no, the government doesn’t serve the people it serves power.

First of all, you’re wrong, unless you have limited your comment to a particular gov where votes in an election don’t count – which is not the situation I am in. I’m in a jurisdiction where not only is there a decent voting system, the reps in gov also take public surveys and sentiment into account for operational design. I’m also in a jurisdiction where civil disobedience has effect. E.g. so many cyclists were unlawfully turning right on red that they decided to scrap the prohibition for cyclists.

You also seem to misunderstand the fact that my drop-in-the-ocean action need not change anything, just as my drop-in-the-ocean election vote is never the one vote that makes a difference.

Unless power thinks you as a group are worth the effort, they will ignore your mailed documents, state you failed to file paper work and you now have to deal with (problems incurred due to not having completed the paper work).

This assumes a scenario where I not only have an obligation to submit something but I also have an obligation to supply an email address. Obviously my form of submission accounts for these factors. The inquiry in the OP does not inherently cover such scenarios, and that’s deliberate.

Paper processes are going away.

Only in regions that are largely populated pushovers and digital zombies, without a right to be analog movement (or the rights to have a movement).

But the point was, there are no good XMPP libraries that would enable a willing government to easily onboard that support. If there were, it would be a very different discussion.

Keyword there is /easily/. It was not easy for Munich to replace all their Windows PCs with linux, but difficulty of deployment was not a show-stopper.

The question is essentially: if e-mail is scrapped, what is the next most qualifying replacement for the given requirements? If XMPP is not the answer, what is?

The gov can /want/ all they want. It is the gov who serves the people, not the other way around. And we (the people) are have some control. That is, if you object to the gov’s email policy or hosting company, you can simply withold your email address. You can send them snail mail. Then they have to pay someone to scan it and react. This is in fact what I do.

I include an XMPP address along with OMEMO fingerprints in the letterhead. It’s mostly symbolic. No one actually uses it. Exceptionally, some attempt to use my XMPP address as an email address. So now I write “note: xmpp is not email” next to the xmpp address.

I’ve installed Deltachat but not experimented at all with it. What happens if someone sends an unencrypted msg to an email account that uses Deltachat? I would expect the msg to still be accepted by the mail server and MS to still see the unencrypted traffic.

If the gov can use email to send a msg, then the payload is seen by MS before it reaches the gateway.

I find XMPP to be /more/ reliable than email, which is largely due to anti-spam zealots like #SpamHaus who block or blackhole email on the basis of IP address, along with countless other anti-spam techniques that cause collateral damage to legit email. I actually cannot send email to Google or MS users because of this crazed zealotry that has lost sight of the purpose of security: availability.

XMPP is certainly glitchy and has a variety of issues, but at least it has not yet been sabotaged by anti-spam zealots, and large corps using anti-spam measures as an excuse to break the platform for those not patronising a large corp.

The other alternative is they provide a website

That’s for person→gov msgs. It is not something I can put in my letterhead as a way for them to reach me. Also, the webforms likely just result in an email transmission that traverses MS servers in-the-clear anyway.

Anonaddy.com is (AFAIK) the only forwarding service that will encrypt inbound msgs using your pgp pubkey. And I use it, but it is useless for cutting Microsoft out of the loop. MS has already seen the payload before it even arrives at the forwarding server.

Thanks for pointing out ArcaneChat. I had not heard of it. First glance, it looks like Deltachat. What happens if an MS email user sends a msg in-the-clear to an ArcaneChat recipient?

Every method has a barrier:

• snail mail: requires postage, which is particularly costly if you need proof of delivery. Also generally entails revealing your physical address to the controller.
• email: requires revealing your email address to them. And if the recipient is MS or Google, or a user on those platforms, their mail server is fussy. I cannot email any MS or Google users because their server blocks my mail server.

A webform could potentially have the fewest barriers, but they blew it.

I wish I kept track of where I read that. Could have been case law, or EDPB guidelines. Maybe I was speed-reading Art.21¶4 (which is really a requirement on the data controller).

It might be a good idea to send a registered letter with reply advice (Einschreiben mit Rückschein).

If I did that it would cost me over €10 for every single request. Even if it leads to lawsuit and the court favors my claim, registered letters are still a loss. They cannot be claimed back in court.

You say for suspicious users, but for the 4-month stretch of beehaw being unreachable there was no opportunity to login. So there was apparently a user agnostic systemwide change.

It’s worse than being reversible. The problem is that it’s unprovable. A switch from “zero logging” to “log everything” is wholly undetectible to users. You have to rely on blind faith that a profit-driven entity will act in your interest and resist their opportunity to profit from data collection. All you have is trust. Tor avoids that whole dicey mess and reliance on trust.

Indeed the ISP can only see where you go when using TLS, and that data can be aggregated to who you are along with everywhere else you go. It’s sensitive enough that in the US lawmakers decided on whether ISPs need consent to collect that info. Obama signed into force a requirement of ISPs to get consent. Then Trump reversed that. Biden did not reverse it back AFAIK.

W.r.t VPNs, you merely shift the surveillance point; you do not avoid the surveillance. The VPN provider can grab all that info just as well.

I am anonymous. Only doxxing experts know who is behind my account. Using clearnet makes it trivially simple for doxxers. Activitypub msgs include the IP address of the sending source which anyone with their own instance can see, IIRC.

But note as well Tor offers more than anonymity. It mitigates tracking by your ISP.

lemm.ee is centralized in Cloudflare’s exclusive walled garden. I can’t speek for the admins but it’s antithetical to the purpose of the fedi to advocate for federation with centralized hosts.

And there are consequences. If an image is posted to Lemmy.world, sh.itjust.works, or discuss.online, those of us who are excluded from Cloudflare cannot see it. A non-CF node federating to a CF node creates a broken network.

If I recall correctly, the main reason we defederated from those instances at the time was the sheer volume of spam we were getting from users of those instances.

Good point (if that’s true). I can’t help but expose the irony of instances centralized under Cloudflare having a spam problem. It seems to show that those instances sold their sole to the devil only to not get the benefits of the devil’s offer.

That’s the topic of discussion at hand.

When you say “we are at 2”, you make it sound like the royal “we” as a society. So it’s not the right language for what you were trying to express. The correct pronoun would be “they”. Some libraries are inclusive and some are not. The exclusive ones are at #2.

BTW- this necropost is due to Beehaw being unreachable for 4 months. I finally got back in today to see your msg.

The elitist idea that it’s okay to exclude people from public service for not having property cannot be framed as “harm reduction” when in fact it fails at that. The people who have mobile phones and subscriptions are the same people who can afford Wi-Fi at home, data plans, etc. These are people who are already served by the private marketplace. You merely give them a convenience at the expense of spending money in a way that marginalises the needy. It’s not just discrimination you advocate – the money is poorly allocated when it should go toward serving precisely those you exclude; the ones underserved by the private sector. By catering for the more privileged you only introduce harm by creating a false baseline that harms the excluded groups even more. Libraries were more inclusive 10 years ago, before they needlessly introduced these SMS-imposing captive portals. And some still are inclusive. Some poorly managed libraries have gone in an exclusive direction and this trend is spreading.

We’re at #2.

Who? Which library is at #2? Some libraries are entirely inclusive and treat everyone equally. Some libraries have regressed and have no pressure to join the inclusive world. You’re opposing the pressure that’s needed to make them better. That’s not helpful… that just enables the problem to worsen.

Having services for some rather than none is quintessential harm reduction.

No it’s not. It increases the harm. We have already reached a point where many governments assume everyone is online and they have used that assumption to remove offline services. So people who are excluded are further harmed by the exclusivity as it creates more exclusivity. If a public service cannot be inclusive then nixing it ensures the infrastucture is in place to compensate knowing that the service is not in place.

extremely childish and harmful.

Elitism is extremely childish and harmful. Respect for human rights is socially responsible. It’s the adult stance.

Unified Declaration of Human Rights, Article 21:

“2. Everyone has the right of equal access to public service in his country.”

If a library is exclusive the threat of defunding has two outcomes:

• compliance – to become inclusive and (if necessary) show the door to elitists therein who think it’s okay to exclude people
• closure (unrealistic, see below)

Either outcome is better than directing public money toward exclusive services. In the case of closure, the same money can rightfully be redirected toward other libraries that are inclusive.

Compliance splits into two possible outcomes:

• exclusive services dropped entirely; inclusive services like book/media access continue
• exclusive services reworked to become inclusive

Both of those are better outcomes than inequality. Dropping an exclusive service invites pressure to fix it. In any case, the elitism of exclusive public service is unacceptible because it undermines human rights.

(edit) One thing I did not consider is the exclusive services getting non-public funding. If Wi-Fi is going to be exclusive/elitist, perhaps it’s fair enough to continue as such as long as Google or Apple finances it. The private sector is littered with exclusivity and that doesn’t pose a human rights issue. In any case it’s an injustice if one dime of public money goes toward a service that is exclusive, which has the perversion of potentially excluding someone whose tax funded it.

I’m scared.

The irony, hypocrisy, and injustice here is that the UN’s own website itself discriminates against some demographics of people and denies access to the UDHR of 1948:

And this same UN will be creating the Digital Global Compact.