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.

  • Buelldozer@lemmy.today
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    6 months ago

    I apply QoS at the edge so wired or wireless doesn’t matter to us for performance but either one is still going to our Captive Portal and forcing you to agree to our ToS.

    Fun Fact: I started applying QoS at the edge because of the people dragging their laptops in so they could Torrent. They’d blow out our bandwidth for everyone else and we were racking up DMCA warnings from our ISP.

    • MehBlah@lemmy.world
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      6 months ago

      At the moment I have no control of the edge router. Its managed by windstream. The qos on the wireless is just on the guest wifi. Like I said soon I will have my own routers and then I can start to control traffic.