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.
I was not carrying my phone. Thus bypassing the reckless policy of a tax-funded public resource to exclusively serve people who entered the private marketplace to obtain mobile phone service, in violation of article 21¶2 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights:
“Everyone has the right of equal access to public service in his country.”
So the protected class they are discriminating against here is “doesn’t want to use wifi”?
You had the means to access the Internet, you chose not to use them.
The protected class is the poor. The UDHR specifically protects people from discrimination on the basis of property. You cannot treat someone different under the UDHR for owning less property than someone else with regard to all the rights enshrined in the UDHR. Only serving people who bought a mobile phone and paid for a subscription violates that provision.
I did not have a mobile phone on me. I could have gone home to fetch my phone because incidentally I happened to have a phone with service at home. But I would not have had time to return to the library and complete my task before it closed.
I’ve also gone over 6 months with no phone service at all sometimes. If I were in one of those time periods, connecting would have been impossible. My phone access is touch and go. I let my service die whenever nothing critical comes up that demands it for a period of time.
And I will do it again. Not having a phone is a goal I will continue to meet, off and on, because it’s important to periodically test whether we have a right to unplug. It’s especially important to test this if you live in a GSM registration part of the world.
I guarantee that a librarian would have helped you if you told them you didn’t have your phone on you.
I don’t buy your story because you’re trying to paint yourself as a victim of some nefarious scheme when in reality you wanted to use a free service in a way the provider doesn’t allow.
I did tell the 1st librarian I did not have a phone. It’s what led up to green lighting my request to plugin.
I’ve run into this at other libraries because I do not carry my phone. Whenever I ask how to get online without a phone, the answer is to use their PCs (if they exist, and if they are open [as they are closed part of the day]). That’s it. There is no upstream support call. They apparently don’t even give feedback to management that someone was denied access for not having a phone.
Did the library have the desktop set up for public use, as libraries all have nowadays?
Then they were providing you equal access to their internet connection, they just weren’t going to let you do it on your computer unless your computer connected to their internet connection by satisfying their security requirements.
I answered this in another reply. The PC room was closed.
In my area the PCs are closed part of the day for some reason (in several libraries), when the library is open for books and wifi. There are two sets of opening hours.
Why are you even in the library to begin with if you’re so opposed to how they manage their network?
If you want to complain, complain. Write to the city, start a petition, whatever.
But regardless of how it’s supposed to work legally, the day that you were in the library, there was a network security setting that was blocking you. You sought to get around that, and you’re not going to get any sympathy for trying to do so.
Just because it’s a public resource doesn’t mean you can break in after hours, and just because you don’t have a phone doesn’t give you permission to sidestep their security policies.
How does one know how they manage their network before entering the library? The libraries that have ethernet /never/ advertise it. Only wi-fi is ever advertised. I have never seen a library elaborate on their wifi preconditions (which periodically change). This info is also not in OSMand, so if you are on the move and look for the closest library on the map, the map won’t be much help apart from a possible boolean for wifi. Some libraries have a captive portal and some do not. Among those with captive portals, some require a mobile phone with SMS verification and some do not. But for all of them, the brochure only shows the wifi symbol. You might say “call and ask”, but there are two problems with that: you need a phone with credit loaded. But even if you have that, it’s useful to know whether ethernet is available and the receptionist is unlikely to reliably have that info. Much easier to walk in and see the situation. Then when you ask what will be blocked after you get connected, that’s another futile effort that wastes time on the phone. It really is easier and faster to pop in and scope out the situation. Your device will give more reliable answers than the staff. But I have to wonder, what is your objection to entering a library to reliably discover how it’s managed in person?
Everyone has access, phone or not, just not when the PC room sometimes is closed due reasons.
You don’t have 24/7 access rights as far as I’m aware.
That’s not equal access. Everyone has equal access to the PCs running Firefox, but not everyone has equal access to BYoD internet service.
Is someone claiming we only need Firefox? If so, then you won’t mind if we scrap wifi altogether, right? BYoD internet service enables people to keep a data store with them which then connects periodically to operate on the persistent data in a collaborative way, which also empowers people to control the applications that are installed. That’s a different public service for difference purposes than a shared PC where your data does not persist and you cannot control the apps.
You can’t claim shit about equality for all and access without materials, when discussing byod. Make up your mind.
Everyone has access, byod is covered for 99% as extra convenience.
You aren’t being treated poorly, instead, you have unreasonable expectations. You need to adjust those. You are not a victim, nor were you rights violated.
You tried to circumvent security when the computer room was closed.
The librarians education most likely doesn’t cover anything more than turning things off and on, he/she isn’t likely to understand what you were doing, and the equipment isn’t maintained by the librarians - it’s simply located there.
Data persists both in the cloud, or on a memory stick. Free options exist.
There is PC access, and then there is byod access. It’s a false dichotomy to demand choosing one or the other particularly when only one of the two is available to everyone, and harmful to people’s rights if you simultaneously design a system of workflow on the assumption that one replaces the other interchangeably.
They are different services for different purposes. Don’t let the fact that some tasks can be achieved with both services cloud the fact that some use-cases cannot.
Everyone has access to a PC running Firefox. Not everyone has BYoD WAN service access.
Firefox is not the internet.
It’s not just convenience. It’s the capability and empowerment of controlling your own applications. If the public PC doesn’t have a screen reader and you are blind, the public PC is no good to you and you are better served with BYoD service. If you need to reach someone on Briar, a Windows PC with only Firefox will not work.
This remains to be supported. I do not believe it’s reasonable to only serve people with mobile phones. Thus I consider it a reasonable expectation that people without a subscribed mobile phone still get BYoD WAN service.
None of the PCs in any library I have used will execute apps that you bring on a USB stick (but even if they did, the app you need to run may not be compatible with Windows). Also some library branches disallow USB sticks entirely. So a restricted Windows PC cannot replace controlling your own platform, regardless of the convenience factor.
(edit) But strictly about convenience, I also would not say it’s fair for a public service to offer extra convenience exclusively to people who have a subscribed mobile phone and not to those without one. That would still be unequal access even if you disregard the factors not related to convenience. It’s still discriminating against a protected class of people.
You don’t have to believe it - everyone still knows you are. Time to wake up to reality. Everyone has access, the method of access isn’t discriminating, nor do you have any say in it. In other words, it’s public, free for all, and the way they set it up.
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.
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.
It’s not free. We paid tax to finance this. The moment you call it free you accept maladministration that you actually paid for.
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.
Please cite the definition of public service that includes all the things you’ve described; access to the internet via Ethernet on a personal machine running the various software you mentioned.
Quote the passage that outlines those details.
Why not take it a step further? I can’t get to the library so they’re denying me my human rights by not running cables right to my house so I can access it without that restriction.
The proof is in the money trail. If the library’s funding traces to a tax-funded government, it is a public service that encompasses all services offered by that institution. It’s also in state or national law that legislates for libraries to exist, which differs from one state to another.
If you want to find a clause that says “only people with wifi hardware may access the internet, and only if they have a mobile phone”, I suspect you’ll have a hard time finding that. At best, I could imagine you might find a sloppily written law that says “libraries shall offer wifi” without specifying the exclusion of others. But if you could hypothetically find that, it would merely be an indication of a national or state law that contradicts that country’s signature on the UDHR. So it’s really a pointless exercise.
Still waiting on an answer that’s not just about evidence you couldn’t find and feel would be pointless, and for you to actually prove your bold, human rights violation claim…
So quote the specifics of what was funded as is relevant to your case.
Again, if they don’t run that line to my house, are they violating my human rights? Or are there boundaries around what defines the service?
Stop modifying your comment and answer my response.
Calm down. It’s a new comment that just came in so of course I’m going to edit it a few times in the span of the first minute or two as I compose my answer. If you wait five or ten minutes you’ll get a more finished answer.
Lol no, you edited it multiple times over the course of 7 minutes, radically changing the context of what I had already replied to.
That’s not the same as tweaking a few things within a minute or 2.
Edit: suddenly its 10 minutes? Why not just retcon your entire post? At least have the courtesy to note significant edits when you’ve already gotten a reply
My client says it was created at 21:24:02 GMT and modified at 21:25:12. Instead of using a stopwatch which you somehow screwed up, just mouse over the time. The popup will show you a span of 1 minute and 10 seconds.
(edit)
strange; after I refresh the screen the /create/ timestamp changed. Surely that’s a bug in Lemmy. The creation timestamp should never change.nvm… just realized I was looking at the wrong msg.Posted 24 minutes ago, edited 15 minutes ago.
I refreshed and watched you edit multiple times over that period.
Stop lying.
I said “wait five or ten minutes”. I’m seeing a 9m1s span. I don’t really feel compelled to be more accommodating than that. Maybe you can write to Jerry and ask to configure it so edits are blocked after 1 minute if it really bothers you. Otherwise if you don’t like the policy of the node, you are free to leave.