I plugged into ethernet (as wifi w/captive portal does not work for me). I think clearnet worked but I have no interest in that. Egress Tor traffic was blocked and so was VPN. I’m not interested in editing all my scripts and configs to use clearnet, so the library’s internet is useless to me (unless I bother to try a tor bridge).

I was packing my laptop and a librarian spotted me unplugging my ethernet cable and approached me with big wide open eyes and pannicked angry voice (as if to be addressing a child that did something naughty), and said “you can’t do that!”

I have a lot of reasons for favoring ethernet, like not carrying a mobile phone that can facilitate the SMS verify that the library’s captive portal imposes, not to mention I’m not eager to share my mobile number willy nilly. The reason I actually gave her was that that I run a free software based system and the wifi drivers or firmware are proprietary so my wifi card doesn’t work¹. She was also worried that I was stealing an ethernet cable and I had to explain that I carry an ethernet cable with me, which she struggled to believe for a moment. When I said it didn’t work, she was like “good, I’m not surprised”, or something like that.

¹ In reality, I have whatever proprietary garbage my wifi NIC needs, but have a principled objection to a service financed by public money forcing people to install and execute proprietary non-free software on their own hardware. But there’s little hope for getting through to a librarian in the situation at hand, whereby I might as well have been caught disassembling their PCs.

  • coffeeClean@infosec.pubOPEnglish
    13·
    2 months ago

    Time to wake up to reality. Everyone has access, the method of access isn’t discriminating, nor do you have any say in it.

    That’s not reality. The reality is everyone has partial access (Firefox on a shared Windows PC only), while some people have full access via both public resources.

    If you want to gain anything from this conversation, try to at least come to terms with the idea that Firefox is not the internet. The internet is so much more than that. Your experience and information is being limited by your perception that everything that happens in a browser encompasses the internet.

    In other words, it’s public, free for all, and the way they set it up.

    It’s not free. We paid tax to finance this. The moment you call it free you accept maladministration that you actually paid for.

    If you don’t like the free service, don’t use it. It not being how you like it isn’t wrong in any way, that’s your problem.

    You’re confusing the private sector with the public sector. In the private sector, indeed you simply don’t use the service and that’s a fair enough remedy. Financing public service is not optional. You still seem to not grasp how human rights works, who it protects, despite the simplicity of the language of Article 21.