debanqued @ debanqued @beehaw.org

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12

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119

Joined

3 yr. ago

I’m so grateful that the Xerox 9700 pissed off RMS. Otherwise we might not have had a FOSS movement.

At the same time, bizarre that printers have still not been liberated by now.

Does it say “Internet required” on the box? If not, a good activist move might be to have a bunch of people buy them, set them up on a disconnected machine, then return them for a refund.

Oki (formerly Okidata) is the lesser of evils. After doing a deep dive studying the ethical problems of all the printer makers, Oki was the one I found the least dirt on. But Oki has pulled out of the US market entirely; probably couldn’t survive in a competition of tricks & traps.

Bipta had it right. The people are to blame not the corps. The corps are doing their job. Any corp that does not do everything possible to generate profit for shareholders is failing to do its job. It’s our job as consumers to reject junk products. To boycott the worst (#HP). The consumers have failed to do their job.

Voters have also failed. We’ve failed to elect lawmakers who respect a #rightToRepair, to ban the practice of dropping support for hardware that has no #freesoftware.

I always air dry indoors close to a window, which I open ¾ of the year. In the cold season you need some kind of ventilation. Even if you use a dryer you’re still going to get moisture in the air that needs to escape the house.

A ventless heat pump dryer is the best if you need a dryer because the moisture is condensed either into a tank that needs to be emptied, or it’s connected directly to the drain. Ventless dryers also operate at a much lower temp which is gentler on the clothes.

The magstripe is useless in my area. The bank also automatically blocks the use of the card in non-EMV regions. A travel notice is needed to make the card function in non-EMV areas. The magstripe encodes a flag that declares that an EMV chip is present so EMV-capable readers will reject the magstripe. So a skimmer would have to find out my travel plans to a non-EMV region. They will be waiting a very long time because I have a different card for non-EMV regions. I could just as well scrape the magstripe off if I thought skimming were a significant risk.

The other exploit is trapping the card using a plastic sleeve then fetching it after you give up and leave. If my card gets stuck in a machine, I would operate under the assumption that that attack is in play. An attacker can drop off a compromised ATM.. a whole machine. Those are always free-standing. I don’t think free-standing ATMs exist in my area.

Every region has a different norm. Smartphone banking may not have caught on in the US but the European normal is quite different in the banking sector.

Europe even has cashless banks (not joking). These are “banks” that actually have no vault, only computers, and do not handle cash. No cash deposits. Withdrawals only possible at ATMs. If your ATM card fails and you need cash, you go to the bank and a banker walks with you to the ATM so the banker can withdraw the cash using a special card. It’s normal in Scandinavia but I think it would be shocking if a US bank were to operate this way. A cashless US bank would be an embarrassment.

The #WarOnCash have made bigger strides in Europe than the US.

If you want to withdraw $15k in banknotes in the US, it’s normal. In Europe it’s not only abnormal but sends red flags. I know someone who tried to withdraw €15k from her bank account and the bank called the police and arrested her. She was not charged with anything but they fully documented the attempt and released her. That was in a country where cash transactions greater than €3k are illegal. Spain, France, and Belgium all have cash limits like this. Netherlands is next. (to be clear, I think a €15k withdrawal would not be illegal on the part of the consumer but it likely exceeded the ToS of the bank and also triggers suspicion.. some of the details are murky)

In my region it’s illegal for a bank to offer 1FA logins. So the banks give you an RSA token of sorts.. a hardware device. Some banks have opted to use mobile phones for 2FA instead of buying and maintaining special purpose devices for everyone. Then they leaped to the assumption that everyone has a smartphone. From there it’s natural for them to figure there’s no longer need to maintain a website.

You don’t trust the bank’s app because of who they might have outsourced the code to

You can safely scratch out the word “might”. It’s very unlikely that a bank would write their own app in-house.

I don’t trust the outsourced entity, nor do I trust the bank. Banks use the cover of “KYC” to collect abusive amounts of information. Closed-source projects need to profit too & banks would be happy to reduce their cost by allowing 3rd party data collection. Most banking apps are outright tagged that they call for perms to collect your GPS location. I also don’t trust Google not to profit from information about where Google pawns do their banking -- that’s too valuable to debt collectors to let it go unexploited.

but you will trust that the ATMs haven’t been tampered with by criminals?

I trust consumer protections to be enforced. I’ve made use of those protections in an ID theft situation so I’ve seen 1st hand that they work. If you fear ATMs then you cannot easily fight the #warOnCash. Do you get your cash over the counter, or do you simply support the war on cash and all the data leeches banks feed? If you’re quite worried about it, I suggest using the indoor ATM at a bank that’s only accessible during business hours.

You get no consumer protection from bank snooping that you agreed to in the ToS. You should read your bank’s ToS and privacy policy sometime. It’s interesting to see what they needlessly collect.

Because the latter is by far more common than the exploitation of a security hole in a banking app.

An outsider exploit is not the biggest threat. It’s the bank itself snooping lawfully (and monetizing that data to keep your fees down) that’s the most certain compromise. Though exploits cannot be ruled out either since closed-source blocks users from auditing the security.

The long-term plan is of course to ditch the account. At the moment I’m in a pinch and just need an ATM that works. It’s a bit alarming how little knowledge and information is available on ATMs. The non-transparency is in itself a privacy issue.

I don’t think credit unions exist in my country. But it’s worth noting that credit unions in the US have a whole different set of pitfalls. They are typically too small to offer their own services. Credit unions outsource everything: bill pay, statement printing, the website, email.. They do nothing in-house. All that outsourcing means copious information sharing with giant centralized corporations that monetize your data.

You may consider giving Ally bank a try.

My dumpster fire bank is not the US. But I would avoid Ally anyway since that bank’s website is tor-hostile and their privacy policy also scores below average on privacy. I suppose the low fees and high interest must be offset by data monetization.

I question the merit of avoiding downloading their mobile app and instead sticking your card into lots of random unverified ATMs to try to get balance reports.

Third party ATMs do not appear to exist in my region. All ATMs are bank-owned AFAICT.

The app may not be great, but SSL is cryptographically sound and the bank has your social and your identity anyway.

The app requires trusting whoever the bank outsourced the coding to. Does the bank even get to see the source code? I wouldn’t trust the bank or the profit-driven closed-source developers to not include spyware or to look after the consumer’s interests. Especially in the case of US banks. Apart from that I object to Google keeping track of where I bank (data which can ultimately be sold to debt collectors) -- which is inherent in being forced to use the Play Store. I also object to buying a new phone (hardware) in order to chase the version requirements. These abuses are certain, thus a non-starter compared to the mere bad luck chance of fraud by a dodgy ATM which at least have the remedy of consumer legal protections.

None of that is normal.

I think it’s the new normal. Aren’t banks like n26 & Revolut purely by smartphone? This was a proper bank that became like the smartphone banks. I see how people all around me blindly trust smartphones & Google or Apple with reckless disregard. And they upgrade with reckless disregard. The Fedi crowd is more likely to see the absurdity in a bank-by-smartphone situation but the young generations would probably just as well have Snapchat handle their banking. It’s a terrible direction things are going in. I can’t even reserve public parking in my region offline anymore.

One of the traditional banks in my area is gradually removing features from the web service & making them exclusively app services. They probably hope to eventually pull the plug on the website. I’m close to pulling the plug on banking.

The bank in this case has closed down their website. Paper statements are gone. They also closed their office & made it by appointment only. Calling & asking a human possibly incurs a fee. All access is exclusively via a proprietary closed-source app that’s exclusively available from surveillance capitalists (Google & Apple). The app is chronically upgraded and fussy about platform OS version & refuses to run inside a virtual machine, thus requires buying a new phone periodically.

You might want to crosspost to !buyitforlife@slrpnk.net.

As a wearer of toe socks, I have given up. #DarnTough & their competitor (forgot the name) only make tube socks.

Has anyone considered getting a sewing machine to repair socks? I have a stash of holey socks now and wonder if some of them can be sacrificed for patches on others. I wonder if that can be done in a way that doesn’t result in a seam that can be felt. #askFedi #sewing

Why use a machine dryer at all? I’ve heard the lifespan of anything elastic (esp. elastic bands on underwear) is shortened by using a machine dryer. I air dry everything now for the environment & for my clothes.

OTOH, I’m a skeptical as well that this solves the OP problem because how do you explain socks wearing out so much faster than all other elastic materials? Surely most of the damage is done by wear and tear.

For me it’s moot.. I suggest boycotting #Paypal:

https://git.disroot.org/cyberMonk/liberethos_paradigm/src/branch/master/rap_sheets/paypal.md

Sharing customer info with 600+ companies is well beyond reasonable. And the way they freeze accounts arbitrarily.. just bizarre that people still use them.

no worries.. i was going to create a personal finance one but ended up doing that elsewhere.

To get the form I simply go to $URL/create_community. That form still renders.

Removing the button but leaving the webform & yet making the form submission fail to prevent community creation reminds me of Office Space, where Melvin (or Marvin.. forgot his name) got moved to the basement then was later sacked but no one told him. Then payroll had a glitch where they kept paying him. And when they figured it all out, their fix was to just /fix the payroll glitch/. So when someone fills out that create community form, it’s like Melvin showing up to work to do some labor not knowing that the labor wouldn’t pay off. I’ve experienced this before a few times in different situations in Lemmy where you do some labor on a form then it’s just tossed.

In that case this is a #LemmyBug report. The #Lemmy community creation form should not have rendered.

The article uses “banks” in the generic sense. Some of those issues apply to credit unions as well, particularly points 4, 6, 12, & 13.

I will never endorse nor recommend cryptocurrency as a sound investment.

Cryptocurrency was not supposed to be an “investment” in the first place. Like they say in Europe “if you treat houses like stocks, they will behave like stocks”.

Anyway, I could almost agree with you on the /investment/ comment, but then you said “never”. Consider fiat money. GBP may be a sound investment to diversify and hedge against USD or EUR. But things change. Maybe one day the GBP becomes very unstable (as btc is today). Would you then at that moment say “I will never endorse nor recommend GBP as a sound investment”? It’s a sound investment when it’s stable, and a dicey investment when not stable.

The article of the thread does not propose cryptocurrency /as an investment/. This is about cryptocurrency as an alternative to (unethical) banks. When you oppose the only alternative to unethical banks (considering the future of cash is endangered & bartering is impractical & unscalable), you effectively endorse unethical banks.

cryptocurrency is one of the largest scams of our modern time

That’s like saying “cheques are a scam” or “wire transfers are a scam”. They are certainly not a scam. But scams can be designed that exploit weaknesses in any of the three instruments (cheques, wire transfers, cryptocurrency transactions).