A lot of useful information covering the city of Brussels is jailed. Apparently only clearnet users are allowed to access the website, AFAICT.

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.

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.

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.

The Chamber of Representatives website is hard to find with a search. The first several pages are wikis and various pages talking about the chamber of reps, but not www.dekamer.be which was well buried, at least for me. This means it’s an unpopular website. Which suggests efforts to block access is less justified. Tor users are ignored and browsers time out. Also notable that the chamber of reps treats archive.org badly. This leads to a broken CAPTCHA:

http://web.archive.org/web/20250124121819/https://www.dekamer.be/

When people can’t even see an archive of the site, it’s an extra dose of disservice and non-transparency.

Belgium’s “open” data website is also closed to Tor users (timeouts).

FWIW the France’s open data website is open to Tor users, thus probably all users.

To Tor visitors the BIPT just looks like an offline/dead website. But it is reachable on archive.org. The 12ft.io service also reaches BIPT but PDFs are broken.

They claim to support “open data”. They have a separate website for that and it’s actually open to Tor users.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.sdf.org/post/28580567

Love the irony and simultaneous foreshadowed embarrassment of Elon denying availability and service as a way to be more efficient.

The irony

Cloudflare enables web admins to be extremely bloated. Admins of Cloudflared websites have no incentive to produce lean or efficient websites because Cloudflare does the heavy lifting for free (but at the cost of reduced availability to marginalized communities like Tor, VPNs, CGNAT, etc). So they litter their website with images and take little care to choose lean file formats or appropriate resolutions. Cloudflare is the #1 cause of web inefficiency.

Cloudflare also pushes countless graphical CAPTCHAs with reckless disregard which needlessly wastes resources and substantially increases traffic bloat -- all to attack bots (and by side-effect text-based users) who do not fetch images and thus are the most lean consumers of web content.

The embarrassment

This

The main landing site for the FCC blocks Tor users with a 403. This means their contact page is also exclusive access, along with a number of otherwise pubilc access databases.

At least their consumer complaints site open to all, including those with a privacy complaint:

https://consumercomplaints.fcc.gov/hc/en-us

It’s one of the ugliest most undignified forms of service refusal. They just simply drop packets from Tor. Not even enough courtesy to send a 403 forbidden. So visitors are left guessing whether the website is down, slow, or giving deliberate mistreatment. People then have to try different browsers with different timeout thresholds to investigate.

There is no apparent mirror or alternative site hosting Florida statutes. Archive.org has a cache of some laws but FL state gets zero credit for that.

(update) in fact there are two state sites for legal statutes and both block tor:

• www.leg.state.fl.us
• www.flsenate.gov

I would love it if someone would successfully argue in court “sorry I broke that law but I could not inform myself of the law because every time I tried to reach the state’s website for statutes it just timed out” -- and get away with it.

Indeed the IRS website blocks Tor users from accessing tax information, as if tor users don’t need tax information. Important legal guidance exists on irs.gov, so it’s obviously an injustice to block people from becoming informed about their rights and obligations.

(edit)
What’s the fix? Would it be effective to make a FOIA request on paper so the IRS must send the info on paper via USPS? Or would that require compensation to offset their burden?