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.

  • lemmyreaderEnglish
    14•8 months ago
    • Most folks will probably freak out when they see a terminal window (“DOS box”) on a computer.
    • Most folks in my country have no idea that there is something else than WhatsApp as alternative to SMS.
    • Whenever I’ve tried explaining to people that stuff on their website violates privacy or when I try to explain why they are having email delivery problems almost always results in permanent silence or disbelief.

    Technology appears to be a scare factor for a lot of people. But in this case the librarian maybe thought that Ethernet was only for their qualified IT department to use.

    • @[email protected]English
      3•8 months ago

      Most folks will probably freak out when they see a terminal window (“DOS box”) on a computer.

      Many many moons ago I was working at a small mom and pop operation that used ancient PCs to run their registers. The entirety of the front end ran on a 3.5" floppy. One night after closing, I exited to the CLI and opened edit. I typed in “HELP, STEVE BROKE ME” and went to the back to count my drawer. The shift manager had a proper shit fit.

      “What are you editing?!? If you break this machine the boss is going to have your head, it’ll cost thousands to have someone come out and fix it!”

      I calmly exited back to CLI and ran the front end exe. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯