I have not been able to track down the Belgian open data law¹ but it seems in principle blocking both Tor users and archive.org from access to the address book of Chamber of Representatives would not be in line with the spirit of open data. They may not have the IT competency to serve Tor users but to treat archive.org like a malicious robot is to underachieve.

¹ I can only find an old archive of the goals of the open data policy (in French), but not the law:

http://web.archive.org/web/20160416034829/http://www.digitalbelgium.be/sites/default/files/content/FR\_strategisch\_dossier.pdf

The original link was from https://openknowledge.be/ which seems to be a stale website and an inactive project. It feels like open data got started in Belgium but then the ball was dropped.

(original post)

To reach the Belgian datasets of open data from Tor you must go through archive.org:

http://web.archive.org/web/20241003145143/https://data.gov.be

And because the website is interactive and also not completely archived, I ultimately could not even browse through to see what data there is beyond the first page of databases. Thus not entirely “open”.

But the Brussels datasets are open to all.

I could not find the data I was looking for. That is, I wanted to know how many complaints are sent to the various different SPF regulators as well as ombuds people -- and very specifically how many complaints are ignored. Some offices produce annual reports but I have never seen an annual report that exposes the count of ignored complaints.

Anyway, the question I have is what section of legal code covers open data in Belgium?

case 1: account closure

Cashless banks have no vault and no cash services apart from the ATMs. ATMs in Europe never handle denominations smaller than €20. This means that even when you are closing an account at a cashless bank, the most you can pull out is a multiple of €20 from your balance. The bank expects you to open an account somewhere else first and transfer the remainder to the other account. This is to keep people trapped in the banking system.

It seems to violate article 17 ¶2:

> 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.

This is not exactly up there with genocide and torture. It’s perhaps the smallest human rights infraction I can think of. But nonetheless, banks should be structured to comply with human rights no matter how trivial, no? It seems like even a cashless bank should (in effect) be required to keep some petty cash on-hand for account closures.

case 2: withdrawal limits

The same question applies for bigger cases. E.g. a bank (cashless or not) may have a daily withdrawal limit; weekly, and monthly too. Perhaps it is fair enough to have a fee or penalty for exceeding their limits, but if I understand correctly the bank has a human rights obligation to allow you to withdraw all your money. At the moment banks with limits simply refuse to execute withrawals that exceed their limits.

case 3: card refusal

ATMs and shops refuse people access to their money for countless arbitrary reasons.

• When a customer’s ID card copy on the bank’s files expires, some banks do not bother to inform the customer or request an updated copy. They just freeze the account. When money is denied, the customer magically presents themselves to the bank to find out why. Cutting off access to funds is the bank’s way of communicating.
• ATMs reject cards for undisclosed reasons. Sometimes a faulty AI bot falsely triggers and claims a transaction looks fraudulent. Sometimes ATMs are discriminating against people based on their origin (locally issued cards get a higher limit than foreign ones, but the ATM does not tell the customer what the limit is or why their transaction is denied).

The closed-source app is exclusively available in these places:

• Google Playstore
• Apple store
• Huawei store

The app will only run on quite recent phones. So anyone who does not keep their OS up to date (which implies periodically buying new hardware for the shitshow platforms people much choose between) are locked out of their account. Also:

• No walk-in service
• Over the counter service requires appointment and a fee for many staff-assisted operations
• No paper statements. No phone → no statements.

The app requires SMS 2fa, so non-phone or landphone users: don’t even think about trying to use an android emulator.

If you want to close your account to escape this shitshow, you have 2 options:

• In the app use the account closure feature, OR
• Send a shit load of sensitive information (ID/passport, utility bill, bank account numbers to close, account numbers of your new external account to transfer the money to, etc) via Google (gmail) from an IP address that Google accepts.

(edit) Worth mentioning an aspect of these cashless banks that should be embarrassing for them: when you close an account, they have no cash so they cannot pay you your balance. You can pull money from an ATM but obviously only in denominations of paper banknotes. So how do you get the rest out? They expect you to open an account elsewhere and transfer it. How silly is that? Maybe you don’t want another account, or maybe you’re moving to a completely different part of the world and the transfer cost will exceed what remains.

You can hack around this various ways, like dining out and paying an exact amount by card and the rest by cash. But really, banks should be embarrassed they cannot give you cash. They shouldn’t need a vault just to secure €20 or so in change.

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.

Both Lemmy and mbin have a shitty way of treating authors of content that is censored by a moderator.

Lemmy: if your post is removed from a community timeline, you still have the content. In fact, your logged-in profile looks no different, as if the message is still there. It’s quite similar to shadow banning. Slightly better though because if you pay attention or dig around, you can at least discover that you were censored. But shitty nonetheless that you get no notification of the censorship.

Mbin: if your post is removed, you are subjected to data loss. I just wrote a high effort post europe@feddit.org and it was censored for not being “news”. There is no rule that your post must be news, just a subtle mention in the topic of news. In fact they delete posts that are not news, despite not having a rule along those lines. So my article is lost due to this heavy-handed moderation style. Mbin authors are not deceived about the status of their post like on lemmy, but authors suffer from data loss. They do not get a copy of what they wrote so they cannot recover and post it elsewhere.

It’s really disgusting that a moderator’s trigger happy delete button has data loss for someone else as a consequence. I probably spent 30 minutes writing the post only to have that effort thrown away by a couple clicks. Data loss is obviously a significant software defect.

The readme talks about docker. I’m not a docker user. I did a git clone when I was on a decent connection. ATM I’m not on a decent connection. The releases page lacks file sizes. And MS Github conceals the size: curl -LI 'https://github.com/Xyphyn/photon/archive/refs/tags/v1.31.2-fix.1.tar.gz' | grep -i 'content-length' output: > content-length: 0

So instead of fetching the tarball of unknown size, I need to know how to build either the app or the tarball from the cloned repo. Is that documented anywhere?

I often save websites to my local drive when collecting evidence that might later need to be presented in court. But of course there problems with that because I could trivially make alterations at will. And some websites give me different treatment based on my IP address. So I got in the habit of using web.archive.org/save/$targetsite to get a third party snapshot. That’s no longer working. It seems archive.org has cut off that service due to popular demand, which apparently outstrips their resources.

Are there more reliable alternatives? I’m aware of archive.ph but that’s a non-starter (Cloudflare).

In the 1990s there was a service that would email you a webpage. Would love to an out-of-band mechanism like that since email has come to carry some legal weight and meets standards of evidence in some countries (strangely enough).

I often supply documents as evidence to regulators (e.g. GDPR regulators). A document is normally in A4 format and I digitally superimpose that onto an A4 page. Thus generally without shrinking or expanding.

I label it by printing “exhibit A”, “bewijsstuk A”, or “pièce A” in the topmost rightmost corner at a 45° angle and give a small margin to avoid unprintable areas. I do that on every single page. If it would overlap something, I shift it down to avoid overlap. It seems to do the job well but a regulator once requested that I resubmit the evidence without my markups.

So apparently they don’t like my style. Maybe they wonder if I could be making more material alterations. What is the normal convention in the legal industry? These evidence submissions are not for a court process but they always have potential to end up in court in the future.

I have some ideas:

• (only for paper submissions) I could stick a Post-It note to every document (every page?) and hand-write evidence labels. This would be inconvenient for them to scan. If they remove the notes to feed into a scanner, then the digital version is lossy and so they cannot dispense of the paper version. Or they must be diligent with entering the label into the file’s metadata or filename.
• (only for electronic submissions) I could make the evidence label a PDF annotation, so when viewing the doc and printing it the user can decide whether to show/print annotations. This seems useful superficially but it’s problematic because the PDF tools poorly adhere to the standard to w.r.t. annotations. Many tools do not handle annotations well. A recipient’s app does not necessarily give them control over whether annotations appear, and how they appear (different fonts chosen by different tools and if a tool does not have the source font it may simply ignore the annotation). The 45° angle that sets it apart and makes it pop-out better is apparently impossible with PDF annotations. And with little control over the font it might look good in one viewer but overlap in another.
• (versatile for both kinds of submissions) I could shrink the doc to ~90% of the original size, put a frame around it, and push it low on the page to leave space at the top for metadata like evidence labels. The the label is obviously not altering the original.
• (versatile for both kinds of submissions) I could add a cover page to each doc with the sole purpose of writing “exhibit A”. Seems good for digital submissions but I really don’t like the idea of bulking out my paper submissions. It would add €1 to the cost for every ten docs.
• (versatile for both kinds of submissions) Perhaps I could get away with rotating “exhibit A” 90° and finely printing it along the edge of the margin. This could even be combined with bullet 3 and maybe with less scaling (~95%).

Any other ideas?

I would like to understand this paragraph:

> § 2. Lorsque (un opérateur d'un [¹ réseau public de communications électroniques]¹) a l'intention d'établir des câbles, lignes aériennes et équipements connexes, de les enlever ou d'y exécuter des travaux, elle tend à rechercher un accord quant à l'endroit et la méthode d'exécution des travaux, avec la personne dont la propriété sert d'appui, est franchie ou traversée.

Argos Translate yields:

> § 2. When (an operator of a [¹ public electronic communications network]¹) intends to establish cables, airlines and related equipment, to remove or perform work therein, it tends to seek an agreement on the location and method of carrying out work, with the person whose property serves as a support, is crossed or crossed.

I think tends is a false friend here because it seems unlikely in this context. A commercial machine translation yields:

> § 2. When (an operator of a [¹ public electronic communications network]¹) intends to establish, remove or carry out work on cables, overhead lines and related equipment, it shall seek agreement as to the location and method of carrying out the work with the person whose property is used as support, is crossed or is being traversed.

Sounds more accurate. I’m disappointed that there seems to be no requirement that the telecom company obtain consent from property owners. Is that correct? The telecom operator does not need consent on whether to use someone’s private property, only consent on how they deploy the cables?

The FOSS app Argos Translate enables people to locally translate their documents without depending on an external service and then hoping their content is not snooped on (while simultaneously hoping to get translation service for free). Argos does okay with quite popular language pairs but it’s really not up to a good standard of quality overall.

The machine learning input into Argos known as “models” are trained on samples of (hopefully manual) translations. The models require huge amounts of data. Apparently the effort to gather large volumes of input leads to grabbing poor quality samples, which ultimately leads to bad translations. To worsen matters, you have a sparse scatter of different projects making their own models. So the effort is decentralised in a detrimental way. End users are then left with having to experiment with different models.

Shouldn’t Académie Française (the French language protection org) have some interest in the public having access to resources that give high-quality translations into French?

Consider that Académie Française members each spend €230k on clothes (yes, that “k” after the number is correct), surely they have money sloshing around to promote French. If playing dress-up is worth €9.2 million (€230k × 40 members), just imagine how much money they must have for their mission of supporting the French language.

This question is inspired by Belgian law but there is no Belgian law forum and I think it’s likely that Netherlands would have the same problem. So answers w.r.t. Dutch law would be interesting enough.

It’s increasingly common for law to mandate that people give the government their email address in various situations. If someone has no email address, I have to wonder how can they be expected to comply with the law? When the law requires disclosure of information that does not exist, is it implied that we must take necessary steps to make that information come into existence in order to disclose it? Is it implied by that law that we must enter the private marketplace and subscribe to email service, then periodically check our email?

I happen to have email addresses but I refuse to disclose them to users of Micosoft Outlook or Google. That includes government offices because the gov uses MS Outlook and simultaneously does not use PGP. Since my workflow of non-disclosure to MS & Google has ensured that email has the tiniest of roles in my life, it would not be a big step for me to nix email altogether and end my subscriptions. But I need to know if it’s even legal for me to do so.

French law often adds a “bis” (e.g. “Article 29bis”) if more law is added later and for whatever reason they don’t just append it to Article 29.

It’s ugly in text, but I’m writing a document in LaTeX so I have freedom and control to do something better. At the same time, I don’t want to invent something that alienates readers. I just want to know from people who have read a lot of well typeset French what style is common. I think italicizing the “bis” is common. But what about making it a subscript or superscript? What about putting a ½ space between the bis and the number?