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.
We are in a public community on the open Internet here where the following is written in the sidebar :
Tor was created by the USA military and the USA government has funded with millions of dollars. Many years ago Tor had a negative word association to it. But not so much anymore. Countless volunteers run Tor nodes from home, and Tor is not that slow anymore as it used to. I use Tor myself because I strongly dislike all the tracking, snooping and scandals by large and even small companies. The Clearnet Internet has become a disastrous place :(
It’s a good point about the irrational Tor hostility. But note the more perverse absurdity with his comment: that a public library is “his lawn”. If his inability and unwillingness to equally serve the whole public would be just in the private sector, there would be no issue because everyone he disservices can refuse to do business with him.
What’s sickening here is he said “I’m someone in IT for a Public Library”. So he is operating a public service in an exclusive manner telling people /get off his lawn/, which was financed with public money. And ~7+ of 8 people are okay with that.
In that sense, it implies that we were encroaching on his space, when in fact he entered this thread (like his handle: a bulldozer) to demand that people recognize an approach to sysadministration that does not respect equal rights, privacy, or the environment, and ultimately undermines human rights and promotes consumerism to ease his job at his competency level, as if the public is expected to serve him. It’s not his lawn in either sense of the meaning.
He made it quite he expects everyone to go through hoops to make his job convenient when he said:
“That doesn’t change the fact that Networks and Systems are not configured for your convenience”
It would be a malpractice of security. Security is about confidentiality, integrity, and availability. To reduce availability needlessly is to work against security. If availability were not essential to security, then you would just unplug the all machines, making the internet unusuable to everyone, and call it “secure”. A competent admin can securely offer internet service to people without phones, and people without a wifi card.