Belgium

Digi is a new ISP who recently drilled into façades of people’s homes without notice or consent. Anyone registered with BIPT as a telecom operator does not need consent for the act of attaching their cable to the façade, but they are required to inform home owners before the work and obtain consent on the way that they run the cable.

Digi simply showed up unannounced with workers in plain clothes who drilled into façades spontaneously. Digi also neglected to say anything about it after the fact.

Proximus and Digi both neglected to give advance notice when they did this. Proximus at least left a letter in mailboxes stating what happened and offered free installation of service.

Both Proximus and Digi are also exclusive services. That is, they do not accept cash payments and thus exclude unbanked people (~3% of the population). It’s extra evil on the part of Proximus because they have physical shops all over which obligates cash acceptance and could serve that purpose.

There is in fact no law obligating Belgian telecom operators to offer service to those whose properties involuntarily host their cables. They can be as exclusive as they want.

And worse, home owners who renovate their façade have a legal obligation to send bPost registered letters to each and every cable owner who uses their façade -- currently a hit of €10 per letter. So if there are 7 cables attached, you are effectively legally obligated to spend €70 to give advance notice before working on your own façade.

Does it have to be this way?

No, because they can run their fiber under the sidewalk. They choose to uglify people’s façades to save money. As such, the law effectively strips the people of their bargaining power. In principle, the ISPs should need to entice consumers with a deal that passes some of the savings of using façades onto them. If you have a strip of terraced houses and one house does not take the deal, then it’s not a problem. The sidewalk just needs to be dug up for the house that refuses the offer.

If you look around, sometimes you will see a terraced house that has buried the cables, perhaps because they want a nice looking façade.

This could even be fixed going forward. In principle, every sidewalk will eventually be dug up again, by Vivaqua doing what Vivaqua does. Such moments would be a good opportunity for telecoms to move their cables under the sidewalk, coordinated with whoever digs up the sidewalk for other purposes. Thereafter, homeowners would not have to send 7+ registered letters every time they need to renovate their façades. But our rights and that opportunity has been squandered.

Given that we are now forced to patronise a bank in Belgium, I believe bank contracts must now be regarded as signed under duress. So as a consequence there may be various laws that protect those who sign something under duress, which are now triggered.

For example under the GDPR, if the legal basis for data processing is consent, there is a rule that the consent must be “freely given” or it ceases to have the effect of consent. If you sign a bank contract under duress then IIUC it should have this effect: no change to any processing mentioned in the contract that is necessary for performance of the contract, but any processing that is not essential to performance of the contract would require consent. But since the bank does not legally have consent, they cannot lawfully process the data in those situations.

Can anyone else think of any other consequences that result when a bank contract is signed by force and under duress?

I once lost access to my money because my ID card the bank had on file expired. Instead of sending me a notice or warning, the bank simply blocked the bank card. That was the bank’s way of communicating. It got me in the door dancing for them the next moment the bank was open. If that same scenario were to play out now that agreement is signed under duress, I could argue that my consent to cut off my card as a communication mechanism was not freely given -- correct? Or am I misunderstanding something?

Forced-banking has become a reality in Belgium. SPF Finances quit accepting cash payments for tax in 2019. Electrabel, Luminus, Totaal Energy, and Vivaqua all refuse cash payments for essential services (water and power).

It has become impossible to live in Belgium without being forced into the marketplace to patronise a bank. Effectively, you have no right to boycott banks in Belgium.

Consequently, banks have no incentive to earn your business. One bank has closed its doors and shut down its web portal, forcing customers to continuously buy recent Android phones and maintain a Google account to run the bank’s app (the only means of access to their account).

So the question is, what non-profit NGOs are standing up for consumers and human rights on this issue? Who can we support and collaborate with in order to fight for our right to use cash in Belgium?

According to the European Central Bank, surveys show 60% of Belgians want the option/right to use cash, while only 45% of the population actually use cash. The 15% of cashless people who want the cash option will probably grow until cash is wholly eliminated -- because not using cash empowers forced-banking.

I would like a complete list of Belgian NGOs relevant to:

• human rights
• consumer rights
• privacy
• digital rights and right to unplug

I’m aware of the following orgs. Have I missed any?

Human rights:

• Amnesty International Belgique
• League of Human Rights
• UNIA
• Vlaams Mensenrechteninstituut
• Association pour le droit des étrangers

Consumer rights:

• Test-Achats
• Euroconsumer (possibly dead)

Digital rights, privacy, transparency and the right to unplug:

• 1710.be
• Abelli asbl
• Ateliers DK
• Kids Unplugged (focused on smartphone-free childhoods)
• Neutrinet
• Technopolice (anti-video surveillance focus)
• Tac-Tic asbl
• Yellow Jackets (fights against forced-banking, but apparently a ghost org… no website or contact info)
• EDRi; NoyB (Europe-wide)

(dead ends?)

• Comité Humain du Numérique (possibly dead)
• DasPrivé (possibly dead)
• Datapanik (possibly dead)
• Gang des Vieux en Colère (possibly dead)
• Ministry of Privacy (possibly dead)
• Open Knowledge Belgium VZW/asbl (possibly dead)
• ethicalnet.eu (possibly dead)

cross-posted from: https://lemm.ee/post/66053687

• France's TotalEnergies, which owns a 20% stake in the Yamal LNG project in Siberia, has a supply contract with Russia's Novatek valid through 2032.

• Belgium, Europe's second-largest Russian LNG customer, is seeking an "in-depth impact assessment" before backing the Commission's plan

Starting with the open data EU directive:

https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/NIM/?uri=CELEX%3A32019L1024

I went to "national transposition" on the sidebar, expanded Belgium, and I see lots of Wallonia-specific statutes. The Brussels specific laws would be interesting but what I fetched was not a complete body of current law. It was a long list of modifications of past law along the lines of “change this word… replace that word..”, etc.

Does anyone have a link to the full current open data law? Preferably in french because that works best for machine translation.

I could not reach the site from Tor. The linked page is the archive.org cached version, which actually is open to all.

Belgian banks have gone to the Orwellian extremes of outright refusing cash deposits without proof of source, even for small amounts as low as €50! The war on cash (war on privacy) is in full swing in Belgium.

At the same time, German ATMs are not producing receipts. My understanding of EU law is that the ATM must print a receipt if there is a currency exchange on the ATM’s side of the transaction (please correct me if I’m wrong). But I see no EU law requiring ATMs to print receipts generally. Some ATMs in Germany don’t even have printers; no slot for dispensing receipts. By extension, I suppose such ATMs must not be capable of offering dynamic currency conversion (which is bizarre because that’s where the most profit is in the ATM business).

In any case, it seems a bit off that you can get cash from a German ATM, get denied a receipt (you don’t know in advance that a receipt will not be given), and then you cannot deposit that cash in Belgium due to their nannying.

Or can you? What if you write down the ATM machine’s number, location, time, date, and amount. Would a log of that information serve to document the source of the cash to legal standards?

wtf.. we cannot simply do an NS lookup in Belgium?

$ dig @"$(tor-resolve resolver1.opendns.com)" -t ns -q europeangreens-eu.mail.protection.outlook.com +tcp +nocomments +nostats +nosearch +noclass +dnssec +noauth +noquestion +nocmd

europeangreens-eu.mail.protection.outlook.com. 0 TXT "Effective April 11, 2025: Due to a court order in Belgium requiring the implementation of blocking measures to prevent access within Belgium to certain domains, the OpenDNS service is not currently available to users in Belgium"

Update

Seems relevant:

Belgian Constitution Article 25:
The press is free; censorship can never be introduced; no security can be demanded from authors, publishers or printers. When the author is known and resident in Belgium, neither the publisher, the printer nor the distributor can be prosecuted.

I asked for a sheet of national stamps. They gave me prior stamps which do not have “prior” printed on them. Price was high, but I just figured the postage rates are jumping leaps and bounds. It turns out a circled 1 “①” is apparently a priority indicator.

Just a heads-up.. watch out for that. The normal stamps come in a sheet of 10 and I think it’s the head of a prime minister on those things.

“The state of government open data across the globe in 2015”

^ ok, bit old. But still, I’m surprised. Maybe Mexico does well on the basis of not having much data to share.

Intro:

“From 1 May, stricter rules on rents apply in the Brussels region. Electrical appliances including dishwashers and laptops will also have to display a repairability score. These and other changes are introduced on Mayday.…”

More info on the repairability index here. IMO this is extremely slow progress. It’s barely a drop in the ocean of what we need for rights to repair.

cross-posted from: https://scribe.disroot.org/post/2609825

A Belgian agency ruled that the government’s sharing of Americans’ financial information with the IRS [Internal Revenue Service, the United States federal government, which is responsible for collecting U.S. federal taxes] under a US law violates European data protection laws.

The US Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act, or FATCA, requires reporting of foreign bank account information to the US agency.

The Belgian Data Protection Authority issued the ruling Thursday, saying sharing of this data in accordance with FATCA violated provisions in the EU General Data Protection Regulation, and it gave the Belgian government one year to bring its data-sharing into conformity with the GDPR.

• The authority initially blocked the sharing of data in 2023, in a case brought by the Accidental Americans Association of Belgium. A Brussels Market Court reversed the decision and sent it back to the authority later that year.
• The Association of Accidental Americans President Fabien Lehagre said his group welcomes the decision, which he said will stop the data transfers, but he decried the decision to give the government a year to comply. “Accidental Americans” are people who hold US citizenship by virtue of their birth but are established overseas.
• “Data protection cannot accommodate a political or administrative timetable,” he said. “Transfers must cease immediately.”

1. Grab a Super+ loyalty card leaflet + card.
2. Lift the card just enough to reveal the barcode and scan the barcode; OR alternatively lift it a little more to reveal the digits and photograph them when no one is looking of course… and leave it on the top of the stack. Otherwise bring the leaflet home.
3. From home, run these commands on your Debian machine:

$ sudo aptitude install barcode; # or use apt if you prefer
$ barcode -b "$delhaize_barcode" -e upc -E -p A8 | epstopdf --filter > /tmp/delhaize_super+.pdf; # where "$delhaize_barcode" is the unique 12-digit code you grabbed.
$ sudo adb start-server; # if this fails, skip the next 2 commands. Otherwise connect your phone to the Debian machine over USB before the next step
$ adb shell mkdir storage/sdcard1/my_disloyalty_cards
$ adb push /tmp/delhaize_super+.pdf storage/sdcard1/my_disloyalty_cards/

4. If you took the leaflet and card home, then your final step is to return to Delhaize and sneak it onto the top of the pile. Eventually someone else will take the card home and activate it by registering it in their name.

No worries if the last 3 “adb” developer commands fail. They will likely fail for most people. The commands can be substituted with however you would transfer the PDF from your PC to your phone.

The barcode should be immediately scannable but it may not have effect until the next poor sucker installs Delhaize’s shitty proprietary closed-source app and registers the card in their name. Thereafter you should get the instant discounts on what you buy but obviously any points accumulation will go to your surrogate. Sure, you could probably exploit the points too but don’t be evil. Your surrogate is your friend. Fair enough that they get the points credit.

Mods

The barcode will not have the exact same cosmetic style as the card (the leading and checksum digits are visually offset). If you care about this, you could:

• Add the -n option to the barcode command to omit the digits, then use ImageMagick or GIMP to insert the digits below the barcode; or
• Use LaTeX to generate the barcode. I’m not sure how to generate a “UPC A” barcode in LaTeX but you likely have complete control over the format

You could pass the -t option to the barcode command to print many copies on a page of sticky labels to give to give to family/friends/colleagues. Those stickers could be put over top of barcodes on other cards which no one activates.

Unworkable shortcut

Theoretically you could simply scan the barcode and use the same barcode app to generate a UPC-A barcode. My app detects the barcode as UPC_A and correctly decodes it, but when the app tries to re-encode the digits into UPC-A it produces a 2D barcode (like a QR). I doubt that works because the cashier’s scanner is likely only for 1D linear codes.

Perhaps other apps can do this correctly.

Notes

The Delhaize barcodes do not seem to start with a “2”, which seems questionable because a 2 normally indicates internal use. So does Delhaize run the risk that their loyalty cards clash with UPCs of actual products? Maybe they actually legitimately bought a range of product codes for memberships but seems like a waste of money.

UPDATE - Why I’ve decided not to do this

It has come to my attention that loyalty customers who run the app have access to their own shopping history. At the same time, couples often share an account and see each others purchases. So consider this scenario:

Bob and Alice are a non-drinking couple, but Bob had a drinking problem historically. Suppose he is on the wagon. If suragate Mallory buys alcohol, Alice will think that Bob is sneaking alchohol which would lead to confusion and misery. Mallory could avoid buying things like alcohol and tobacco, but there is also the problem that Alice or Bob could be using the receipts for accounting and bookkeeping.

Since there are unpredictable problems with this, I think this anti-surveillance advertising move should not be used.

Belgium has Riopan for €8.95 (price controlled):

• comes in 20 individually sealed shelf-stable packets of 10 ml doses containing 800mg of magaldrat

Netherlands (price controls unknown):

• Antagel Sanias for ~€7.50 comes in 1 bottle of 300ml (20—30 doses of aluminumoxide + magnesuimhdroxide) which must be refrigerated after opening; stable for only 1 month
• Maalox chew tablets (×20 of 200mg aluminumoxide & 400mg magnesiumhydroxide) for €4.85 [€c24/dose]

Superficially the Antagel Sanias seemed like a winner because the price is lower than Riopan and you can control your dosage. But you have 1 month to use it up! Whoever needs 20—30 doses in 1 month has serious enough problems that they probably should be getting more rigorous treatment. Not sure why this stuff exists in that quantity. If you only get acid reflux 1—2 times/week, the Antagel Sanias is a ripoff.

Not sure why Maalox tablets have 10 times the potency of Antagel Sanias. Is there a 90% absorption loss with chew tablets?

Makers of appliances like washing machines implement a diagnostic mode which enables manual control to command specific cycles (filling, agitating, draining, spinning). There is typically also a secret set of steps to see error codes.

Why do retailers like Krefel get that info? I have never seen a retailer who actually connects their machines to water and sewage, so it’s unclear how they use the secret modes.

In any case, they are somehow prohibited from sharing the secret info with customers -- those who actually need diagnostic control to maintain their own property.

Just asking myself (and now you guys too)... is it possible to use Itsme on a deGoogled phone? Clarification: I want to get rid of all Google and Meta stuff. A new FairPhone 5 with e/OS Murena could be a good choice, but I have to be carefull. For many things in Belgium related to government and bank stuff, you need Itsme to login. I don't want to put myself in some kind of trouble when I woul realize to late that Itsme's not working on my e/OS.

Flixbus recently started blocking tor for some operations like seeing prices. The only alternative site for Flixbus price info is Trainline, as far as I know.

Are there others?

Then trainline started blocking tor. And (today?) Flixbus started blocking tor from the whole site (not just pricing info). Same problem for blablacar (blocks tor).

Anyone have a source for openly reachable Flixbus pricing?

EDIT: found wanderu.com

Riopan is an over-the-counter (OTC) drug that anyone can buy for stomach pain relief. Docs prescribe it, but the prescription is almost meaningless because it is not reimbursable. So the prescription only serves as a doc→pharmacist communication so the patient gets the right stuff.

20 sacs (10ml ea.) of Riopan is €8.95. Thus 45 €cents/dose. Bit pricey, no? So I checked a few places. All the same price and one pharmacist said the price is controlled on Riopan. No pharmacist can legally charge less than €8.95.

Yet this stuff is non-reimbursible. WTF? If a doc prescribes something, it means the patient needs it. If it’s needed, why would it not be covered?

At the same time, what’s the point in a price control on something that is unnecessary? This is bizarre, no? If medicine is needed, sure price controls make sense in a socialised medicine context to ensure equal access. But if it’s not reimbursable, it’s therefore treated as not needed, yet there are price controls which seem to worsen the deal for consumers on something like this due to lack of competition. It seems like an incoherent combination of disadvantages to consumers.

Also bizarre that despite being an openly accessible OTC drug, they don’t put Riopan on the shelf. You have to ask the pharmacist for it as if it needs some kind of controlled supervision/nannying. What is that about?

Does it make sense to buy Riopan or other drugs in neighboring countries? Obviously not worth a trip for Riopan but I just wonder if I happen to visit NL, DE, or FR, are there any OTC drugs I should buy.

The mod might want to consider adding these related communities to the sidebar (all of which are properly decentralised):

• !belgique
• !belgium
• !Brussels

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/27227073