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.

    • @[email protected]OPEnglish
      1•8 months ago

      You need to read Article 21. And as you read it, keep in mind it’s a public library.

      (edit) There was a day when black people were denied access to the library. I suppose you would have said “Bruh, denying books is not a human rights violation” without any kind of legal rationale that articulates the meaning of Article 21.

      Bizarre that so many here think it’s human-rights compliant to block poor people (those without phones) from public internet; who are in fact the people who need it most as governments are abolishing analog mechanisms of public service. Would be interesting to survey that same crowd on how many of them find it okay to block black people from publicly owned books. People can’t be this obtuse. It’s likely a high density of right-wing conservatives here, who understand human rights law but simply condemn anything they regard as competing with their privilege.