evenwicht

If you sit in front of a PC with a big screen all day, smartphones are not a good way to do SMS. Rationale:

• you have to reach for a small screen & possibly tap around (enter PINs) to see the txt that just arrived
• smartphones have a huge attack surface; street-wise people do not put GSM chips in them
• to send a msg, you have to tap on a tiny keyboard (or fiddle with a dicey speech-to-text tool)
• if your phone breaks, you lose access to all your SMS msgs. (Gammu can copy all your SMS msgs even if your screen is shattered, but only from dumb phones)
• (countless software freedom issues here… gammu does not work with smartphones because smartphones do not support a standard AT command protocol)

Theoretically, isn’t gammu or gnokii a smarter way of working? If you have a text terminal and gnu screen/tmux running, possibly with irssi, it would be a much more efficient workflow if SMS msgs would arrive in an irssi window just like an IRC channel so you can use your full size keyboard to enter an SMS.

Anyone doing this?

I got gammu working on an old dumb phone. Haven’t checked yet whether it can be integrated into irssi or bitlbee.

Possible snag: serial connections are possibly unreliable with Gammu. My USB→serial DCU-65 cable attached to a Sony Ericsson dumb phone chronically disconnects and reconnects to the PC. I wonder if using bluetooth instead would solve that.

The gammu and gnokii projects seem to be somewhat idling.. having been pushed aside due to smartphones. But it’s unjust and an artifact of tech wisdom fading in the population.

Woah, this is sickening.

unplugged off-gridders fucked
If you live off-grid outside of Denmark, wtf.. what happens to your letter when it is sent to a Danish address in 2026? Will every national postal service worldwide have to negotiate a contract with FedEx? Extra sick: FedEx is a hard-right GOP-supporting ALEC org that ships slave dolphins, hunting trophies, and shark fins. UPS is also an ALEC member. So if you boycott both, then what? Maybe you get lucky and live in a country that does a deal with DHL (assuming they operate in DK).

e-mail is still broken
I sent a critically important time-sensitive e-mail to a Danish landlord. The recipient’s e-mail service accepted my email for delivery, then silently sent it to a spam folder. The asshole dip-shit landlord argued it was my fault they did not receive my email message in their inbox. WTF? How can a sender possibly control what the recipient’s mail server does with a message after the SMTP transaction is over? I was legally screwed because I was expected to be accountable for the action of a server I had no control over. Denmark is not ready for forced-email with this kind of ignorance in play.

I can’t even get a msg accepted by Google and Microsoft mail servers. And I’m happy about that because I boycott those companies anyway.. would not send email to gmail or outlook recipients even if it worked. Hence why I send lots of snail mail and almost no email.

In Denmark, I would be fucked. Glad I left. I think DHL would make my cost of living shoot up even higher amid the housing shit show there.

workaround
Send faxes, for the few recipients who still have fax numbers. It will still typically arrive in the recipient’s email inbox, but there are still some advantages:

• delivery is more reliable than pure email because the email segment of the transmission has the same endpoints, thus not much risk of dicey treatment.
• the payload is raster dots, thus more effort for surveillance advertiser-operated email services to snoop (doubt they bother with OCR -- but if they do, fine.. let them work for it).
• you can send msgs without being forced to reveal an email address to the recipient.

action
Would a few million people outside DK please send a snail mail to a DK address in the 1st week of 2026?

The linked thread shows a couple bash scripts for using Gimp to export to another file format. Both scripts are broken for me. Perhaps they worked 14 years ago but not today.

Anyone got something that works?

I heard someone was forced to solve a Google reCAPTCHA in the course of applying for unemployment in Ohio.

I’m not sure of the circumstances but the user would not have been using Tor, so it is likely imposed on everyone. They said they were unsure if there was an analog alternative (during COVID).

From the article:

“In terms of cost, we estimate that – during over 13 years of its deployment – 819 million hours of human time has been spent on reCAPTCHA, which corresponds to at least $6.1 billion USD in wages. Traffic resulting from reCAPTCHA consumed 134 Petabytes of bandwidth, which translates into about 7.5 million kWhs of energy, corresponding to 7.5 million pounds of CO₂. In addition, Google has potentially profited $888 billion USD from cookies and $8.75-32.3 billion USD per each sale of their total labeled data set.”

This means when a CAPTCHA serves as a barrier between people and an essential public transaction, people are being forced into involuntary uncompensated servitude. I believe this is a human rights issue.

Since this community discusses CAPTCHA (see sidebar), I thought I should plug a community I just started. [email protected] is not about CAPTCHA in general, but it has the sole purpose of collecting situations where people are forced to solve a CAPTCHA in the public sector.

The Secretary of State (SoS) for most (if not all) states maintain a database of registered companies. This basic dataset is needed to lookup how a company is registered, their contact info, status, etc. Most queries have come to impose a CAPTCHA.

If you fax or mail a request for records, the SoS offices simply ignore it without even the courtesy to respond. So if you boycott Google, you’re fucked. The state makes you choose between access to “public” records, and witholding your labor and data from Google. Can’t have it both ways.

Unless you make a FOIA request, in which case you have to pay the state for the info.

This thread could be used to document the states that push this shitty practice on people.

From the article:

“In terms of cost, we estimate that – during over 13 years of its deployment – 819 million hours of human time has been spent on reCAPTCHA, which corresponds to at least $6.1 billion USD in wages. Traffic resulting from reCAPTCHA consumed 134 Petabytes of bandwidth, which translates into about 7.5 million kWhs of energy, corresponding to 7.5 million pounds of CO₂. In addition, Google has potentially profited $888 billion USD from cookies and $8.75-32.3 billion USD per each sale of their total labeled data set.”

This means when a CAPTCHA serves as a barrier between people and an essential public transaction, people are being forced into involuntary uncompensated servitude. I believe this is a human rights issue.

Elon’s DOGE regime stormed into NOAA and demanded direct access to their IT systems to snoop on the data. This is in the name of cutting fat.

climate

Climate scientists worldwide rely on weather data from NOAA. Obviously the party of climate denial is no friend to climate science. They want to stamp out that particular segment of science.

abolition of environmental regs

The GOP also hates environmental regs because they prioritize big business over the environment. From the linked article:

“The organization [NOAA] cited impacts of cuts could include overfishing, increased imports of illegal or unethically sourced seafood, threats to endangered wildlife, and threats to life and property without its weather forecasting and data resources.”

DEI

Team GOP is also looking to stamp out diversity, equity, and inclusion. This article covers that angle of DOGE’s likely assault on NOAA.

privatization

Of course Musk is also looking for his personal business advantage and any maneuver using government power to increase Tesla and Space-X revenue. Any opportunities to kill off public spending on public resources create opportunities for his private corporate empire will not be overlooked.

I tagged it as “US/world” because even though the data comes from the US, and is threatened within the US, the whole world uses the data.

(edit) It was noticed on [email protected] (where I was about to cross-post):
https://mander.xyz/post/24567559

It’s back online with not a peep from the admin as to what happened. Logins work only via the web UI, but it just gives a non-stop stream of “401 the access token is invalid” popups.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.sdf.org/post/28580567

Love the irony and simultaneous foreshadowed embarrassment of Elon denying availability and service as a way to be more efficient.

The irony

Cloudflare enables web admins to be extremely bloated. Admins of Cloudflared websites have no incentive to produce lean or efficient websites because Cloudflare does the heavy lifting for free (but at the cost of reduced availability to marginalized communities like Tor, VPNs, CGNAT, etc). So they litter their website with images and take little care to choose lean file formats or appropriate resolutions. Cloudflare is the #1 cause of web inefficiency.

Cloudflare also pushes countless graphical CAPTCHAs with reckless disregard which needlessly wastes resources and substantially increases traffic bloat -- all to attack bots (and by side-effect text-based users) who do not fetch images and thus are the most lean consumers of web content.

The embarrassment

This is a perfect foreshadowing of what we will see from this department. “Efficiency” will be achieved by killing off service and reducing availability. Certain demographics of people will lose service in the name of “efficiency”.

It’s worth noting that DOGE is not using Cloudflare’s default configuration. They have outright proactively blacklisted Tor IPs to ensure hard-and-fast fully denied service to that demographic of people. Perhaps their PR person would try to claim CAPTCHA avoidance is efficient :)

The other embarrassment is that they are using Cloudflare for just a single tiny image. They don’t even have enough competency to avoid CF in the normal state & switch it on demand at peak traffic moments.

The discussion

More chatter here.