evenwicht
I used the proprietary apps for public transport back in my pre-Google boycott days and indeed they were quite useful for last minute changes on unfamiliar routes. Then public transport started blocking Tor which broke their app. But I eventually realised public transport is not the way forward anyway.
I switched to a bicycle (more independance and autonomy, better for the environment, better for health [not just exercise but less viral exposure], much more privacy, and cheaper). So if your travel is in cycling range or you can make it so, it makes more sense to ditch public transport entirely.
Public transport is getting increasingly more privacy hostile. More and more networks refusing cash payments, transitions to SMS tickets, more surveillance & facial recognition, more tracking, and despite all that privacy compromise in the end you are still less safe than cycling due to viruses and the unavoidable possibility of attacks (though that’s city-dependant to some extent… some cities are rough cycling).
I figured the power consumption of multiple parallel decodings would increase but it would be negligable if limited to occur during channel browsing. If you settle on a signal for 2 min, it could revert to 1 channel.
A more crude improvement would be trivial: simply continue playing the previous buffer during the 3 second gap, but update the display instantly to show the user that their command was received and acted on. The 3 second gap could also be a fade-out to give an audible signal that the channel change command is in motion. The linux app “Clementine” does some of this. When you click the stop button, it does not stop the music instantly but does a fade out.
DJs sometimes have to switch to something else quickly with no time to beat match. It’s not a good situation but their method of choice seems to be a rapid cross-fade, as opposed to a sharp and sudden discrete switch. That slight smoothness helps. With a small buffer the two channels could even slow one channel and speed up the other to do an automatic beat match and cross-fade a bit more smoothly. I would not be surprised if there were some FOSS libs that already provide this sort of thing.
(edit) I should note as well that there is one station that has a very low level so you have to double the volume to match any other station. A device that fades during transitions could normalize the level differences without the user even knowing the differences are there.
It’s not a binary statement. it’s a measure of proportions. So my statement was factually correct. Cloudflared banks are quite rare in Western Europe, for example. I actually cannot think of any off the top of my head. Step into the US, and credit unions are mostly pawned by Cloudflare. It’s a shit show. Hard to find non-Cloudflared CUs, which is an artifact of shoestring-budget funding.
I heard someone talking about a European bank that was considering using Cloudflare and it was met with protest. The bank backed off the idea. In the US people don’t give a shit… they don’t even notice. There’s a bit more blind trust for big corps.
I asked them in writing. It will be interesting to see if they comply.
To be clear, the purpose of the post is to understand the law (the forum being !law_us) because I want to fix this problem for everyone not just myself. I believe these digital rights abuses are so rampant because so few people step up to the plate to fix the problem for everyone. Most people just pragmatically fix the problem for themselves and move on. I want to understand the law to get an idea of the legal actionablity so that I can work out whether I have a pathway to force the CU to make their workflow with all customers legally compliant – which would be a process I can recycle with other similar data abusers (other banks).
I blame Taylor Swift, telling people to “shake, shake, shake it off…” instead of fighting back.
When I visit the opt-out website and it simply prints on the screen “403 Forbidden”. No reason given¹. No recourse given. That is not giving opportunity. When they conceal the URL from some demographics of people, that is also withholding an opportunity to opt-out.
Let’s suppose the opt-out procedure were completely disclosed and fully transparent. Suppose they sent a properly formed email that reveals the opt-out procedure to everyone (inluding those with text-based MUAs). If they were to outright state something like “you must use our preferred network (clearnet, not Tor, not VPN, not CGNAT), you must share your personal IP address with a 3rd party with no expectation of privacy, and you must solve a series of CAPTCHA tests after traversing our cookie wall.” That would still be giving exclusive opportunity. IOW, not everyone has opportunity, just those who are both willing and able to dance for them. When strings are attached to the opt-out, that “opportunity” is conditional. I believe the law would have to specifically state that conditional opportunity is permissable. Otherwise the only valid interpretation of law (IIUC) is that the opportunity be unconditional. Hence my question.
If you believe arbitrarily conditional opportunity is lawful, what’s your limit? What if the procedure requires driving to a remote location, crossing a river with crockodiles, and running through an area with snakes and scorpions in order to reach a form (written in a blend of Mandarin and Apache) that you must fill out requesting an opt-out? Would you still regard that as giving opportunity?
¹ When I say that they are blocking people who are on the Tor network, that is merely my guess. A “403 Forbidden” can manifest for many reasons and in this case the site does not state why a 403 was pushed. But regardless of their undisclosed reason, when they lock someone out of their gate, it is of course denying opportunity to opt out.
Of course banking is practically impossible without a phone.
I’m a bit disgusted by the state of affairs that has inspired your comment. But I notice you say “phone” and not “smartphone”.
IMO, just about all banks require being reachable at a phone number (VOIP or mobile). Some banks have taken the extra shitty step of obligating customers to have a mobile phone number provably registered in their name which is then used for SMS 2fa verifications. Some even nastier banks have taken the abusive step of closing down their website and forcing customers to always have an up-to-date smartphone running their closed-source phone app which is exclusively available from Google or Apple.
All banks are shitty but at least today we still have the ability to reject the worst of the worst and go without a smartphone, AFAICT. Though this would vary from one country to another.
I struggle to agree in the strict sense of need. But it’s a boiling frog scenario.
Public transport managers have mostly quit offering printed schedules and maps. IMO that’s borderline a violation of human rights (all people are entitled to equal access to public services, and I would consider providing info about public transport to be an indispensible part of that public service). Although in terms of smartphones, you can typically use a PC instead. And inside the stations you often have schedules and maps on the walls. But the bus infrastructure is dicier.
In Germany there are ticket sales with online exclusive pricing. Offline people must pay more for the same trip, or even lose access to some tickets entirely. Although a PC may still be an option there.
You’re really asking “how much convenience do you need?” Some people are entirely enslaved to what Tim Wu describes as the Tyranny of Convenience.
I am not one of those people. I have ditched Google Playstore which greatly limits what I can do with the phone (and I’m fine with that – fuck suppliers demanding that I patronise Google). And since I am always around a PC I only use a smartphone for:
- offline navigation with OSMand (hard to give up)
- notes (could give that up easily)
- camera – to take a pic of store hours posted on a door, occasional QR codes, to capture evidence when a store advertises a different price than they charge at the register, and because there are actually hardware stores that have no posted prices and you need to give the cashier the item number of (e.g.) a pipe fitting so they can ring it up. Also to capture rejection messages from ATM screens because ATMs are not designed well enough to print faults with the receipt printer.
- some (stupidly) high-tech restaurants have no paper menu. Although I prefer to ask staff to borrow their phone to highlight to them the foolishness of their operation. My hardened defensive phone does not even work with most websites and i need to do this anyway.
