Glad to see they are tagged. It could evolve more but the tags are the most important thing.

I think this project has some tools that might automate that:

https://0xacab.org/dCF/deCloudflare

They ID and track every website that joins #Cloudflare. It’s a huge effort but those guys are on top of it. A script could check the list of domains against their list. There is also this service (from the same devs) which does some checks:

https://karma.crimeflare.eu.org:1984/api/is/cloudflare/html/

but caveat: if a non-CF domain (e.g. example.tld) has a CF host (e.g. somehost.example.tld), that tool will return YES for the whole domain.

Manually adjusting availability is a can of worms that I don’t want to open

I would suggest not bothering with any complex math, and simply do the calculation as you normally do but then if a site is Cloudflare cap whatever the calculated figure is to 98%. Probably most (if not all) CF sites would be 100% anyway, so they would just be reduced by 2%. Though it would need to be explained somewhere – the beauty of which would be to help inform people that the CF walled garden is excluding people. Cloudflare’s harm perpetuates to a large extent because people are unaware that it’s an exclusive walled garden that marginalizes people.

Cloudflared services like ani.social are getting a “100%” available stat. That site may be up but it’s unavailable (denying availability) to something like ~1-3% of the population 100% of the time. So in principle it should never be able to achieve the 100% availability stat.

I understand it would be quite difficult to calculate an availability figure that accounts for access restrictions to marginalized groups, because apart from Cloudflare you would not have a practical way of knowing how firewalls are configured. But one thing you could (and should) do is mark the known walled gardens in some way. E.g. put a “🌩” next to Cloudflare sites and warn people that they are not open access sites.

The lestat.org availability listing is like a competition that actually gives a perception advantage to services that exclude people, thus rewarding them for compromising availability. I would also subtract off ~2% for all CF sites as a general rule simply because you know it’s not 100% available to everyone. They do not deserve that 100% trophy, nor is it accurate.

Maybe you misunderstand the enforcement part of the GDPR. It’s not made for you to get personal enforcement out of it.

You obviously have not read article 77. This article entitles individuals to report GDPR violations to a DPA for enforcement. Article 77 does not distinguish violations against an individual (which I suppose is what you mean by “personal enforcement”) and violations against many. Some of the violations I have reported can only be construed as violations against the general public. E.g. an org fails to designate a DPO.

The problem is there is nothing to enforce article 77 itself. When a DPA neglects to act on an article 77 report, there is no recourse. There is only a provision that allows lawsuits against the GDPR violators. But then when someone did that, and then claimed legal costs, an Italian court decided for everyone in a precedence-setting case that legal costs are not recoverable. Which essentially neuters the court action remedy. So we have an unenforced article 77 and a costly & impractical direct action option.

It works on the basis of multiple infractions being recorded and then escalating the agencies response level.

It’s not even doing that much, in some cases. The report has to get past the front desk secretary and be submitted into the litigation chamber before it’s even considered as something that would indicate a trend. If it doesn’t get past the secretary it does nothing whatsoever. Some of my reports were flippantly rejected by a pre-screening secretary for bogus reasons (e.g. “your complaint is ‘contractual in nature’” when in fact there is no contractual agreement, apart from the fact that the existence of a contract does not nullify the GDPR anyway).

I work with many companies as IT consultant and I can assure you, that they all FEAR the GDPR

So you’re only seeing the commercial response. Gov agencies & NGOs are also subject to the GDPR, which is where you see the most recklessness (likely due to the lack of penalty). On the commercial side banks also don’t give much of a shit about the GDPR because when they violate it there’s a shit ton of banking regs they point to and the DPAs are afraid to act against banks because of the messy entanglement of AML/KYC laws that essentially push #banks to violate the GDPR.

Enforcement of GDPR does happen and you can review every enforcement on a public website called enforcement tracker.

Indeed I’ve browsed through the enforcement tracker. It’s a good prop for making the public believe that the #GDPR is being well enforced. They are cherry-picking cases to enforce to convince the public that something is being done, but people who actually submit reports know better. We see the reports that are clearly going unenforced.

I have also personally requested information about me and my family through the rights bestowed by the GDPR

I have had article 15 access requests denied which I then reported to the DPA, who opened a case but just sat on it. For years, so far.

(edit) By the way, I suggest you leave Lemmy·world for a different instance. If you care about privacy at all, you don’t use Cloudflare nodes. I cannot even see the msg I wrote (which you replied to) because #lemmyWorld blocks me (which I give some detail here: https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/1435972). I had to reply to you based purely on your msg without context.

The weapons you mention are quite basic. Those don’t even begin to scratch the surface unless you’re using the internet the way most normies do.

I was thrilled when #wiby.me was first introduced. Then for a while wiby.me was itself a Tor-hostile Cloudflare site. I’m glad you brought it up because it prompted me to check again & it seems at the moment wiby is a user-respecting non-Cloudflare site. Note there was another search engine similar to wiby which I can’t track down right now… but it’s possible I’m confusing that other one with wiby. Err… I think both were unusable for a while.

(edit) The other site is search·marginalia·nu. That’s the one that became a despicable CF site. I think wiby broke down for tor users for a while but glad to see at the moment that it’s still usable. I just got good results when searching for a recipe.

I would bet it’s a slim enough minority of students who pay public transport on a per-trip basis that theft would not be from arbitrary break ins. A student would have to (recklessly?) use a high-end phone for this & be spotted putting an uncovered phone in the locker.

The best security is a good insurance policy. Not sure if high-end phones tend to have an insurance policy because I avoid them myself.

Perhaps not at all.

But the limitation of using #Selenium is a big one. Being forced to work in java, forced to use the resource hog of a modern gui browser, forced to reveal more browserprint info, being browser-dependent, etc. Selenium is my last choice when desperation is sufficiently high.

The problem is search engines have proven not to keep up with our needs. Sites trashed up with cookie popups, subscription nags, and CAPTCHAs are making it into the highest ranks of search results. Cloudflare sites in particular.

It is indeed another attack on #openData principles.

luckily there will always be people fighting to keep the Internet free

Google’s move makes the fight much more uphill for freedom fighters. The real problem is the masses of pawns who fail to vote with their feet. Some of them voted with their feet merely because CAPTCHA is inconvenient. Eliminating the CAPTCHA puts these #tyrannyOfConvenience users on the wrong side of the fight.

lol… I see that the Facebook-addicted kids are down-voting me :) Probably as they sit in a boring class!

Do “good parents” really all have this level of robotic control over their kids?

Do you really give a zero to “nature” in the nature vs. nurture behavioral influence?

I used a PalmOS device in school to manage my school schedule. So this was my 1st thought:

“Banning mobile phones entirely from school premises would raise some practical concerns, for example for parents wanting to contact their children while travelling between school and home.”

Feature phones still exist. It would be great if the massive stockpiles of prematurely discarded dumbphones could be recycled to students. Maybe bring back offline PalmOS types of things for scheduling.

“…Some pupils will also use phones as payment methods on public transport.”*

Easily solved: smartphones go into the locker at the start of the day. Also, bring back the ability to pay cash on the public transport vehicle – this will help push back on the #warOnCash. We could also say there’s a systemic inefficiency if students don’t have season passes on public transport.

Anyone know how the price of electricity from these chargers compares to prices in the home?

I just wonder about possible non-car use-cases. E.g. someone is off the grid and they use a cargo cycle to bring batteries¹ to one of these charging stations. Will they be fleeced on price, or are there subsidies that could perhaps make the cost lower than household electric?

① asking w.r.t. both lead-acid batteries and li-ion, though I suspect these chargers would be li-ion only.

It was coded 8 years ago in Tcl¹ for a one-off project in Belgium. Would you really be interested?

The APIs would have changed dramatically by now & some of the real estate sites no longer exist. Some of the sites brought in CAPTCHAs. It was coded to use Tor & the public transport site has become Tor-hostile and also changed their API. It’s also very user unfriendly… a collection of scripts & variety of hacks because I was my only user.

I didn’t publish the code at the time because I worried that it would trigger the target sites to become bot-hostile.

① Also note that I use #Tcl for personal use but I resist publishing any Tcl code because I would rather not promote the Tcl language. Why? Because the Tcl folks have jailed a large portion of their docs in Cloudflare’s walled garden. I believe programming language docs should be openly public.

The only benefit I can see to users is it could eliminate captchas

#CAPTCHA elimination is not a benefit. The CAPTCHA motive of separating humans from bots is responsible for killing beneficial bots. The only good thing about it is humans get fed-up with CAPTCHAs and the captcha-pushers lose human traffic. That backlash is a good thing™. Remove that backlash and beneficial bots are defeated on a much larger scale.

I’m not sure how you can blame a corporation for doing the job of a corporation. It’s capitalism doing its thing.

I will blame the end users. When the masses of anti-bot pro-advertising normies decide to run browsers that play the token game, it will be on them. Just as countless shitty websites get high ranking search results today… it’s because the masses endorse it.

Boycotts are far too rare. It’s the consumer’s job to #boycott. They don’t do their job and this is the real point of failure (which Google gladly exploits).

It would stop beneficial bots like the ones I create¹ as a small-time hobbyist because the little guy does not have the resources for this arms race. You may be right when it comes to large-scale scraping ops that are done by a business (e.g. scraping RyanAir or Southwest airlines so an airfare consolidation site can show more fares).

① e.g. I wrote a bot that scraped the real estate market sites, scraped the public transport sites, and found me a house with the shortest public transport commute.

It’s bizarre that you think the EU market it small enough to be dispensable. When GDPR came into force, many US sites had to reject EU traffic. But that was only temporary for the most part. They knew it wasn’t smart for business to exclude the EU so they got their compliance issues sorted.

Hope you guys enjoy not being able to search for things.

I would love that actually. But it’s not reality. In reality what happens is the search engines deliver a shit-ton of unusable garbage results that I would rather not see. E.g. sites that block Tor users, CAPTCHAs, giant cookie popups, etc.

If a search engine were to filter out the garbage, it would be a great start to solving the shitty web problem.

Challenge rejected.

If you want challenge, just simply try to find a search engine that filters out shitty websites (e.g. Cloudflare sites, CAPTCHA-pushing sites, giant cookie popups, countless dark patterns).

We are already failing to meet the challenge. We don’t need more challenges.