Indeed. I wasn’t sure if tja was asking for alternatives for admins or users.

Sometimes the marginalized groups of users can circumvent Cloudflare by finding an archive.org mirror of the blocked page, but that does not always work (and if interactivity is needed it never works). There is a browser plugin which will detect when a user clicks on a Cloudflare link and automatically redirect to archive.org.

Most government deployed websites do not use Cloudflare. I don’t think they choose a different outsourced competitor; they likely insource admins who are proficient with web security.

Some admins use Cloudflare DNS but not the proxy. This enables them to be able to simply and quickly flip a switch on-the-fly when the load exceeds a threshhold. That can also be scripted to happen automatically. Then visitors are not burdened by Cloudflare most of the time. Some admins also know how to configure CF to not block indiscriminantly, but I think that control only available to whitelist the Tor network not the other groups who face discrimination.

Cloudflare is a walled garden that excludes people.

Many would say it’s fair enough if the private sector excludes people because people have an equal right to not patronize private businesses. But when a government has a human rights obligation to serve the whole public, it’s obviously an injustice for some demographics of people to be blocked from access to a public resource that was financed with public money.

Thanks for the link.

Though I have to say it’s disturbing that an official public service is proxying through Cloudflare (which makes access exclusive). At least I was able to get some info from this link: http://web.archive.org/web/20240325210211/https://www.eccbelgium.be/contact

As far as we know, Google is not giving up any data. The crawler still must store a copy of the text for the index. The only certainty we have is that Google is no longer sharing it.

Here’s the heart of the not-so-obvious problem:

Websites treat the Google crawler like a 1st class citizen. Paywalls give Google unpaid junk-free access. Then Google search results direct people to a website that treats humans differently (worse). So Google users are led to sites they cannot access. The heart of the problem is access inequality. Google effectively serves to refer people to sites that are not publicly accessible.

I do not want to see search results I cannot access. Google cache was the equalizer that neutralizes that problem. Now that problem is back in our face.

From the article:

“was meant for helping people access pages when way back, you often couldn’t depend on a page loading. These days, things have greatly improved. So, it was decided to retire it.” (emphasis added)

Bullshit! The web gets increasingly enshitified and content is less accessible every day.

For now, you can still build your own cache links even without the button, just by going to “https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:” plus a website URL, or by typing “cache:” plus a URL into Google Search.

You can also use 12ft.io.

Cached links were great if the website was down or quickly changed, but they also gave some insight over the years about how the “Google Bot” web crawler views the web. … A lot of Google Bot details are shrouded in secrecy to hide from SEO spammers, but you could learn a lot by investigating what cached pages look like.

Okay, so there’s a more plausible theory about the real reason for this move. Google may be trying to increase the secrecy of how its crawler functions.

The pages aren’t necessarily rendered like how you would expect.

More importantly, they don’t render the way authors expect. And that’s a fucking good thing! It’s how caching helps give us some escape from enshification. From the 12ft.io faq:

“Prepend 12ft.io/ to the URL webpage, and we’ll try our best to remove the popups, ads, and other visual distractions.”

It also circumvents #paywalls. No doubt there must be legal pressure on Google from angry website owners who want to force their content to come with garbage.

The death of cached sites will mean the Internet Archive has a larger burden of archiving and tracking changes on the world’s webpages.

The possibly good news is that Google’s role shrinks a bit. Any Google shrinkage is a good outcome overall. But there is a concerning relationship between archive.org and Cloudflare. I depend heavily on archive.org largely because Cloudflare has broken ~25% of the web. The day #InternetArchive becomes Cloudflared itself, we’re fucked.

We need several non-profits to archive the web in parallel redundancy with archive.org.

Bingo. When I read that part of the article, I felt insulted. People see the web getting increasingly enshitified and less accessible. The increased need for cached pages has justified the existence of 12ft.io.

~40% of my web access is now dependant on archive.org and 12ft.io.

So yes, Google is obviously bullshitting. Clearly there is a real reason for nixing cached pages and Google is concealing that reason.

This is probably an attempt to save money on storage costs.

That’s in fact what the article claims as Google’s reason. But seems irrational. Google still needs to index websites for the search engine. So the storage is still needed since the data collection is still needed. The only difference (AFAICT) is Google is simply not sharing that data. Also, there are bigger pots of money in play than piddly storage costs.

What happens if you use cURL? The link you just posted has the same problem for me (same host).

Is that link tor-hostile? I just get a blank page (which is expected since I have images disabled). But then I ran:
torsocks curl -I https://midwest.social/pictrs/image/4f02113b-f999-4992-bb9c-93ecc9470bd8.png
to get the image size, and got zero:

HTTP/2 405
server: nginx
date: Sun, 08 Oct 2023 12:43:23 GMT
content-length: 0
vary: Origin, Access-Control-Request-Method, Access-Control-Request-Headers
allow: GET
access-control-expose-headers: allow

Ah, that’s interesting. My cases were pro se so I had no lawyers fees. The costs of filing the court case and serving the defendant were always covered by the loser in my cases.

My European lifestyle differs from that of the US largely because of Europe’s lack of remedies for individuals who are damaged. In the US you can fearlessly enter contracts & loosely buy any product/service you want because consumer protections are far superiour for consumers who are willing to take action.

Europe’s style of consumer protection ignores the individual. If many consumers get burnt/scammed by the same supplier, regulators will take action on behalf of the people if there’s sufficient critical mass of people affected. And when a fine hits, the victims still get no compensation – just satisfaction of knowing the baddy was corrected. More commonly you get burnt in a one-off transaction in which case you’re a neglegible case.

This means I’m incredibly cautious about who I do business with in Europe. I do not front money to contractors. If a deal seems too good to be true, I walk. When there is no confidence in consumer protection, fewer transactions happen. And now that I see how unenforced the GDPR is, I distrust data controllers with my data and often opt not to transact at all for that reason.

So it doesn’t exist and you have no statistics to support your claim beyond personal anecdotes.

Trusting the accuracy of my experience is a problem for you, not me. I’ve seen the dysfunctionality many times over 1st hand & I’ve often heard other GDPR complainants say the same. I’ve been to privacy conferences where speakers talk about how their complaint citing many different violations would be acted on on the basis of just one of the violations. Someone from Noyb said a DPA cherry-picked 1 out of 6 or so violations and enforced it. But then the other violations simply got ignored. And their complaint about the ignored complaints was also ignored. I’ve seen the same, where the front desk gave a bogus rationale that (even if correct) could only possibly refute 1 out of my ~8 or so cited violations.

The problem is widespread enough that Digital Courage plans to ask the EU to write a new law that actually forces DPAs to enforce article 77. Watch for it.

Most EU countries have civil law so other courts decisions are not legally binding, only the word of the law is.

The word of law can be very ambiguous. Even in Europe. It still needs interpretation.

This is what happened when a data subject demanded that a data controller list who they share the data with. The letter of the GDPR law says they only have to mention categories of info that’s shared, not who it is shared with. So the data controller refused the request. That clause was recently (this year) “interpretted” such that data controllers actually do have to state who they share with (which contradicts the word of law). It’s a good outcome for consumers, but a contradiction that proves you cannot rely on the word of law in Europe.

It doesn’t seem to mention courts at all.

You can ask the source’s author (Noyb) directly yourself how an Austrian court decision had EU-wide impact.

Nonsense. Of course it is. I’ve sued several corporations in the US. It’s trivially easy. Fill out a form, submit with $50—90 in fees, get those fees back when you win (and you win by default if the other party does not show up). I even sued a major bank for under $70 once. Won, got awarded court fees, and got paid. It was simple. It’s even standard on the court complaint form to ask for interest compensation for the duration of the dispute & that’s typically awarded as well. No case is too small or too big to get a remedy in the US. I’ve tested this in two different states.

Getting remedies like this is impossible in Europe. European courts are useless for any case under €10k. I’ve been ripped off by rogue contractors & others in amounts of ~€3k-7k. Had solid evidence but the court system is designed to penalize everyone involved. If you have a case worth less than €10k in Europe, your best move is to eat the loss and forget about court. Take it on the chin because you’ll lose even more if you chase it. Under €10k you can get what Europeans call a “cerimonial win”, where the judge says your right, but your costs still match or exceed the amount of the dispute.

There’s also an upper limit in Europe. Class action lawsuits→ non-existent.

I’ve been ripped off in both continents several times. In the US I always get a remedy via various different channels, some of which work before things even get to court. In Europe I always have to eat the loss. Exceptionally I had one court case in Europe, won, but still had to pay for my own registered letter expenses despite the fact that the wrongdoing by the other party was what forced me to send reg’d letters. Legal advisors told me even though the judge agreed with me in the verbal judgement, I would likely have to pay all the court costs when the written judgement arrives (as a winning defendant!). I got lucky and the plaintiff had to cover the court costs in my case. This is somewhat exceptional.

I’m aware of enforcementtracker.com which is used to show that some cases are cherry picked for enforcement. 2000 cases is an embarrassment. I would love to see an “unenforcement·com” service where we can all publish our reports that get irrationally dismissed or mothballed. I’ve filed reports on dozens of #GDPR violations over the years and not a single act of enforcement resulted. One report was dismissed instantly by a 1st tier office worker on bogus rationale.

To worsen matters and exacerbate the problem, some member state’s DPAs operate in a non-transparent fashion so your report is concealed even from yourself and you get zero progress information or interaction. You only get notified in the end if an enforcement action was taken. They’ve never contacted me to provide more info on any of my reports either, which suggests no slight amount progress either.

How do Austrian court proceedings affect what is happening in other countries?
Afaik the only court that would directly affect the legal situation of other countries ist the ECJ.

That’s beyond me. I recall reading about that decision that came out of some high court in Austria and the report said that it set a precedence for the whole EU.

What I’ve seen in the US is that any lawyer can use any other case as a precedent for the court to consider even if the case happened in a different state, but there are varying degrees of utility. The lower the court, the less weight the result carries. And when a result from a different jurisdiction is used, it still has merit but less so than cases in the same jurisdiction.

I know in Europe it’s the same as far as highness of a court & proportional weight. The lowest of court decisions are used in aggregate. But I’m a bit fuzzy on crossing jurisdictional boundaries on EU-wide law.

Note that the GDPR has a specific consistency clause. Outcomes in different member states must be consistent for similar violations. Perhaps the Austrian decision is relevant EU-wide because of this consistency requirement.

Indeed Europe makes a lot more progress from the point of view of human beings (as opposed to the point of view of corps). But it’s worth noting that Europe can’t actually make effective use of their legislation. No teeth.

Take the #GDPR for example. EU courts are weak, so when your GDPR rights are violated in Europe you have no recourse. You can file a complaint with the DPA under article 77, but the DPA just sits on these complaints because there is no law that forces DPAs to act on article 77 complaints. The GDPR says you can take direct action in court, but the Austrians have neutered that option. Someone sued a GDPR offender, an Austrian court sided with the victim, but then the victim was still forced to eat his own legal costs! That precedent-setting decision killed the only means for remedy.

A courtroom victory in Europe is purely symbolic. The winner still loses from a cost standpoint.

The US is much better w.r.t court actions. Court cases are cheap & easy to open. When you win, the loser pays the legal costs. it works really well. But the problem is there are no decent laws in the US to empower people to take legal action.

What we need is EU legislation with a US court system.

Those EU lobbyists have less capability. They cannot finance a campaign for a politician, can they?

The US has #CitizensUnited.

The US also has corporate lobbyists who use fraudulent techniques such as writing thousands of letters from fake people (they got caught doing this on the #netneutrality issue whereby Congress got thousands of letters appearing to be from individual human beings who all opposed network neutrality – LOL). Are EU corporate lobbyists willing to partake in such blatant fraud?

Biggest lobby in the US → #NRA. The NRA owns about ½ the politicians. And since the NRA are right-wing extremists who work with #ALEC (right-wing lobby & bill mill), they push everything in favor of big corps and against human beings. They block progress.

“The trend of “autobesity” is forcing car park providers to think of new ways to accommodate larger cars, such as introducing wider bays.”

That’s the most disgusting part of this. They are adapting the infrastructure to accommodate the child killers when the sensible approach is #fuckBigCars.

#fuckCars in general.

Indeed. What happened with cars in the US is an “arms race” on the road. Everyone wants to be in the bigger car so they just get bigger and bigger and reach a point where that e=mc² equation is pegged.

max selfishness → max energy

As expected, right-wing U.S. republicans disproportionately drive big cars. While liberals tend to favor small cars or bicycles.