Sorry for necro but your ideology is fascinating. It sounds like you believe offline people deserve the same benefits as online people.

Not in the case at hand. But yes, I do believe offline ppl are entitled to the same benefits w.r.t. public services. E.g. our human right to healthcare and education is not preconditioned on being online. It’s inalienable.

W.r.t software sold on the private market, it’s more about standards. Standards of privacy, quality, functionality, and pro-consumer. With the video game, I’m not sure if I am more annoyed by the needless dependency on a WAN, or the anti-consumer way of doing business in general, which entails using the money of paying customers against them. Paying for deliberate anti-features and product crippling rewards corporations for being proactively anti-consumer… biting the hand that fed them. And so I oppose the idea of feeding enshitification.

Why do you believe this? Why shouldn’t the world move towards an expectation of online existence?

In Europe there is a battle emerging whereby some gov offices have decided it’s okay to exclude some people for being offline. Note that those same excluded people do not have a right to opt-out of taxation.

If I were to guess, your goal is not offline existence, but privacy, and doing things offline guarantees privacy, the same way that high-security environments use airgapped machines.

Privacy is one of many factors. Another factor, for example, would be that if I boycott Microsoft and the gov uses MS for email, I effectively lose my boycott privileges if email is the only means of communicating that the gov accepts.

Another factor is convenience. I find CAPTCHAs inconvenient, so I boycott them. My boycott against CAPTCHAs goes so far that I am willing to undertake a greater inconvenience in order to carry out my boycott against CAPTCHA pushers. And note that CAPTCHA is just one insideous¹ form of inconvenience. A local gov publishes their PDF community newsletter through some shitty 3rd party that animates the PDFs with JavaScript, so you can graphically see a visual of the page turning. That shitty protectionist js-forced service blocks people from simply downloading the PDF file. And I’ll be damned if I am going to support that kind of protectionism, so I insist that someone hand-delivers a paper newsletter to my door until they become competent. It’s unlikely that they will become competent in my lifetime.

Even if they manage to make the PDFs downloadable, they will fuck something else up. E.g. wget won’t work because they would arbitrarily decide to take an anti-bot posture without cause, and without realising that humans run wget.

¹ “insideous” because it puts humans to work for machines doing uncompensated labor which is potentially involuntary servitude in some cases. And performance of the labor often still results in DoS if the CAPTCHA is broken or if it discriminates against the incapability of the user.

But that’s just a means to an end. There are other ways of achieving privacy, like using vetted open source software that take privacy seriously, for example a fediverse client running in Tor browser.

Yes. In fact, well implemented tech gives more privacy than analog methods most of the time (cash payments being a notable exception).

Privacy does not necessitate being offline.

It does if the other party is too incompetent to get it right. The gov is not competent enough to publish a public key. It is not competent enough to maintain a server that allows Tor connections. It is not competent enough to design a webform that does not make email and phone number required fields.

The problem is not lack of possibilities. It’s lack of competency.

Going to a cafe to download articles to read offline, is not really offline either. It’s just an intermittent internet connection

The fetching is online (though not necessarily); the reading is offline. If I have a LAN with AP and no uplink, a friend or someone near my home could connect to the LAN and upload content, which would be an offline means of getting content. There are also ways to get info via SMS. The gov who uses a protectionist 3rd party to block PDF downloads and limit distribution to those running some proprietary JavaScript effectively blocks offline reading by someone like myself.

I suppose my ultimate thesis is that the gov should only be rewarded with digital participation if they competently deployed a service. An analog mechanism is always needed as an escape from the tyranny of poor design. Without an analog mechanism there is little incentive to implement a good design. Analog methods serve as an important quality control feedback mechanism.

I am curious how many times have you gone to court?

I’ve been to court countless times, but only twice that I recall for choosing an analog lifestyle.

You obviously have access to internet or else you would not be here,

My gaming desktop is at home where I have no Internet. I /could/ bring a gaming laptop into a public library and do gaming there, but I should not need to. It’s an absurd injustice that I cannot game from the comfort of my home on a big screen because the game makers want to snoop on people arbitrarily.

you are on one of the more private places on the internet (fediverse) sure so the likelihood of “them” finding you on here is slim.

I have no idea what motivates this comment. I would certainly object to anyone outside the fedi finding me in the fedi, but this is entirely orthoganol to anything said here. What does the fedi privacy have to do with the freedom of an offline person to play a game?

If you are concerned about your privacy on line as I am sure many of us on Lemmy are look into getting an internet connection to your home, accept that you will have to pay taxes and invest in a really solid Pihole or Adguard home setup.

“Privacy” is such a broad concept spanning countless ways to achieve countless forms of privacy, it’s really bizarre that you make this suggestion. I cannot trace this suggestion to any specific privacy scenario that I have mentioned. A general change that like you suggest simultaneously grants some forms of privacy while compromising privacy in other ways. Also no idea what taxes has to do with this.

I have not used pihole but I know it is something I need to research. Adguard does not strike me as a like-with-like comparison, but my knowledge of the two is superficial. In any case, I struggle to see how these tools relate.

Perhaps you are suggesting that forcing all connections over Tor solves the privacy problem. I would first say: no it does not. We have no idea what info is sent when a closed-source blob phones home. But more importantly, even if I could sufficiently circumvent the snooping, I shouldn’t fucking have to. Snooping cannot be justified by the existence of circumvention hacks.

That does nothing.

Doing nothing is already far better than 99% of the population, who feeds oppressors. Not being part of the harm is in itself an important minimal baseline for me.

From there, it’s an oversight to neglect the fact that living offline makes the battleground visible. It shows me where I need to fight battles. It’s how I know where to fight. When I force the gov to partake in analog transactions, it’s being offline that enabled me to gather the intel for what fights to bring to them.

Concrete example: if I were online, I would visit the website that shows my city’s newsletter and view it on the website. But because I am offline, I pop into a cafe and try to download it instead, for later offline reading. They have some shitty web app that blocks saving a PDF. It actually breaks the law AFAIK, so I can harass them about it and force them to stop imposing a shitty app that impedes downloading the newsletter as a PDF. I would not know that or think deep enough to give a shit if I simply had always-on cloud access from my residence.

There are mandated transactions with the gov that have no offline means. When the gov drags me into court for not filling out an online form, being able to truthfully state that I don’t have cloud access or required info for the web form (like email address) gives me a defense that the court cannot ignore. When I play that card, it’s effectively a push back that overcomes oppression.

companies dgaf about negative publicity anymore

Since when do corprorations not care about money? We’re talking about money, which publicity affects. Can you explain in more detail how financing a lawsuit against someone who “pirates” Fujitsu’s drivers (needed to support their hardware) is good for their profits?

Anti-piracy actions normally boost profits by showing the shareholders that they are enforcing their intellectual property (publicity indeed). That does not seem to apply here – unlikely has the effect that you seem to think it does.

It’s a culmination of several goals.

• I am trying to live as unbanked as possible. Local ISPs do not accept cash payments. I do not want to feed anti-cash suppliers. I boycott them. So the only way I can get online from home is over GPRS using a prepaid sim card. Those prices are not competitive. I can get online for ~¾ the cost of a big mac per month, but that’s with a ~4-5gb cap. Sometimes I do that on rare occasions.
• I oppose the forced use of the cloud by gov public services. Being offline is the only real way to test and experiment with public services to know when to protest the exclusion of offline people. It also ensures that I can take my protest to court and truthfully testify that I have no residential Internet.
• In the context of gaming, it’s fine if a game inherently needs the cloud for the experience. But when a game artificially but needlessly demands cloud access as a precondition to installation, it’s somewhat of a human rights violation because it’s people’s human right to access and experience culture. It’s wrong for game makers to exclude offline people if a game does not strictly need it.
• I believe the right to boycott is fundamentally the single most important consumer right. It is the only consumer protection that consumers can give themselves without depending on others for protection. It should be practiced and tested constantly.
• Apps have taken a shitty direction that assumes non-stop cloud access. This is a kind of vulnerability that weakens civilization. The fact that no Lemmy client apps store data locally and support offline reading and queued responses is a weakness that promotes the elitism of excluding offline people. The circumstance exacerbates pressure to buy an Internet subscription. I should be able to pop into a cafe periodically and sync with Lemmy servers, go home, and do my reading there. My offline experiment enables me to see what most people do not.

Thanks for the tip! I would have dismissed that quickly had I discovered it myself because the pricing page shows $5/month as that cheapest. But in fine print at the bottom there is a free fax option. I have not tested it but it could turn out to be quite useful.

Sorry to say, both have failed me. On fax.plus I cannot register because the “Register” button is faded and unclickable. I cannot work out what causes that and what it expects.

Onlinefax.io lets you upload a file without using Google Drive, but then you must login to a Google account to go further. So I’m still looking for options.

What are you trying to imply? That because Bradly Manning used wget, that makes wget a threat? Manning probably also used Firefox. So let’s flag Firefox as a hacker tool too.