I really appreciate Hartmut's contribution here because I've been thinking of asking Shaw for new equipment after many years, so I'm glad to know the Hitron's are still a thing.
On the credit union front, I'm just glad that my credit union still has a web interface. Possibly I'm missing out on mobile cheque deposit via photographing and some other mobile specific features but the web interface gets the job done and I can do that from my all floss Power9 Raptor Computing systems Blackbird. (housed in an ATX case that Frantic Films threw away.)
If I had to go mobile only I'll be looking for another bank that still has a web interface. Hopefully we can count on that existing for decades to come given how slow banks can be to change.
I'm living day to day with a feature phone in my pocket instead of a smartphone, will be interesting to see how far and how long I can push that.
Got my first aftermarket, user-serviceable battery a few months ago. (battery life on this replacement has been disappointing, but I'm at least living the dream)
To the conversation I'll contribute two other cases of the push towards mobile devices that have irritated me in recent years.
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First, Ticketmaster and the Blue Bombers have made it very irritating to attend a football or soccer game without a smartphone running the proprietary Ticketmaster, "Blue Bomber" (a ticketmaster whitelabel) or Google Pay apps. I imagine True North (Jets/Moose) with Ticketmaster has done the same thing at their venue.
I believe it's possible to stand in a long customer service line on game day for a printed ticket, but I've just bent over and just used a casual (not day to day) smartphone to avoid that.
They use a time based token that updates on screen, making it non-printable by folks at home. I appreciate the business reason for this, there have been too many people victimized by ticket sale scams, and so there's going to be less victims when it's known that transfer of the time based code is required. I haven't heard of anybody transferring these time based codes outside the blessed system.
And at least I was savvy enough to figure out that I didn't need a data plan on said smartphone, that the time based ticket-token can be transferred to the Google Pay app which works entirely offline. Others may not have been prepared for that and landed in the long customer service line. There are people who own smartphones as their day to day phone and don't have data plans, believe it or not. (I know several).
I would just appreciate it if the protocols/standards for these time based tokens were open so they could be transferred to a fully floss stack token-wallet. Maybe this is already documented or reverse engineered out there, I haven't looked into it.
Though, can you imagine me popping open my Pinebook at the stadium gate and saying "scan this"?
Probably it would be more principled to just not attend. Can use my ears and take in the game free to air on 680 AM or walk into a sports bar. I could certainly find things to complain about if using a cable box and cable subscription or DRM streaming at tsn.ca .
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Second situation that irritated me was the required mobile app for verifying Manitoba vaccine cards.
(I think I posted this before).
It wasn't truly my itch to scratch because I didn't personally operate a venue required to perform verifications, but I felt sorry for this imposition of proprietary software and mobile devices on Manitoba restaurants and so forth.
With help from my fellow folks at Skullspace, we reverse engineered the Manitoba app. Which basically boiled down to discovering that the magic API URL was GET https://immunizationcard.manitoba.ca/api/verification/UUID with a simple JSON response payload.
(plus a redundant login auth layer that ends with a "authorization: Bearer " http header being included in the above)
Our work was featured on hackaday.com, including my proof of concept demo video https://hackaday.com/2021/08/19/manitoban-makes-open-software-demo-of-propri... https://github.com/markjenkins/immunizedshellscriptmb/blob/mainline/verifica...
But I never went further to document the login auth protocols or to make a full replacement app. As is the case for many hobby projects, I was satisfied to just get the proof of concept and key information out there for anyone else that wanted to take it further.
Adjacent to this was my experience as a card holder.
I didn't opt to receive a government printed card in the mail. I considered that a waste and had heard how they were scarce at first, so I said to myself, save it for others. Figured it wouldn't matter as well because the program would not be part of mainstream domestic life in Manitoba for very long. (was under a year in the end)
Though I didn't want to use a smartphone as a way to display my QR either.
There was no print button in the government website UI. I self-printed my QR anyway. Much later in the program they recognized that choice of card by mail or smartphone was a barrier for some people and added an official print button with a nice Manitoba logo in the design.
But, long before self-printing was officially recognized, I took myself as an experiment to see what life would be like as a weirdo with a self-printed QR instead of a government printed card or smartphone displayed QR.
There were three classes of experience.
1. To my pleasant surprise, the vast majority of venues that were actively verifying QR codes didn't treat me as a weirdo for self-printing a QR. Venue staff understood that optically scanning a QR printed on paper was no different than optically scanning a QR displayed on a phone or card. They scanned, they cross verified the name on my ID card and life was somewhat normal.
2. The other really common experience was venues not operating scanning equipment at all. They eyeballed the font and layout of my self printed QR just like they eyeballed the font and layout of anybody presenting a smartphone, just like they eyeballed the font and layout of anybody presenting a piece of plastic.
I had a private joke about this. I joked that maybe it was true that there was a microchip in the vaccines because serving staff showed remarkable computational power to eyeball a QR code, decode it and converse with the Manitoba government server.
Clearly many Manitoba businesses were not eager to roll out a fleet of smart phones to their staff. No enforcement effort was ever directed at small venues that asked customers for proof but didn't verify said proofs.
3. I can only remember two exceptions where self-printing my QR broke down. At one venue the lighting wasn't great and they just couldn't get a scan. Perhaps my self-print out was starting to wear at that point, (though with all the error correction in QRs that shouldn't have been a problem). It may have also been a network outage of some kind. I don't know. They were nice and admitted me. I later offered to dig up and boot up the casual smartphone in my bag to have that scanned instead.
Occasionally I would say to venues of type 2. "you're not going to scan that?".
This backfired on me only once.
I came back to a certain place on a different day and they grinded my gears back at me, saying they now would only accept the government printed card. I explained how the government printed card was opt-in and how it was an official part of the system that people could display QR codes and that it is up to venues to scan them. They gave me the business about how anybody could just print that and I was like "yes, that's right, anybody can replicate the look of these printed cards and QRs and you need to scan it if you're serious about verification".
That wasn't enough so I pivoted to "would it make you happy if I showed it to you on a smartphone through the official government app" and after much fumbling with a smartphone that I don't use day to day I was having trouble getting things open and finally they acknowledged that they now had a device of their own on site that they could use to scan. My paper copy got scanned, and I was able to stop feeling like a criminal.
Anyway, I could have avoided these two oddball experiences by just taking delivery of a government printed card, but it was interesting to see life without that or smartphone. I perhaps successfully educated one venue along the way as to how things worked, though with their veneration of the government printed cards I doubt they ever ended up scanning those.
Mark