For example, who is the shipping company to say that “I Claudius” isn’t a real name?
Not that it doesn’t happen (see below) but I was thinking more legal requirements, not company rules.
Now granted it certainly would be highly unusual to have a single letter first name and their software may not even allow it on the presumption there are none. I write software and I make similar presumptions on interfaces as to the shape and form of data being input.
If generic mailings can be sent to “Current Resident” at a given an address, there’s no reason for them to offer this slap in the face by refusing to ship to what they assume is an initial – or even a complete pseudonym, for that matter.
Wouldn’t be the first time large entities and individuals are under different rules.
Mass mailers tie back to a company who governments likely feel they can find and punish if they need to. But I’ve never seen these sorts of mailings crossing international boundaries so each country’s internal rules are their own.
That being said, I’ve shipped stuff within the US to people who I only knew them by their screen name. So I put that on the box and let 'er rip. No issues thus far. Who’s to say whether its a company name or person’s name or what and the USPS does not appear to care. Now, if you sent some no-no items, then they are going to care and may hit you with whatever law you might be breaking when you addressed a package w/ a screenname. (EDIT- If such a law exists)
How many people with eccentric legal names can’t receive packages because of this idiotic prejudice?
I wouldn’t know. Never studied the matter. But a quick search indicates that there are a number of laws that are in place, state-by-state, in the US for names that would nominally prevent the issue.
No hyphens/asterisks or accent marks or numerals for example. Some states ban non-English characters all together. Some states limit the combined characters of first and middle name; others limit the character count of the first and middle name individually.
Famous bad people are banned as names. There is even a comic about this topic; you might can name your child DROP ALL TABLES and have your laughs about preventing SQL injection in your state of residence.
Some states, like California, allow initialisms (the name for single-letter names apparently) for the first name. Most I think allow it for the middle name. Federal systems likely will hiccup on it and you’ll have to go through special processes.
Now, if you think this is rough, apparently Iceland, Denmark, and Portugal have lists you must pick from. In Iceland and Denmark, parents must obtain written approval if the desired name is not on the list. In Portugal, the name has to match the gender of the child and most common English names are considered too foreign and are rejected.
In so far as Companies, they may not accept single letter names, regardless of whether the name is legal or not. I see one company, Priceline, who someone asserts will not let him buy plane tickets through them due to having an initialism. I have no idea if this practice is legal and, again, it may matter by state. California might allow such names but X company operates in Utah where its not lawful to supply an initialism where legal names are required by the state and initialisms are not allowed.
Price of being eccentric. Ergo some nations like Sweden consider it unlawful to give a child a name which causes discomfort. A name that would cause issues for them using services under their legal name and make all such interactions burdensome would likely fall under this rule.
As for the fees, in every other online transaction I’ve seen, the charge wasn’t made until the package was shipped. (I’ve been told by online retailers that such is a legal requirement, even.)
It may be a legal requirement where those retailers are located. In the US, state law is usually the predominant governing force for businesses and I would imagine this sort of rule would be found therein.
It may even be a matter of interpretation of older laws regarding “rendering payment at time of sale” and when the state considers the “sale” to have occurred (and thus when a whole host of other laws may also come into play regarding seller and buyer responsibilities).
Remember that for nearly 100 years, mail-order sales from catalogs were the only form of remote ordering. Obviously, it is impossible to render payment at time of shipping in any sort of timely manner (letter to you informing you product is ready for shipping, letter w/ money sent back). Ergo laws on POD (pay on delivery), deposits, et al. Thus, in the last 30 years, some states may have updated their law as they saw problems/needs/votes-to-earn and other states have not.
In the case of varying exchange rates, it still makes no sense, because I’ve seen numerous online purchase situations where rates were effectively frozen at the moment of purchase.
While I have dealt with international ordering many times, I honestly cannot say what the law or even normal process in this instance would be. I used credit card and, if this or any other sort of situation arose, I would have challenged the charge. It never happened to me so I never had to explore this issue in depth.
Do you have any suggestions on how else I might obtain a Pioneer, whilst being sure of its security?
The Pioneer explicitly? No. But perhaps this is a learning opportunity?
I built my freedombox off a fresh Debian install on a virtual machine in one of my servers. VM makes for a very easy way of backing up, testing, and breaking FB without data loss or painful headaches of trying to fix it (and I have broke the crap out of it - Matrix Federation Issue and Cloudflare)
VM’s can be run on a hypervisor or from inside most modern desktop OSs using VirtualBox, QEMU, Hyper-V, etc.
Or, if you have an old computer and don’t want to fool with virtualization, then wipe and install a compatible base OS of choice on said old device and go from there. Any 64bit desktop in the last decade is likely to meet/exceed a Pi4 for performance in a headless configuration.
Sometimes, old machines are getting tossed out. In exchange for providing the organization with positive destruction of their data and showing them good hardware hygiene prior to disposal, you could get a free computer. Churches, small non-profits, schools, etc are often guilty of this sort of practice and can use our knowledge and assistance for the betterment of society.
Finally, you could acquire another SBC (Single Board Computer) of similar price and build your FB thereon.
As far as being sure of its security, that depends on your threat model. I’m not going to bother with nation-state actors and para-national entities. If your threat is from them, then I’m likely the enemy feeding you bad data.
Obviously, if you have an old machine or get one for free from at random, the chances are not low that someone has accidentally infected the OS with your standard malicious internet STD. Your wipe of the disk with ones and zeros should take care of that. A factory new SBC with some sort of onboard flash storage should be clean; others work like the Pi and use a MicroSD for the OS/storage.
Chances are very low BIOS was compromised. But any large production machine or gaming board, firmware is likely available to restore original firmware and BIOS. Most resilience measures work at hiding files from the OS (ie rootkit) or loading them on a partition a factory wipe wouldn’t touch (ie, the factory reserve partition itself). Since we’d be blasting the entire drive, top to bottom, with a DoD-style wipe and loading a compatible OS from a USB or disk made on another machine, this should not be a problem either.
The documentation for the build-yourself process was good and the forums here contain more than a few of us who have built ground up so you are not alone in the woods there.