Sounds mostly reasonable.. but I don’t see the alternate citizenship helping, unless you mean to go as far as renouncing because all FATCA regions (~130+ countries) look at the birthplace, not nationality, and you can never get a new birthplace. It’s probably hard to find a non-FATCA region where you can trust the banks. But indeed.. getting your 4th amendment rights has come to extremes.

That makes some sense.

In my case I think I have credit that I’ve never actually used; and I think I’ve also put on their file that I am unemployed. So in principle consumers who either don’t care for the credit, or are happy to be in the highest risk category, they should not be harassed with this. I will just ignore it and see what happens.

3
submitted 5 days ago* (last edited 5 days ago) by soloActivist@links.hackliberty.org to c/privacy@links.hackliberty.org

(cross-posting is broken on links.hackliberty.org, so the following is manually copied from the original post)


When your bank/CU/brokerage demands that you login to their portal to update KYC info soloActivist to Privacy@fedia.io ·

In the past I have only seen PayPal spontaneously demand at arbitrary/unexpected moments that I jump their their hoops -- to login and give them more info about me. I reluctantly did what they wanted, and they kept my account frozen and kept my money anyway.

So I’ve been boycotting PayPal ever since. Not worth it for to work hard to find out why they kept my account frozen and to work hard to twist their arm to so that I can give them my business.

Now an actual financial institution is trying something similar. They are not as hostile as PayPal was (they did not pre-emptively freeze my account until I dance for them), but they sent an email demanding that I login and update my employment information (even though it has not changed). Presumably they will eventually freeze my account if I do not dance for them to satisfy their spontaneous demand.

I just wonder how many FIs are pulling this shit. And what are people doing about it? Normally I would walk.. pull my money out and go elsewhere. But the FI that is pushing KYC harassment has a lot of power because they offer some features I need that I cannot get elsewhere, and I have some stocks through them, which makes it costly/non-trivial to bounce.

I feel like we should be keeping a public database on FIs who pull this shit, so new customers can be made aware of who to avoid.

[-] soloActivist@links.hackliberty.org 4 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

Love the irony of being blocked from reading that article because I am anonymous and the #reclaimthenet hypocrits insist on using Cloudflare.

So I can only comment on the title and what the OP (apparently) copied. Judging by how the masses happily continue using banks who voluntarily abuse KYC by collecting more info than required, internet users will also be pushovers who give in to whatever KYC comes their way.

This policy will actually create victims. Just like GSM registration creates victims. In regions that require GSM registration phone theft goes up because criminals will steal a phone just for a live SIM chip. So KYC creates incentive for criminals to run their services from someone else’s PC.

The 1st ½ of your comment sounds accurate. But...

And also in Foss there are highly opinionated software where the devs completely ignore users, ban them from GitHub when they post issues,

Right, but to be clear non-free s/w is worse - you can’t even reach the devs, generally, and there is no public bug tracker. FOSS is an improvement in this regard because at least there is a reasonable nuclear option (forking). The nuclear option for non-free software is writing it yourself from scratch.

That all sounds accurate enough to me.. but thought I should comment on this:

However - in larger enterprises there’s so much more, you get the whole SDL maturity thing going - money is invested into raising the quality of the whole development lifecycle and you get things like code reviews, architects, product planning, external security testing etc. Things that cost time, money and resources.

It should be mentioned that many see testing as a cost, but in fact testing is a cost savings. In most situations, you only spend some money on testing in order to dodge a bigger cost: customers getting burnt in a costly way that backfires on the supplier. Apart from safety-critical products, this is the only business justification to test. Yet when budgets get tightened, one of the first cuts many companies make is testing -- which is foolish assuming they are doing testing right (in a way that saves money by catching bugs early).

Since the common/general case with FOSS projects is there is no income that’s attached to a quality expectation (thus testing generates no cost savings) - the users are part of the QA process as free labor, in effect :)

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submitted 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago) by soloActivist@links.hackliberty.org to c/foss@beehaw.org

There is a common theme pushed by fanatics of capitalism that never dies: that a profit-driven commercial project ensures higher quality products than products under non-profit projects. Some hard-right people I know never miss the chance to use the phrase “good enough for government work” to convey this idea.

I’m not looking to preach to the choir here, but rather to establish a thread of scenarios that correspond to quality for the purpose of countering inaccurate narratives. This is the thread to share your stories.

In my day job I’m paid to write code. Then I go home write code I was not paid for. My best work is done without pay.

Commercial software development

When I have to satisfy an employer, they don’t want quality code. They want fast code. They want band-aid fixes. The corporate structure is too myopic to optimize for quality.

Anti-gold-plating:I was once back-roomed by a manager and lectured for “gold plating”. That means I was producing code that was higher quality than what management perceives as economically optimal.

Bug fixes hindered:I was caught fixing some bugs conveniently as I spotted them when I happened to have a piece of code checked out in Clearcase. I was told I was “cheating the company out of profits” because they prefer if the bugs each go through a documentation procedure so the customer can ultimately be made to pay separately for the bug fix. Nevermind the fact that my time was already charged anyway (but they can get more money if there’s a bigger paper trail involving more staff). This contrasts with the “you get what you pay for” narrative since money is diverted to busy work (IOW: working hard, not smart).

Bugs added for “consistent quality”:One employer was so insistent on “consistent quality” that when one module was higher quality than another, they insisted on lowering the quality of the better module because improving the style or design pattern of the lower quality piece would be “gold plating”. This meant injecting bugs to achieve consistency. The bugs were non-serious varieties; more along the lines of needless complexity, reduced performance, coding standard non-compliances, etc, but nonetheless something that could potentially be charged to the customer to fix.

Syntactic dumbing-down:When making full use of the language constructs (as intended by the language designers), I am often forced by an employer to use a more basic subset of constructs. Employers are concerned that junior engineers or early senior engineers who might have to maintain my code will encounter language constructs that are less common and it will slow them down to have to look up the syntax they encounter. Managers assume that future devs will not fully know the language they are working in. IMO employers under-estimate the value of developers learning on the job. So I am often forced avoid using the more advanced constructs to accommodate some subset of perceived lowest common denominator. E.g. if I were to use an array in bash, an employer might object because some bash maintainers may not be familiar with an array.

Non-commercial software development

Free software developers have zero schedule pressure. They are not forced to haphazardly rush some sloppy work into an integration in order to meet a deadline that was promised to a customer by a manager who was pressured to give an overly optimistic timeline due to a competitive bidding process. #FOSS devs are free to gold-plate all they want. And because it’s a labor of love and not labor for a paycheck, FOSS devs naturally take more pride in their work.

I’m often not proud of the commercial software I was forced to write by a corporation fixated on the bottom line. When I’m consistently pressured to write poor quality code for a profit-driven project, I hit a breaking point and leave the company. I’ve left 3 employers for this reason.

Commercial software from a user PoV

Whenever I encounter a bug in commercial software there is almost never a publicly accessible bug tracker and it’s rare that the vendor has the slightest interest in passing along my bug report to the devs. The devs are unreachable by design (cost!). I’m just one user so my UX is unimportant. Obviously when I cannot even communicate a bug to a commercial vendor, I am wholly at the mercy of their testers eventually rediscovering the same bug I found, which is unlikely in complex circumstances.

Non-commercial software from a user PoV

Almost every FOSS app has a bug tracker, forum, or IRC channel where bugs can be reported and treated. I once wrote a feature request whereby the unpaid FOSS developer implemented my feature request and sent me a patch the same day I reported it. It was the best service I ever encountered and certainly impossible in the COTS software world for anyone who is not a multi-millionaire.

Sorry I do not know if BBC interviews are transcribed.

But FWIW it will air again on BBC World Service at 02:32 GMT tomorrow and the next day (which could be useful for those on limited internet connections)

11
submitted 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago) by soloActivist@links.hackliberty.org to c/privacy@programming.dev

cross-posted from: https://links.hackliberty.org/post/609883

This BBC interview has a #Cloudflare rep David Bellson who describes CF’s observations on internet traffic. CF tracks for example the popularity of Facebook vs. Tiktok. Neither of those services are Cloudflared, so how is CF tracking this? Apparently they are snooping on traffic that traverses their servers to record what people are talking about. Or is there a more legit way Cloudflare could be monitoring this activity?

1
submitted 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago) by soloActivist@links.hackliberty.org to c/nostupidquestions@mander.xyz

There’s a widespread nuisance of shared e-scooters (which do not need to be locked) taking up bicycle stalls that cyclists need to lock their bikes. Are e-scooter platforms instructing users to use bicycle racks? Or are people doing that against policy?

9
submitted 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago) by soloActivist@links.hackliberty.org to c/privacy@programming.dev

Some banks will annually mail a paper “welcome” letter to all customers purely for the purpose of collecting bounced mail ultimately to verify if anyone has moved without telling them. The letters never state that’s the purpose.. they take that opportunity to talk about their service in arbitrary ways. Some banks even charge customers a fee for their cost in doing that. If you ask the banker about it they readily admit that it’s an address verification technique.

That’s it.. just a PSA so folks are aware, as it is a bit sneaky.

Some national postal services (e.g. USPS) sell your mail forwarding information which is how you get tracked to your new location by various entities even when you did not inform them of your new address. So obviously a good defensive measure is to never use the mail forwarding service. Select the entities you want to know your new address and inform them directly. But then to get some immunity to the sneaky trick in the 1st paragraph, perhaps give the next resident a stack of addressed envelopes and stamps and ask the next resident to ~~forward~~ (remail) for you.. or just ask them to trash your mail instead of returning it.

14
submitted 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) by soloActivist@links.hackliberty.org to c/cybersecurity@infosec.pub

cross-posted from: https://links.hackliberty.org/post/454425

When I visit this post:

https://jlai.lu/post/2250911

the embedded short abstract intro to the article is “403 Blocked www.lecho.be” When I try visiting the link directly I get “403 bot detection”. This suggests that everyone who opens that thread independently visits that webpage by way of some javascript that’s not under the user’s control. If 1000 people open that thread, then 1000 separate fetches are made. That’s a poor design. The server could do that job just once and the results would be more reliable. As opposed to everyone getting different results.

This is also a #privacy #security bug. Someone who opens a thread does not necessarily intend to fetch the linked article. Non-tor users are under surveillance in some countries (e.g. the US, where Trump enacted law s.t. ISPs can collect data on users without consent). So they should have control over what sites they visit. Merely opening a thread is an abuse because it makes users actions instantly trackable. IOW, users share information with their ISP without their knowledge or control.

Note that the example thread shows the full text of the article because the author was diligent about copying it. But that’s not the general case.

#bug #lemmyBug

9
submitted 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) by soloActivist@links.hackliberty.org to c/lemmy_support@lemmy.ml

When I visit this post:

https://jlai.lu/post/2250911

the embedded short abstract intro to the article is “403 Blocked www.lecho.be” When I try visiting the link directly I get “403 bot detection”. This suggests that everyone who opens that thread independently visits that webpage by way of some javascript that’s not under the user’s control. If 1000 people open that thread, then 1000 separate fetches are made. That’s a poor design. The server could do that job just once and the results would be more reliable. As opposed to everyone getting different results.

This is also a #privacy #security bug. Someone who opens a thread does not necessarily intend to fetch the linked article. Non-tor users are under surveillance in some countries (e.g. the US, where Trump enacted law s.t. ISPs can collect data on users without consent). So they should have control over what sites they visit. Merely opening a thread is an abuse because it makes users actions instantly trackable. IOW, users share information with their ISP without their knowledge or control.

Note that the example thread shows the full text of the article because the author was diligent about copying it. But that’s not the general case.

#bug #lemmyBug

1

cross-posted from: https://links.hackliberty.org/post/285435

When a private sector company blocks Tor, I simply boycott. No private entity is so important that I cannot live well enough without them. But when a public service blocks Tor, that’s a problem because we are increasingly forced to use the online services of the public sector who have gone down the path of assuming offline people do not exist.

They simply block Tor without discussion. It’s not even clear who at what level makes these decisions.. could even be an IT admin at the bottom of the org chart. They don’t even say they’re blocking Tor. They don’t even give Tor users a block message that admits that they block Tor. They don’t disclose in their privacy policies that they exclude Tor.

Just a 403 error. That’s all we get. As if it needs no justification. Why is the Tor community so readily willing to play the pushover? Even the Tor project itself will not stand up for their own supporters.

The lack of justification is damaging because it essentially sends the message: “you Tor-using privacy seekers are such scum we don’t even have to explain why you are outcast. We don’t even have to ask permission to exclude you from participating in society” This reinforces the myth that Tor users are criminals and encourages non-criminal Tor users to abandon Tor, thus shrinking the Tor userbase. The civilized world has evolved to a point of realizing the injustice of #collectivePunishment. At best this is a case of punishing many because of a few. I say “at best” because I’m skeptical that a bad actor provokes the arbitrary denial of service.

When the question is publicly asked “why did service X start blocking Tor” answers always come as speculation from people who don’t really know, who say they were probably attacked.

1

cross-posted from: https://links.hackliberty.org/post/303031

These are the steps I take against companies who block Tor (e.g. a grocery store, bank, DNS provider.. whoever you do business with who have started using Cloudflare):

  1. GDPR art.17 request to delete my email address & any other electronic means to reach me, but nothing else.
  2. Wait 30 days for them to comply.
  3. GDPR art.13 & 14 request to disclose all entities personal data was shared with + art.15 request for all my data (if I am interested) + art.17 request to erase all records. These requests are sent together along with criticisms for their lack of respect for privacy and human rights and shaming for treating humans like robots (if that’s the case).

The reason for step 1 & 2 is to neuter the data controller’s option to respond electronically so they are forced to pay postage. It’s a good idea as well because they would otherwise likely use Microsoft for email and you obviously don’t want to feed MS. It may be feasible to skip steps 1 & 2 by withdrawing consent to use the email address (untested).

A few people doing this won’t make a dent but there is a threshold by which a critical mass of requests would offset their (likely uncalculated) cost savings by arbitrarily marginalizing the Tor community. It’s a way to send a message that cannot be ignored.

1
submitted 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) by soloActivist@links.hackliberty.org to c/philosophy@mander.xyz

cross-posted from: https://links.hackliberty.org/post/307315

Considering Sam Bankman-Fried claimed to practice #effectiveAltruism, and the fact that he makes substantial political donations, I thought we can validate to some extent whether his effective altruism is bogus or genuine. I thought this would be easily settled. If he favors democrats, he’s putting humanity above wealth & tyranny. If republicans, the altruistic claim can be easily dismissed.

It turns out #SamBankmanFried donated to democrats and republicans both. It’s unclear if the donations were equally effective for both parties, but interesting that he donated to dems in-the-clear while hiding donations to republicans. One of the notable donations went to a congressman who was most critical of cryptocurrency. So naturally he had to bribe that politician.

Dems were surprised to find that he also donated to republicans (and by his own admission!). Had he donated to both parties in transparency, recipients could see their opponent is also being fed and disregard the donation (i.e. give no preferential treatment). Seeing all the recipients would reveal if there were at least a consistent ideology or philosophy in play.

I have to conclude the political donations were likely all just to promote his own success. It does not completely nix the claim of effective altruism because he would argue it was purely a wealth accumulation endeavor as a precursor to effective altruism. But I have to say someone who is fully engaged in the idea of effective altruism would be irresistibly selective in who receives political contributions even at the cost of reduced wealth. A humanitarian would not be able to stomach the idea of financing a republican war chest.

You also have to figure that since he chose to make dem financing transparent and repub financing in the dark, he inherently gave republican recipients full view of it. That’s only viable if he donates much more to republicans who would see that he donates mere peanuts to the opponent for optics.

1
submitted 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) by soloActivist@links.hackliberty.org to c/philosophy@links.hackliberty.org

Considering Sam Bankman-Fried claimed to practice #effectiveAltruism, and the fact that he makes substantial political donations, I thought we can validate to some extent whether his effective altruism is bogus or genuine. I thought this would be easily settled. If he favors democrats, he’s putting humanity above wealth & tyranny. If republicans, the altruistic claim can be easily dismissed.

It turns out #SamBankmanFried donated to democrats and republicans both. It’s unclear if the donations were equally effective for both parties, but interesting that he donated to dems in-the-clear while hiding donations to republicans. One of the notable donations went to a congressman who was most critical of cryptocurrency. So naturally he had to bribe that politician.

Dems were surprised to find that he also donated to republicans (and by his own admission!). Had he donated to both parties in transparency, recipients could see their opponent is also being fed and disregard the donation (i.e. give no preferential treatment). Seeing all the recipients would reveal if there were at least a consistent ideology or philosophy in play.

I have to conclude the political donations were likely all just to promote his own success. It does not completely nix the claim of effective altruism because he would argue it was purely a wealth accumulation endeavor as a precursor to effective altruism. But I have to say someone who is fully engaged in the idea of effective altruism would be irresistibly selective in who receives political contributions even at the cost of reduced wealth. A humanitarian would not be able to stomach the idea of financing a republican war chest.

You also have to figure that since he chose to make dem financing transparent and repub financing in the dark, he inherently gave republican recipients full view of it. That’s only viable if he donates much more to republicans who would see that he donates mere peanuts to the opponent for optics.

10
submitted 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) by soloActivist@links.hackliberty.org to c/lemmy_support@lemmy.ml

After submitting an HTML sample in this post, #Lemmy gutted the content silently and destructively without telling me. The original text is totally lost and not recoverable. I only noticed because more than half the code was discarded.

This is terrible. It’s perhaps understandable that raw HTML might have security issues if it appears as-is, so of course the angle brackets should be automatically encoded as literals by the submission processing modules. The status quo is obviously a #LemmyBug because authors are not even warned about the destruction and given a chance to preserve their work. It just gets trashed.

[-] soloActivist@links.hackliberty.org 3 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago)

I think this is a regression. IIRC, there was a time when a removal only removed it from the timeline. You could still reach it via the modlog. IIRC. But those days are gone. It’s a shame because it’s important for the community to be able to evaluate the mod’s decision making.

I’ve even seen cases where an over-zealous mod gets embarrassed by the mod log and purges the mod log itself to remove traces of the censorship itself. I suppose that’s only possible if the mod is also an admin.

[-] soloActivist@links.hackliberty.org 4 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago)

There are bug reports and then there is user support. There’s some confusion because I filed a bug report in a user support community (because there is no bug reporting community).

Indeed the user support solution is to either request that the admin to change the slur filter config, or change instances. But the purpose of the thread was to report a bug in an in-band way (without interacting with a Microsoft asset [#deleteGithub]).

[-] soloActivist@links.hackliberty.org 9 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago)

I can see your point in many situations but when I say I am the one b*tching (myself… in the 1st person), in this context I am not saying I am acting badly myself. So the “women are bad” narrative doesn’t follow. In this case the word merely serves as a more expressive complaint.

If someone were to talk about someone else b*tching, it might well be what you’re saying, as they are complaining about someone else complaining & maybe they oppose that other person complaining or their aggressive style thereof.

Do you know what I should look for? Is it the version number? I recall Lemmy was forked to Lenny, but not sure how to recognize Lenny instances.

(btw, fwiw, I wouldn’t use sh.itjust.works because that’s even more nannied [by Cloudflare]).

[-] soloActivist@links.hackliberty.org 4 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago)

but it is still considered misogynistic

Men and women both use that word and when a woman uses it, it’s not misogyny because it’s directed at a specific woman (not a demonstration of hatred of women generally). It usage has murky origins but it can’t be assumed that the author is even conscious of that. The bot is making a blunt blanket decision that it can’t, and it assumes the worst of people.

The other two bugs I mention are bugs regardless of how justified or true the positive detection is.

[-] soloActivist@links.hackliberty.org 5 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago)

The travel insurance sounds more plausible than the anti-fraud measure. I had not considered that. Although the question is how is that info sharing is arranged considering airline would not inherently care about my travel insurance or have a duty to inform my insurer.

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soloActivist

joined 10 months ago