy@lemm.ee
⚠feddit.org/c/datenschutz “Datenschutz - Privacy - Digitale Selbstverteidigung”
⚠lemmy.blahaj.zone/c/thenexusofprivacy “The Nexus of Privacy”
⚠lemmy.dbzer0.com/c/privacy “Privacy”
⚠lemmy.ml/c/vpn “Privacy is a right. Learn about how you can best protect your privacy in this channel”
⚠lemmy.ml/c/privatelife “privatelife - privacy, security, freedom advocacy”
⚠lemmy.ml/c/privacypride “Privacy Pride Europe”
⚠lemmy.ml/c/privacyonandroid “Privacy on Android”
⚠lemmy.ml/c/privacyinternational “Privacy International”
⚠lemmy.ml/c/privacyguides “Privacy Guides”
⚠lemmy.ml/c/privacydo “Do Privacy”
⚠lemmy.ml/c/privacy “Privacy”
⚠lemmy.ml/c/extremeprivacy “Extreme Privacy”
⚠lemmy.ml/c/exodus “Exodus privacy”
⚠lemmy.ml/c/europrivacy “Europe Privacy”
⚠lemmy.ml/c/dataprivacy “GDPR (RGPD) / Apply LegalTech to Defend European Dataprivacy Rights”

↓ Kingdoms under the imperial Cloudflare empire ↓
🏰lemmy.ca🌩|privacycanada “Privacy Canada Edition”
🏰lemmy.ca🌩|privacy “privacy”
🏰lemmy.one🌩|theprivacypodcast “The Privacy, Security, and OSINT Show”
🏰lemmy.one🌩|privacyguides “Privacy Guides”
🏰lemmy.world🌩|thenexusofprivacy “The Nexus of Privacy”
🏰lemmy.world🌩|protonprivacy “Proton ”
🏰lemmy.world🌩|privacypride “Privacy Pride International”
🏰lemmy.world🌩|privacyhub “Privacy Hub”
🏰lemmy.world🌩|privacycoins “Privacy Coins”
🏰lemmy.world🌩|privacy “Privacy”
🏰monero.town🌩|privacy “privacy”
🏰programming.dev🌩|privacy “Privacy”
🏰sh.itjust.works🌩|digitalescapetools “Digital Escape Tools — Privacy & FOSS”
🏰zerobytes.monster🌩|privacy “Privacy in the digital age”

On the good nodes, (x/y) means (subscribers/active recent posts).

It’s also worth noting that there are some communities for specific privacy topics, such as:

🗽☯lemmy.sdf.org/c/digi_fiefdom_required (121/1) “Digital Fiefdom (aka walled-garden) Required 🏰” 🗽☯lemmy.sdf.org/c/email_required (126/1) “Email Required (digital exclusion of people without email) 📧” 🗽☯sopuli.xyz/c/right_to_unplug (125/32) “Right to be Offline / Analog / Unplugged 🔌📪📖📟📝” 🗽☯lemmy.sdf.org/c/smartphone_required (277/65) “Smartphone Required 📱(digital exclusion of people without smartphones)”

Generally I would expect in france to be able to get a prepaid SIM for €15, which would then last a year. Is that not an option?

I would still object to paying anything, and then being forced to tend to that number which pinpoints a geographical location. If they can get msg to you by sms or voicemail, that likely satisfies any obligation they have to inform you which then creates an obligation on you to monitor the phone (I suspect).

How so? No blow-ups in the decades I’ve been doing it. People are not obligated to be voice-reachable (at least not by any laws I’ve encountered). Creditors need to send you a bill, sure, but that’s their problem. If they can’t handle fax they better be willing to use snail mail.

What’s blowing up in people’s faces is the culture of sharing a mobile number that then takes the role of identification, which then gets exfiltrated by cyber criminals. The abuse of using mobile numbers as an identifier has spread through Europe and only a small segment of privacy advocates currently realise the problem.

Twitter demanded a mobile number from me. Would not take a fax number. So I walked. Shortly after, Twitter had a data breach that leaked everyone’s mobile numbers. Then Twitter was caught abusing the mobile numbers themselves in ways not allowed in the privacy policy.

Americans are extra fucked because there is no privacy safeguard. The bank shares the number with the credit bureau, who then shares it with all members (banks, insurers, etc) and those who will pay for it.

Not even remotely. Ever heard of Efax? You email the phone number and the Efax company sends the fax.

eFax was bought by j2.com, so indeed i’m aware of it. Efax, Jconnect, j2… all the same ownership.

Fax is being ditched by those who think it is no longer used, regardless of whether they have dedicated equipment or a gateway. It’s the same decision. Either they ditch their fax service (i.e. their fax line is virtual), or they ditch their fax hardware. Or they decide to keep the fax number because they see they have customers who still use fax.

More likely they would call it, get the fax tone and mark it as a wrong number until you contact them.

They can suit themselves… that doesn’t matter to me either way if they decide to alternatively pay postage to reach me. Of course they’re going to be waiting a long time for me to reach them if they don’t signal to me that they want to reach me. If I decide to call them from my non-DID SIP line, the caller ID is set to spoof my fax number, which shows them the number is still correct.

In some cases, snail mail is just too slow for the situation at hand. Speed is the only thing that makes fax irreplaceable in some cases.

In most cases, fax is much cheaper than postage. So I’m always grateful when I can send a fax… so I don’t burn through stamps so quickly.

I’m glad to hear some libraries offer access to broadcast TV signals. I’ve not encountered it but this will help in convincing my local library to do the same.

Are you asking how the kill switch is triggered? It’s an autonomous algorithmic kill switch not a remote kill switch. When the machine detects a fault it switches to a broken mode. The switch can only be reset by someone who the manufacturer trusted with the reset procedure (ie. their own repairers who charge more than the machine is worth just to show up).

At that age (27 yrs), I suppose your machines don’t have kill switches. Your next machine will have a kill switch, so even though you can fix it mechanically, the control board will deny you the privilege to start a wash program.

Not to defend garbage business practices, but hand washing REALLY sucks though.

That’s exactly why they get away with it. People’s intolerance for inconvenience is directly proportional to the level of enshitification suppliers can get away with.

I have been washing my clothes by hand for a year now to ensure that I am on the right side of the curve. I wash my much clothes with much less frequency now and do more airing out.

This is a systemic problem and the solution to systemic problems is legislation, not personal responsibility.

We don’t live in the kind of reality where your proposal works. The jurisdiction where legislation is the most viable on the world stage would be Europe. Europe decided against it. “Ecodesign” and right to repair are a shit-show after a 10-year attempt. Have a look at this thread:

https://discuss.tchncs.de/post/46422830

It’s just like the climate problem. You cannot sit back and expect the state to fix it. Hence the existence of Extinction Rebellion. The problem needs both state action and people taking personal responsibility.

Europe has gone as far as to make consumers immune to prosecution for reverse engineering their own property (IIRC). But that’s as far as they go. So effectively, the Polish train hacking approach is allowed but Europe is helpless as far as obligating suppliers to share repair info with amateur repairers (only pros).

People outside of Europe are fucked even more.

Your logic is off-target, as this is caused by “management”, not the individual.

It is management that I was referring to. That should be obvious. The incompetence belongs to whoever makes the incompetent decision, which in this case would be high in upper management.

It’s fair to assume in this case USPS is not that incompetently wasteful.

No. It isn’t.

The USPS is being intentionally mismanaged as a step towards dismantling the pillars of US government.

A safe assumption need not be an accurate assumption. It’s about consequences. Incompetence has consequences – and rightfully so. IOW, when the assumption is wrong, it does not obviate the purpose of my action. Therefore the assumption is safe.

That would not make economic sense. Why would they hand-enter grandma’s chicken scratch hand-written return address when it is not needed for outbound routing? Anyone wasting money like that is not competent for their job.

Just finding the return address takes time in itself. It could be on the top left, or it could be a one-liner just above the destination address, or it could be on the backside, or not even supplied. They should only be looking for it when it is needed.

It’s fair to assume in this case USPS is not that incompetently wasteful. But if they are, then that incompetence is the problem (not how we choose to address our envelopes).

For return service, indeed. In that very rare event, they would have to hand enter it just as they do for hand-written addresses.

Your sympathy is backwards though. Postal workers’s job security is under threat currently as people move away from postal service. Denmark eliminates postal service for the whole country this year.

(update) Also, other countries are downgrading the postal service and cutting staff in the drive toward digital transformation.

This to me falls under reasonable loss of privacy,

A good standard for what’s “reasonable” is set out by data minimisation principles, like what you have in Europe’s GDPR Article 5.

Storing the routing data on the envelope itself is a form of data minimisation, as opposed to collecting it into a DB.

without reading (or “scanning”) the adresses, how could the postal system work?

I believe USPS has been in service for over 100 years, and demonstrated the capability of mail delivery as far back as horseback delivery (before Alan Turing was born).

It was only in the past ~15 years or so that USPS began offering a notification service that recipients can subscribe to. You get an email showing raster scans of envelopes that are out for delivery or have been delivered, for those who fancy that. But this new service does not just scan images for subscribers. Either your region offers this extra feature, or not. And if they do, then they scan /everyones/ envelopes whether they subscribe or not. Perhaps all regions offer it now… I’m not up to date on the progress of this rollout.

pre-15 years ago (or so), the scanning was not building a database of images of envelopes (AFAIK). It was merely printing a barcode of the destination address for routing purposes. The barcode is not a reference to a DB record – it’s an actual address encodified. So this routing info is stored on the envelope itself, not in a DB.

As for codes that becomes invisible after scanning, what would the point be?

What do you mean “codes”?

They use the fluorescent ink for barcodes. I describe the idea of using a like-colored ink for textual addresses, so the human postal worker can still read it and use it for routing, but it would be useless for mass surveillance. And to be clear, the return address is only needed for return routing. Sure, if they read the return address for routing purposes they are also likely storing it in the DB, but it’s a fair trade-off at that point because it’s a rare circumstance that return service is triggered.

I don’t recall off the top of my head what the average case length is in various member states, but it was published in 2024 when the EU collected reports on the GDPR progress. In 2024, everyone (people and orgs) could give the EU feedback on the GDPR’s effectiveness. I think it happens every 4 years. The report from the EDPB to the EC contained stats. So if you dig that up it will show what the average length of a complaint is. IIRC, 2 years was the worst average timeframe of all countries. I don’t recall which country had that average, but I tend to figure if my complaint idles for 2 years then I will consider it mothballed.

There is a new law that allows merchants to stop giving paper receipts.

The forced use of e-receipts in Europe (France, Belgium, Netherlands, Denmark, England, & Italy)

That bug tracker is in MS Github - a place I will not go. And I have yet to find an organised or simple way to find downstream trackers. I generally check Debian but when a pkg is not in official Debian then I report to !bugs@sopuli.xyz and !bugs_in_services@sopuli.xyz.

I wasn’t aware of the “Privacy Shield”, but the article mentions that:

“In the Schrems II judgement, the CJEU raised several points regarding the U.S. intelligence agencies’ access to EU data. The EU-U.S. Data Privacy Framework tackles them and includes significant improvements compared to the mechanism having existed under the Privacy Shield.”

Found this and this to help me catch up on this.

(edit) in this doc I counted 81 “should”s and 33 “shall”s, to get an idea of the strength.

https://git.kescher.at/dCF/deCloudflare/src/branch/master/subfiles/rapsheet.cloudflare.md