A smart attack would be coupled with a clear message. Have the malware clobber them with anti-evil messages and just like that you have a sound free speech defense.

Consider florida, where if you are caught with shrooms that are wet, freshly picked, they cannot convict you for carrying contraband because you do not necessarily know what you picked.

Laws are often based on intent. In some cases, penalties vary depending on intent. It would be an unacceptably brutally harsh law to judge someone under a presumption of harmful intent for something they might have no awareness of.

QR codes can have icons on them. Certainly if I created such a t-shirt, I would put some cool looking icon in the center of it. Someone being dragged through the system might argue “i did not know that qr code was real… i just liked the cat in the middle of it”.

“Malice” implies intent. Accidents are not malicious. Neglect in the worst case. So certainly any charges could not be based on malice.

Not sure but I think QR codes that hold wi-fi creds would more likely be automatically processed by phones. Seems like an adequate attack surface. Maybe dodgy creds could overflow or do some kind of DB attack. Or even legit creds could lead someone to connect to a malicious hot-spot captive portal that the attacker carries.

Thanks for the tip. It seems to work but I have to say it’s a rough UX because the UI is really meant for a graphical browser. I could not even paste my UID and PW in to login.

For the same reason, I suppose you would love text adventure games like Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, where you have to come up with your action, as opposed to getting visual aids which come like a loaded question, steering you and somewhat robbing you of control.

indeed… #NeonModemOverdrive failed for me too.

So, how did you do post to lemmy.ml? Did you use cURL? If so, I would love to see the sample code.

It is exactly that.

There are ~95 pages of rights and obligations covered in EU Directive 2015/2366, as well as EC Regulation 593/2008. Have you read them, or anything else to substantiate your claim?

You’re trying to solve the wrong problem.

There is no such thing as a “wrong problem”.

You do you. This thread is not about your problems. Start your own thread if you want a different problem worked. In this thread, you can either help solve the problem at hand, or fuck off.

There was a story about a German guy insisting on paying his radio licensing fees in cash. He setup an escrow account and paid his invoices into that, so that the state could not claim he was just using cash refusal as an excuse not to pay. I don’t think I ever heard what came of the legal case.

I heard postbank was eliminated in Germany but post office banking is still an option in other countries. I doubt any post office banks stand on their own. The one I’m aware of is just a proxy for another crappy bank.

Many elderly people can’t use a smartphone so smartphone only options definitely sound like a no go.

It’s somewhat convenient that tech illiterates are in the same boat with the streetwise (who are tech saavy enough to distrust commercial tech that’s being pushed down our throats). But there are efforts to divide us. Elderly folks are getting social helpers with tech, which will shrink those resisting enshitification of everything to a population that’s easier to marginalise. I also don’t suppose it will be long before the tech illiterate elderly are no longer with us anyway.

at least in Germany companies and state are not anymore required to accept cash for invoices

Yikes. That’s a shame. There is the EC Recommendation of 22 March 2010 (2010/191/EU) which wisely states:

A debtor can discharge himself from a payment obligation by tendering euro banknotes and coins to the creditor.

I am surprised Germany has gone against that. I thought cash was loved by Germans.

Glad to hear you’re standing up for yourself, and others. And glad to hear an analog option is still possible. That’s by far the most important option. If you can do everything offline, then you can escape whatever garbage tech they try to push. Essential services like banking and utilities should always have an offline analog option.

The thesis is: what are our rights? Knowing your rights is a good idea /before/ you go off and try to solve a problem.

It may very well be that we have no useful rights and the choices are: be bullied, or find a different bully. But let’s not get ahead of ourselves. Other banks are garbage too, so it may be better to improve the bank you have (if possible through legal actions and exercising your rights) then to make it someone else’s problem.

you should probably just keep the money in cash

Of course. Cash would solve the problem. But creditors are refusing that now and also refusing cards at the same time. Otherwise the bank card could get cash out of the ATM and pay the creditors.

No, not anymore. They became app exclusive. Customers must become an Apple or Google patron, or just use the bank card. They also closed their shop doors and terminated their phone number. If you call them on their unpublished phone number, they insist: “email us” and they refuse to give any service over the phone. And their email goes through gmail (and no PGP key given). Paper letters are ignored. They also refuse manual transfers. The app is the sole means for transfers.

The EU has that covered as REGULATION (EU) No 260/2012 imposes 2FA.

But for me personally, I do not trust closed-source apps from surveillance advertisers running on a Google or Apple proprietary platform, no matter how well they do the 2FA. Even if the endpoint were impenetrable, I do not trust the bank itself not to snoop – in part because I do not trust the GDPR, which is scantly enforced and regularly disregarded to a laughable extent. And from the ecocide PoV, I refuse to throw away good hardware and support designed obsolescence. They can pry my old phone from my cold dead hands.

Thanks for the feedback. A couple other people also say they have no problem.

I am trapped on a 3-year old version. I could upgrade from 4.0.7 to 4.0.9, but that’s as far as I can go because 4.1.9 abandons anyone running AOS older than 6.0. So I wonder if they recently changed the map server in a way that breaks old versions.

I am also on Tor. But also tried a VPN. I doubt they would block Tor and VPNs and then also introduce blocks on both at the same time. Thought I should mention it in the remote off chance that it matters.

This is the decode function if anyone is interested:

decoded_reference()
{
    local yr_msd=${1:0:1}
    local yr_lsd=${1:1:1}
    local seq_enc_msd=${1:3:1}
    local seq_enc_lsd=${1:4:1}
    local seq_msd=${lookup_table_reverse[$seq_enc_msd]}
    local seq_lsd=${lookup_table_reverse[$seq_enc_lsd]}
    local seq_msd_index=$(typeset -p symbolset | grep -oP '[0-9]+(?=]="'"$seq_msd"'")')
    local seq_lsd_index=$(typeset -p symbolset | grep -oP '[0-9]+(?=]="'"$seq_lsd"'")')
    local seq=$((seq_msd_index * ln_symbolset + seq_lsd_index))
    local yr_msd_index=$(typeset -p symbolset | grep -oP '[0-9]+(?=]="'"$yr_msd"'")')
    local yr_lsd_index=$(typeset -p symbolset | grep -oP '[0-9]+(?=]="'"$yr_lsd"'")')
    local yr=$((ln_symbolset * ln_symbolset * 2 + yr_msd_index * ln_symbolset + yr_lsd_index)); # warning: the “2” is a dangerous hard-coding! Hopefully that bug manifests after I am dead

    printf '%s\n' "${yr}-$seq"
};#decoded_reference

I probably need a perfect hash function. This code seems to do the job:

encoded_reference()
{
    local -r yr=$1
    local -r seqno=$2
    
    local -ar symbolset=(a b c d e f g h   j k   m n   p q r s t u v w x y z     2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9)
    local -a seedset=("${symbolset[@]}")
    local -r ln_symbolset=${#symbolset[@]}; # 31
    local ln_seedset=${#seedset[@]}
    local -A lookup_table=()

    for sym in "${symbolset[@]}"
    do
        pos=$((50 % ln_seedset)); # 50 is just an arbitrary static number
        lookup_table+=(["$sym"]=${seedset["$pos"]})
        seedset=(${seedset[@]/${seedset[$pos]}}); # remove used elements from the seedset
        ln_seedset=${#seedset[@]}
    done
    
    local yr_enc=${symbolset[$(((yr / ln_symbolset) % ln_symbolset))]}${symbolset[$(($yr % ln_symbolset))]}
    local most_sig_fig=$((seqno / ln_symbolset))
    local least_sig_fig=$((seqno % ln_symbolset))
    
    # caution: if the seqno exceeds ln_symbolset², this calculation is out of range
    local seq_enc=${lookup_table[${symbolset[$most_sig_fig]}]}${lookup_table[${symbolset[$least_sig_fig]}]}
    
    printf '%s\n' "answer → ${yr_enc}-$seq_enc"
};#encoded_reference

for yr in 2024 2025 2026
do
    for seqno in {1..20}
    do
        encoded_reference "$yr" "$seqno"
    done
done

This is close to ideal, but I just thought of another problem: what if a year-seq pair were to derive an encoded number like “fy-ou” or “us-uk” or “sh-it”? A bias that nearly ensures a digit is used would help avoid generating offending words. But I guess I’m getting well into over-engineering territory.

That is certainly a winner from the standpoint of code simplicity. And it’s trivially reversible. But I’m also prioritizing simplicity for human recipients above code simplicity. Base64 output is case sensitive and someone writing back and referencing a ref number would not necessarily preserve case. It’s also intolerant of human errors like confusing a “1” for a “l”.

(edit) I think base32 would avoid the case sensitivity problem. So here’s a sample:

for seq in {1..60}; do printf '%s → ' 2024-"$seq"; printf '%s\n' 2024-"$seq" | base32 | awk '{print tolower($1)}' | sed 's/=//g'; done

2024-1 → giydenbngefa
2024-2 → giydenbngifa
2024-3 → giydenbngmfa
2024-4 → giydenbngqfa
2024-5 → giydenbngufa
2024-6 → giydenbngyfa
2024-7 → giydenbng4fa
2024-8 → giydenbnhafa
2024-9 → giydenbnhefa
2024-10 → giydenbngeyau
2024-11 → giydenbngeyqu
2024-12 → giydenbngezau
2024-13 → giydenbngezqu
2024-14 → giydenbnge2au
2024-15 → giydenbnge2qu
2024-16 → giydenbnge3au
2024-17 → giydenbnge3qu
2024-18 → giydenbnge4au
2024-19 → giydenbnge4qu
2024-20 → giydenbngiyau
2024-21 → giydenbngiyqu
2024-22 → giydenbngizau
2024-23 → giydenbngizqu
2024-24 → giydenbngi2au
2024-25 → giydenbngi2qu