Yoz reports on the efforts of London’s Orthodox Jews to erect an eruv, a symbolic shelter that allows the Orthodox to carry things around on the Sabbath (you aren’t supposed to carry things outside of your home on the Sabbath, an eruv symbolically extends your home’s boundary to cover your neighborhood). Unfortunately, the eruv-masters have decided to use a proprietary software hack to warn those who rely on the eruv about failures:
Thing is, those wires and poles are fragile, so the eruv has to be checked every week. If there’s a problem, the whole community has to be alerted so that we don’t end up using an eruv that isn’t there. This is where the website comes in – in the top-left corner of the front page you’ll see a traffic light image and some text that indicates (this week anyway) that the eruv is up and running.
What’s that? You can’t see it? Ah. That’ll be because you’re using Mozilla. Or Safari. Or a phone browser. Or anything that isn’t MSIE. Or you’re running MSIE with Javascript turned off. Or you’re a disabled person using a browser with extra accessability features, and now you’re really annoyed because the main recipients of the benefits of the eruv are, of course, disabled people. The silliest thing here is that the web page seems to be dynamically-generated anyway (or, at least, hand-edited at least once a week)
The part I don’t get: if you’re not supposed to operate a computer on the Sabbath, how are the Orthodox meant to load the webpage before venturing out of doors with parcels?