ciferecaNinjo

joined 2 years ago
[–] ciferecaNinjo@fedia.io 1 points 3 days ago

Thanks. I wonder how long that statement has been made. In the past I was never confident in the wording from the national bank as far as expiry of banknotes. But the page you link seems solid enough. Saving an archived version here as an extra measure against any future shenanigans:

https://web.archive.org/web/20250521052910/https://www.bankofengland.co.uk/banknotes/exchanging-old-banknotes

(and because bankofengland.co.uk is not an open access website)

 

It’s disturbing to hear the UK is /again/ changing the banknotes (according to BBC WS). Does this in any way shorten any deadline to trade-in the previous notes? Will it be possible to trade in notes that are 2 generations old?

I have a couple thousand GBP banknotes. These are the previous style and no longer legal tender. I would get burnt if I tried to exchange them for my local currency because the exchange service cannot sell them (they must send them to England). I believe I can still travel to the UK and exchange them fairly legal tender at post offices, correct?

 

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 was startled to find this gem in EU directive 2019/1024 Art.9 ¶1:

Where possible, Member States shall facilitate the cross-linguistic search for documents, in particular by enabling metadata aggregation at Union level.

Even if you neglect the “cross-linguistic” specification, merely making public documents searchable is a huge leap of progress in the EU. And I think all member states are currently breaking that law for the most part, as we are generally forced to rely on private sector ad surveillance garbage from Google and Bing to find most public sector docs.

Sure there are a few scattered search tools for some very specific collections of documents. But most public documents are not at all indexed in any publicly administered search tool.

Of course the “cross-linguistic” specification is quite interesting because document translations are sometimes performed but the result is often not shared and even more often not searchable. E.g., for some reason a university or institution in Belgium (possibly public sector) went to the effort of creating a good English version of a big piece of the Belgian Economic Code. I was lucky to stumble into it out in the wild. Per the directive (which is hopefully transposed into national law), someone who searches for that section of Belgian economic code should get a reference to the unofficial English version along with the French and Dutch versions. But they certainly do not because the national legal statutes search site is hard-coded for just French and Dutch.

This touches on a recent question I asked. If the EU were to obtain an English version of transposed directives, in principle they should be furnishing that to the public. There’s one snag here though: the open data directive seems to exclude the EU itself from Art.9.

 

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?

[–] ciferecaNinjo@fedia.io 2 points 1 month ago

I don't know the Belgian case, but I think it's the same thing in many member states; the publishing of laws online is done by private for-profit companies, and comes with weird restrictions.

Belgium has an open data law obligating the state to make available to the public generally all information that the state has, with some reasonable restrictions w.r.t private info about individuals. Legal statutes themselves would obviously have to be openly accessible under that law. That law was even used to force publication of train routes and schedules. I’ve not read the law but I guess it’s likely sloppy about what constitutes “open”, because the state’s own website is access restricted (e.g. Tor IPs are blocked).

[–] ciferecaNinjo@fedia.io -2 points 1 month ago

If a resource blocks certain IP addresses, that is not open access. It is access restricted. It is a deliberate blockade against a demographic of people.

“Open data” has different meanings in different bodies of law, so your comment is meaningless without context. But in any case, we can call shenanigans whenever an “open data” legal definition fails to thwart access restrictions in an Emporer wears no clothes type of attempt.

IOW, you cannot claim that an access restriction ceases to exist on some emotional plea that you believe the access restriction is just, appropriate, or necessary. An access restriction is an access restriction. “Open” implies open to all people, not some select demographics.

[–] ciferecaNinjo@fedia.io 2 points 1 month ago

Yes I understood that but it is not correct. We choose to use Tor for privacy, not to lose access to resources. There is no exclusion on the Tor side of this.

[–] ciferecaNinjo@fedia.io 1 points 1 month ago (4 children)

You don’t know how Tor works. The Tor community has exit nodes on the clearnet which give them inclusion. When a tor user is blocked, the exclusion is done by the resource, not from the Tor side. The tor network in no way excludes people from accessing legal publications.

[–] ciferecaNinjo@fedia.io 1 points 1 month ago (2 children)

I mentioned that, along with the problem of that. As well as the problem of searching using private sector tools.

We should not be pushed to use private search engines like Google, Bing, or their syndicates to find public resources. Public administrations have an “open data” obligation to some extent. Certainly the EU knows where the member state’s implementations are.

[–] ciferecaNinjo@fedia.io 1 points 1 month ago (10 children)

This is generally saying if you are being discriminated against, change whatever your demographic is that is subject to discrimination. Putting oneself inside the included group does nothing to remedy the fact that there is an excluded group of people.

It’s also wrong to assume everyone has clearnet access. At this very moment I am using a machine that does not have clearnet access.

[–] ciferecaNinjo@fedia.io 1 points 1 month ago

What an anti-feature. Thanks for pointing that out! Should be corrected now.

 

Take the anti-spam directive, for example:

https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/?uri=CELEX%3A32002L0058&qid=1747912567106

The website gives us the directive but makes no references to the member state’s implementations of that. It seems a bit sloppy that visitors have to try manually searching using some private-sector surveillance advertising search tool to find a member state’s version. In Belgium it’s especially a mess because many of the official websites that “publish” laws are access restricted (e.g. Tor users often denied access). Only some segments of the public can reach some websites. We have Moniteur Belge but that involves digging a law out of a large PDF that globs together many unrelated laws and publications.

According to the EC website, the EC has a duty to verify whether the member state’s version was implemented timely and correctly. Is that done in English, or does the EU have native speakers of all languages on staff doing the verification?

I ask because if there is a translation step, then the EU would perhaps have a good quality English translation of member states laws


which I would like access to. To date, I do machine translations which is tedious. And if the source language is Dutch, the translation tends to be quite poor.

Update: perhaps the biggest shit show is this site:

https://www.stradalex.com/

Visiting from a tor exit node with uMatrix installed, that site is in some kind of endless loop. No idea what kind of shitty JavaScript causes this, but it reloads itself non-stop and never renders. Opening the uMatrix UI shows 3rd party js rows popping up and disappearing faster than you can click to give perms. These people should not be allowed to do web service for legal information.

update 2

This page gives some general links to member state’s law pubs, but you are still left with having to dig around for the implementation that corresponds to the EU directive -- if you can get access.

update 3

Found something useful.. this page is openly accessible and has a “National Transposition” link. From there we can do an /advanced search/ and limit the collection to national transposition and search on 32002L0058, for example.

Then it finds no results, which seems a bit broken. But if I simply do a quick search on 32002L0058 then use the “national transposition” link on the left bar, that seems to work. But then in this test case I followed it all the way to a page that said “ Text is not available.”

In fact, “Text is not available” is what I got on 3 of 3 samples. So it’s a crapshoot. Hopefully the EC folks who verify national implementations are not relying on this same mechanism.

 

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.

 

Many member states a daft when it comes to GDPR enforcement. But there are an exceptional few member states that have a Data Protection Authority that actually does their job. E.g., in principle, I might want to file all Article 77 complaints in Norway. Of course, without living there and having no transaction there, it’s outside of the jurisdiction. OTOH, what happens when a company like Microsoft or Google abuses your data and violates the GDPR? I think MS has headquarters in multiple countries: France, Finland, Spain, Norway, Germany, etc. If I have zero confidence in the DPA for the country I am in, can it be effective to direct the GDPR to a another country if MS has a headquarters there? Is there a heirchy of headquarters whereby an ultimate top level headquarters where a corporation is most relevant?

 

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.

[–] ciferecaNinjo@fedia.io 2 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Well, it wouldn’t require lying but certainly it seems tricky. You can deregister before you leave the country and neglect to provide an address for where you are going -- because you wouldn’t necessarily know in advance and you cannot provide information that does not exist. So they clear your address from your id card which then just has an empty address.

Correct me if I’m wrong, but you don’t have a specific legal obligation to state where you live abroad.

Though one snag is that you have a legal obligation to vote in elections and you must vote in the nearest embassy, which requires giving an address to get on the voting roster. However, voting is not strictly enforced. If you fail to vote there is a small fine but I don’t think they actually hit unregistered people abroad with that. If you do not vote in 3 consecutive elections, then you could lose your voting rights for a few years, I think.

I do not believe the bank gets a notification that you have deregistered. But at some point your ID card on the bank’s files will expire and they will expect an updated copy and freeze your account until they receive it.

If you walk into an embassy to “renew” your passport, do they demand an address? I would think you would pick up your passport at the embassy a week later. Or do they mail it?

Anyway, I can understand giving in to surveillance and disclosing US ties, but OTOH it seems like a nightmare to do what’s expected as well.. to be tagged as a toxic US person. It’s a mess either way. Perhaps the wisest move is to “move” to Canada, stay there a couple months, setup residency, then move to the US and just neglect to mention it. Get mail forwarding from Canada.

 

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.

[–] ciferecaNinjo@fedia.io 1 points 2 months ago (3 children)

Half their internet banking site is off-limits to me

Mind elaborating? Did they restrict your account specifically, or does the website simply treat logins from the US differently? I’m surprised you wouldn’t retain full cloud access so long as your account exists under the terms you signed up for.

I don’t understand why you would tell your Belgian bank that you left Belgium, particularly when your new residence is the US which flags you as a toxic asset that requires special handling. That could only work against you. Surely you would be better off not telling them you moved and use a VPN to Belgium to access your acct.

[–] ciferecaNinjo@fedia.io 1 points 2 months ago

Bingo. This is true even across EU borders. Rabobank in Netherlands does not exchange info with Rabobank in Belgium, IIUC. (but note I think Rabobank quit doing business in Belgium eventually anyway)

[–] ciferecaNinjo@fedia.io 1 points 3 months ago

Do you think it's politicians' job to provide technology education?

Of course. Public education comes from the public sector. We should be electing politicians with administrations who are smarter than the general public. Any tech education that comes of Twitter abandonment is welcome.

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