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.
Or you could just ask them to avoid confusion as it takes 5 seconds and they may have a way of doing things that you don't know about? It's respectful and it potentially saves you a lot of hassle if it doesn't work and you need to troubleshoot it.
Yeah. For all we know, there could be a sign in/out thing at the desk for if you use ethernet - She DID think OP was taking one of the library's cables after all, which implies the public has access, possibly through a sign in/out system
I’ve asked librarians a full range of tech questions about what works, what’s blocked, what’s allowed.. they /never/ have a clue because of outsourcing. Their guess is as good as mine. In the 90s, I would say you are spot on. Librarians should have answers. Things have evolved to where the policy is decided non-transparently, it’s outsourced to an unreachable company, and librarians are simply as uninformed as the public. Trial and error. If you read the AUPs it never says Tor is banned at libraries, for example, but they simply block it. Experimentation is the way people get answers in my area.
So knowing that librarians don’t have deep tech info, or even basic tech info, and that they also cannot escalate questions, talking to them is really where time is wasted.