A new fiber network provider drilled into the façades of private homes to run their cables, without consent, to save themselves the cost of digging. Their website was in Cloudflare’s exclusive walled garden -- which means they were drilling people’s façades who were not even necessarily in the included group who could get service.

So my friend hand-delivered a letter and got the receptionist to sign for it (thus can be recognised by a court). The letter objected to the use of their home to deploy a network that exclude everyone Cloudflare excludes, and also said something like “since you had no consent to drill my house and I explicitly object, I will detach your cable on date X. And unless you say otherwise, if you consent to my work then take no action. Your inaction will signal acceptance to my plans.”

The Internet carrier had to employ a lawyer to write a long strongly worded response citing laws and their right to drill people’s façades, which they then had to send using registe

The linked “magazine” (community) is where Twitter & FB users can converge with non-Twitter & non-FB users to have their messages to their gov reps relayed. This is a hack to circumvent digital exclusion.

What’s going to happen in the EU is public spaces like libraries which already have wi-fi service are going unplug their wi-fi service and take this free wifi4eu option. Then only people who can get the special Google/Apple-only app will have wi-fi access.

So while the project falsely claims to favor digital inclusion, they will actually be making existing networks more exclusive.

When Google sabotages network neutrality by blocking Tor and Invidious instances, is it wise for the fedi to facilitate the sharing of #Youtube links?

Fedi instance operators would probably not tolerate links into Facebook’s walled-garden if people were to start polluting an otherwise open community with them. So Youtube links should probably be treated with contempt during periods where Google’s DoS attack is underway.

ecfr.gov used to be a decent source for looking up laws. When looking up the anti spam laws, the linked page is littered with links to an access-restricted Cloudflare site (www.govinfo.gov). The important parts of the law are missing from ecfr.gov. It’s common for various states to have this mom-pop shop competency level, but tragic and embarrassing that the US feds lack competency to the point of Cloudflare-dependency.

Often Cornell University publishes federal law and mitigates the embarrassment to some extent. But when looking up the CAN-SPAM law at Cornell, the Cornell law site redirects to another access-restricted Cloudflare site (www.gpo.gov).

There needs to be a fundamental high-level that requires all laws to be accessible to all people, not just people who Cloudflare is willing to give access to.

Yikes. As some Tor users may know, the UN drafted the Unified Declaration of Human Rights, which in principle calls for privacy respect and inclusion. That same UN blocks the Tor community from their website. Indeed, being denied access to the text that embodies our human rights is rich in irony.

Well that same UN plans to create a “Global Digital Compact” to protect digital human rights. It’s a good idea, but wow, they just don’t have their shit together. I have so little confidence that they can grasp the problems they are hoping to solve. Cloudflare probably isn’t the least bit worried. Competence prevailing, Cloudflare should be worried, theoretically, but the UN doesn’t have the competence to even know who Cloudflare is.

One quite annoying Lemmy behaviour is when you search for a community that has many results spanning multiple screens (e.g. query “software”), the list is largely clusterfucked with crappy centralised instances that go against the #fedi philosophy (e.g. #lemmyWorld, #ShItjustWorks, #lemmyCa, #LemmEE, #LemmyZip, #programmingDev, etc).

I discovered a fix: ctrl-rt-click on every community in the list to open each in a tab. Then click “block community”, then repeat the search. It works the way it should: blocked communities are excluded from search results.

Wish I realised that sooner.. would have saved me some effort and frustration in trying to search only for communities in the decentralised free world.

The problem:

Most #fedi authors post links with no idea if the hosting server discriminates against people, or who. The consequence is that the fedi is muddied with references to exclusive venues that do not treat people equally, which wastes the time of readers who are impacted by discrimination. A variety of walled gardens pollute our threadiverse experience. So how can we remedy this?

Proposed fix:

Suppose we create a community and designate it as a testing area which welcomes bots. So e.g. I post something in the test community, and a bot that is paywall-aware replies yes or no whether the link is paywall-free. A bot that is Cloudflare-aware does the same. A regional bot, such as a bot in Poland can check that Polish IP addresses can reach the URL and make noise if the website blocks Poland. Etc. It need not be just bots.. someone in some oppressed region might manually attempt to visit links and report access problems. We would certainly like a bot in a GDPR region to test whet

The linked¹ #gemini article is the political platform of the French green party in Belguim w.r.t. digital rights. It was translated from French.

I’m overall impressed enough to vote for them. But I do have some concerns:

“At the Belgian level, we propose to establish a legal guarantee of 5 years for new electronic devices.”

Yikes, waaay too short. Needs to be at least 10 years. But it helps that they advocate FOSS:

“Generalize the ability to use free software on all devices to decrease software obsolescence.”

Though this statement is far too vague. If a maker of hardware with proprietary non-free software only gives 5 years of support, there needs to be a legal obligation that they port FOSS to the device at the end of the warranty. This is missing in the green party’s plan.

A lot of other things are missing in their plan, but generally their principles are sensible.

¹ (edit) actually it cannot be linked usin

Might be useful for some.. but note that it uses CF to get the CIDRs.

Mastodon used to show people the mirrored version of federated content which shielded users from Cloudflare’s discriminatory blockade. But something apparently changed. If I try to visit this mirror of a mastodonapp.uk status on layer8.space:

https://layer8.space/@[email protected]/112387605497275701

it redirects to:

https://mastodonapp.uk/@tmmj/112387605489133663

which is apparently a shitty Cloudflare node that deceives us into thinking the account does not exist. If you are logged into the mirrored node, then it does not redirect and you can see the content. Of course, only if you have an account on the mirror which means anonymous viewing is no longer possible.

If I want to share that layer8.space link with other people, it would be an injustice to share the mastodonapp.uk link because it’s in a walled garden that excludes people. It would be like sharing a Facebook link with an audience that includes people outside of Facebook. So naturally I would share the layer8.space ve

When an image is posted by someone on a Cloudflared instance like the following:

• #LemmyWorld
• #ShitJustworks
• #LemmyCA
• #LemmyEE
• #LemmyZip
• #LemmyOne

the image is inaccessible to all demographics of people who Cloudflare discriminates against because images are not mirrored to federated nodes.

We expect corporations to not give a shit about marginising people who are not profitable enough to care about. But when naive asshole users outnumber progressive egalitarians, it highlights a problem with the fedi, which still lacks the tooling needed to keep oppression at bay.

The six listed nodes above effectively host the AOL users of our time. Lacking the sophistication needed to detect and grasp situations of eroded digital rights with a degree of blindness and lack of concern for centralised corporate co

cross-posted from: https://sopuli.xyz/post/11709471

Many political parties are allowing Cloudflare to block some demographics of voters from seeing election info on their own candidates. These political parties are running exclusive websites:

• PS/Vooruit (Socialist / Parti Socialiste [fr/nl])
• Défi (previously part of the MR, now more at the center [fr])
• CD & V (center / Christen Democratisch en Vlaams [nl])
• Groen (Green Party [nl])
• Open VLD (liberal [nl])

Effectively they are operating in an anti-democratic fashion. Open and inclusive access to election info is paramount to democracy.

The political parties who are running inclusive websites are (quite ironically) the right-wing parties. And funnily enough, some of the right-wing parties actually have an English version of their website as well. This defies their historic reputation as being relatively xenophobic. If voting purely on the basis of digital rights and digital inclusion fostered by their we

IMO this is a #netneutrality issue due to lack of access equality. People with old phones are discriminated against.

cross-posted from: https://infosec.pub/post/11021006

…
TLS-encumbered captive portal (transit service)

A transit service offered wi-fi but the network forcibly redirected me to a captive portal that triggers this error:

 undefined

    
net::ERR_SSL_VERSION_OR_CIPHER_MISMATCH


  

I tried a couple browsers and tried rewriting the https:// scheme as http:// but SSL redirect was forced consistently. The error apparently implies my phone’s browser can’t do TLS 1.3.

It seems like a shitty move for a transit service to require passengers to use TLS 1.3 just to tick a fucking box that says “I agree” (to the terms no one reads anyway). Couple questions:

• I’m generally in the /protect everything by default/ school of thought. But I cannot g

Some people think Cloudflare is not a “walled garden”. This article goes to a great extent to show not only that Cloudflare is a #walledGarden, but it’s actually more of a walled garden than the well known ones (Facebook & Google).

(⚠ Enshitification warning: The linked article has a cookie wall; just click “reject” and the article appears)

Google is ending the public access to the cache of sites it indexes. AFAICT, these are the consequences:

• People getting different treatment due to their geographic location will lose the cache they used as a remedy for access inclusion.
• People getting different treatment due to having a defensive browser will lose access.
• The 12ft.io service which serves those who suffer access inequality will be rendered useless.
• Google will continue to include paywalls in search results, but now consumers of Google search results will be led to a dead-end.
• The #InternetArchive #WaybackMachine will take on the full burden of global archival.
• Consumers will lose a very useful tool for circumventing web enshitification.

Websites treat the Google crawler like a 1st class citizen. Paywalls give Google unpaid junk-free access. Then Google search results direct people to a website th

There is hardly any discussion on this trending variety of web enshitification where a website needs to give physical locations to people. Many web devs are starting to spotlight their profound incompetence in accomplishing this very simple task. They throw up an interactive map which requires the full utilization of fancy GUI browser frills that excludes all but those who “chase the shiny”. A 1990s high schooler to do this better in plain HTML.

Doesn’t this screw over blind people? How does a screen reader handle a map?

My hardened low-bandwidth browser can’t handle this absurd degree of putting fancy above access equality. When this shit happens on a vendor’s website and I’m trying to locate them to give them business, the answer is easy: they can fuck off and lose my business. But it’s sad when a government does it and the information has medical relevance.