Indeed, and it’s useful to be aware of that.. things like pinger numbers. But I certainly would not cut the bank any slack for their oppressive mandate that excludes people without a mobile phone.

It’s not about the last €20¹. It’s about the last €18.45. How do you get €18.45 from an ATM?

Well, shit, that could be an answer too.. cashless banks could have a special kind of ATM that has no denomination limitations. Even my local grocer has a cash machine capable of dispensing all small denominations.

So there are several reasonable things they /could/ be doing, but there is no pressure on them to be competent.

¹ I will edit my post to make this more clear.

(edit) it just occurred to me this is a human rights violation. A very minor one, but against international law nonetheless. You cannot deprive someone of their property. UDHR Art.17:

1. Everyone has the right to own property alone as well as in association with others.
2. No one shall be arbitrarily deprived of his property.

What do you say? Am I too lazy or it is unpractical to stay away from big tech?

Laziness is what the surveillance advertisers are exploiting. It is everyone’s duty to resist the tyranny of convenience that Tim Wu articulates in a famous essay.

After a year I'm starting to think that maybe my data is not worth the hassle just to keep big tech out of my digital life.. I guess Big Brother wins

Think of it as boycotting. Exposure of your personal data may not be worth the effort of protecting it, but the big picture is that privacy seekers are not just looking for confidentiality. Privacy is about power and agency. You are exercising your right to boycott a harmful entity. Boycotts are no longer simply a matter of not handing money over, because data is worth money. So boycotting now entails not handing your data over. Giving Google your data feeds Google’s profits.

So you are really asking, “should I give up the boycott”? The answer is no, because the boycott is not just a duty to yourself; it’s a duty everyone benefits from (except Google).

ChatGPT will probably remember it was you who asked and doxx you in retaliation when it discovers you’ve plagerized chatGPT.

Another thought is to translate it into Scottish. But then again, you probably still want to be understood.

Changing dialect may be too small of a change. But if you could say write this like 1-2 generations younger/older using high school slang of the time you might get a useful difference.

From the article:

"was meant for helping people access pages when way back, you often couldn't depend on a page loading. These days, things have greatly improved. So, it was decided to retire it." (emphasis added)

Bullshit! The web gets increasingly enshitified and content is less accessible every day.

For now, you can still build your own cache links even without the button, just by going to "https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:" plus a website URL, or by typing "cache:" plus a URL into Google Search.

You can also use 12ft.io.

Cached links were great if the website was down or quickly changed, but they also gave some insight over the years about how the "Google Bot" web crawler views the web. … A lot of Google Bot details are shrouded in secrecy to hide from SEO spammers, but you could learn a lot by investigating what cached pages look like.

Okay, so there’s a more plausible theory about the real reason for this move. Google may be trying to increase the secrecy of how its crawler functions.

The pages aren't necessarily rendered like how you would expect.

More importantly, they don’t render the way authors expect. And that’s a fucking good thing! It’s how caching helps give us some escape from enshification. From the 12ft.io faq:

“Prepend 12ft.io/ to the URL webpage, and we'll try our best to remove the popups, ads, and other visual distractions.”

It also circumvents #paywalls. No doubt there must be legal pressure on Google from angry website owners who want to force their content to come with garbage.

The death of cached sites will mean the Internet Archive has a larger burden of archiving and tracking changes on the world's webpages.

The possibly good news is that Google’s role shrinks a bit. Any Google shrinkage is a good outcome overall. But there is a concerning relationship between archive.org and Cloudflare. I depend heavily on archive.org largely because Cloudflare has broken ~25% of the web. The day #InternetArchive becomes Cloudflared itself, we’re fucked.

We need several non-profits to archive the web in parallel redundancy with archive.org.

Normal users don't have these issues.

That’s not true. Cloudflare marginalizes both normal users and street-wise users. In particular:

• users whose ISP uses CGNAT to distribute a limited range of IPv4 addresses (this generally impacts poor people in impoverished regions)
• the Tor community
• VPN users
• users of public libraries, and generally networks where IP addresses are shared
• privacy enthusiasts who will not disclose ~25% of their web traffic to one single corporation in a country without privacy safeguards
• blind people who disable images in their browsers (which triggers false positives for robots, as scripts are generally not interested in images either)
• the permacomputing community and people on limited internet connections, who also disable browser images to reduce bandwidth which makes them appear as bots
• people who actually run bots – Cloudflare is outspokenly anti-robot and treats beneficial bots the same as malicious bots
• …

There are likely more oppressed groups beyond that because there is no transparency with Cloudflare.

It’s more about ethics than security. I’m an ethical consumer, which means I will not patronize unethical companies. Feeding data to Google is as good as feeding money to Google. Google is part of the fossil fuel industry (they are in partnership with Totaal oil and use AI to help Totaal find places to drill for oil). My objection to Google collecting data on me is less about cyberattack and more about not supporting a harmful force in the world.

I’m also ethically opposed closed-source software because I think it misplaces power. The worst kind of misplacement of power is to give it to tech giants who abuse their power and use it against consumers.

I’m also ethically opposed to software designs that make phones disposable and force the disposal of perfectly good hardware. I’ll buy a smartphone after that problem is fixed. #RightToRepair is still insufficient. There needs to be a rule that the moment a phone maker decides to stop supporting a device, they must do whatever necessary to ensure the platform (kernel + drivers + gui) are FOSS at that point of dropped support. I’ll wait for it. I can hold out as long as needed.

W.r.t. paranoia, street wise people and those with some infosec background always seem “paranoid” to normal people. And to us, normal people are cavalier because they needlessly share information without applying the rule of least privilege. Privilege should only be granted on an as-needed basis and that includes access to information. It’s unreasonable for banks to snoop on people arbitrarily without a warrant. It’s not just that the banks abuse the info, but the overcollection exposes everyone to exfiltration by criminals. That’s not fiction - it has happened. (Captial One via Amazon contractor, Equifax, several other banks including a bank breach I recently detected but have not reported yet). I have already been the victim of multiple data breaches even with some diligence to not be completely reckless.

Trusting banks with sensitive info is the least of the problems I describe & possibly not a show-stopper in itself. But taking everything together I remain baffled at the zombie masses endorsing & supporting all of it. A basic information security class should perhaps become part of the mandatory secondary school cirriculums at this point.

Note as well a German company recently brought back the sleeper carriages. When the travel happens overnight while I’m asleep, I tend not to care how long it takes.

Nothing is better than being able to board the train with free luggage allowance and without all the TSA lines, harassment, confiscations, etc. No wasting of my awake time (unlike air travel). Then waking up at the destination is effectively like zero time wasted.

meh, #fuckCars.. let them burn. I’d rather see solar covered cycling paths keeping cyclists dry. And solar covered bus/tram/train stop shelters, which could power the ETA display.

Good point, because we rely on what little competition there is to get reasonable pricing.

1. Wasteful cleaning: printers spray the ink to clean the heads. Some printers are coded to be extremely liberal in the ink that gets wasted in this manner. E.g. cleaning the heads daily whether you use it or not. So the excessive waste effectively means you pay more for what you actually get to use. Yes, it’s deliberate. It’s not like the mfr really wants you to have sparkling clean heads.

2. Expiry: some printers assume a cartridge will only last X long regardless of your actual consumption. Like the drugs industry, the expiry date is set to maximize profits. Cartridges self destruct or get rejected past expiry. They want you throwing out good product to buy more. I think the PR excuse they use is to say it serves as a way of detecting when the ink is out, however sloppy.

3. Consumption metering shenanigans: like (3) above, the printer falsely reports an empty cartridge. But in this case it emits a laser or some kind of IR beam through the cartridge and when the beam reaches the detector, the cartridge is regarded as depleted. They place this beam high enough that ink still remains below the beam. IIRC, Brother inkjets did this.. or maybe it was just their fax machines.

3.1 (sloppy math) Instead of detecting how much ink is in the cartridge, the printer keeps track of how much was dispensed. But IIRC the math doesn’t work out so it ends up overcounting the amount dispensed which yields another trick to falsely treating a non-empty cartridge as empty.

1. Anti-competition: some cartridges have chips in them which talk to the printer so the printer knows if the ink is approved (i.e. has the same brand as the printer). This suppresses competition to give monopolistic pricing.

4.1. (DMCA) ^ the chips were quickly hacked by competitors. So printer makers introduced encryption mechanisms, which were also defeated. IIRC, the printer makers abused (or attempted to abuse) the DMCA by claiming their tech safeguards were bypassed to violate their “intellectual property” rights. (I think)

4.2. (Disloyalty punishments) printers connect to the cloud to self-update their firmware. Some of these updates introduced firmware that logs whether non-OEM ink was used and printer self-destructs on a certain date when the logs report a disloyal customer. Funnily enough, the company who did this tried to argue that the move was to “protect” the printer from bad ink, as if they’re looking after the customer’s best interest.

I’m sure I’m missing some of the tricks.. that’s just off the top of my head.

HP has mastered these shenanigans the best. I think no ink is costlier than HP after you account for all the tricks & traps. I kind of see it as bad-on-bad. HP has been an evil company for a long time even if you disregard the printer industry. HP supports Israel’s gaza blockade and oppression of the Palestinians. Note as well HP has been caught sending customers data about what they print back to HP.

So people should be boycotting HP /anyway/.

When that happens, I register on whatever forum it was where someone said that just to say (necropost if needed) that I had the same question, searched it, and the search results brought me here where an asshole is saying to search it.