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.
It’s their network that they are offering as a service, if they say no then no it is.
Private libraries are quite rare. I think only one employer I worked for had an on-site private library where the assets are not publicly owned. It’s rare. Most libraries are public.
My post is about public libraries, which were financed with public money. It’s worth noting the Universal Declaration of Human Rights:
That includes public libraries. It’s disgusting that you endorse discriminating against people without mobile phones and private subscriptions in the course of accessing public resources.
If you’re not trolling - poorly - then you obviously have massive issues. I would encourage you to seek out some help for those.
You have the right to access the internet through WiFi like everyone else. So where’s the problem?
That “right” is exclusively available to people who:
The Universal Declaration of Human Rights has no such limitation on Article 21.
Bruh it’s library Internet access, not a human rights violation
You need to read Article 21. And as you read it, keep in mind it’s a public library.
Libraries usually have computers available for use.
You are the one being obtuse.
The UDHR is not a treaty, so it does not create any direct legal bindings. The article you quote may have been excluded, overwritten or rephrased in your jurisdiction.
Sure, but where are you going with this? Legal binding only matters in situations of legal action and orthogonal to its application in a discussion in a forum. Human rights violations are rampant and they rarely go to The Hague (though that frequency is increasing). Human rights law is symbolic and carries weight in the court of public opinion. Human rights law and violations thereof get penalized to some extent simply by widespread condemnation by the public. So of course it’s useful to spotlight HR violations in a pubic forum. It doesn’t require a court’s involvement.
The judge who presided over the merits of the Israel genocide situation explained this quite well in a recent interview. If you expect an international court to single-handedly remedy cases before it, your expectations are off. The international court renders judgements that are mostly symbolic. But it’s not useless. It’s just a small part of the overall role of international law.
I doubt it. It’s been a while since I read the exemptions of the various rights but I do not recall any mods to Article 21. The modifications do not generally wholly exclude an article outright. They typically make some slight modification, such as some signatories limiting free assembly (Art.20 IIRC) to /safe/ gatherings so unsafe gatherings can be broken up. I would not expect to see libraries excluded from the provision that people are entitled to equal access to public services considering there is also Article 27:
“Everyone has the right freely to participate in the cultural life of the community, to enjoy the arts and to share in scientific advancement and its benefits.”
The European HR convocations take that even further iirc.
You are still citing the UDHR as it was law. It is not, so nobody needs to modify Article 21 to violate it as long as established law doesn’t recognize it.
If you really want to argue about general guidelines, the UDHR is inadequate because it’s just a draft. What you want is the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, which is its main successor, and is at least a treaty and also ratified by most countries in the world.
Still, ratifying a treaty still doesn’t make it established law, it’s just an obligation to implement the treaty as best as is possible into your domestic jurisdiction. Failure to do so will be met with finger-waggling at the next UN meeting, so it’s more of an apparatus of peer pressure than anything else.
I have to say I didn’t downvote you as you’ve been civil and informative so far. But I’m not sure how to cite/quote from the UDHR as though it’s not law. I named the article and pasted the text. For me whether the enforcement machinery is in force doesn’t matter w.r.t to the merits of the discussion. From where I sit, many nations signed the UDHR because it has a baseline of principles worthy of being held in high regard. When the principles are violated outside the context of an enforcement body, the relevance of legal actionability is a separate matter. We are in a forum where we can say: here is a great idea for how to treat human beings with dignity and equality, and here that principle is being violated. There is no court in the loop. Finger wagging manifests from public support and that energy can make corrections in countless ways. Even direct consumer actions like boycotts. Israel is not being held to account for Gaza but people are boycotting Israel.
I guess I’m not grasping your thesis. Are you saying that if a solidly codified national law was not breached, then it’s not worthwhile to spotlight acts that undermine the UDHR principles we hold in high regard?
I see a lot of downvotes on your comments on this thread and I wonder if it’s due to differences in nationality/geography/jurisdiction. In the USA I know we give free smartphones with working Wi-Fi to people with low incomes as a part of the lifeline program. Some of the libraries I’ve been to even have staff on hand to help low income people find out about these sorts of benefits, and even help them sign up. Maybe they don’t have this sort of program where you’re from?
And I know most people DO carry their phones with them wherever they go these days assuming they haven’t forgotten it somewhere.
Am I missing something? To me, in my area, these limitations would be a choice the user has made.
I see that the relevant websites (FCC and lifelinesupport.org) both block Tor so you can’t be poor in need of the Lifeline and simultaneously care about privacy. Many parts of the US have extremely expensive telecom costs. I think I heard an avg figure of like $300/month (for all info svcs [internet,phone,TV]), which I struggle to believe but I know it’s quite costly nonetheless. One source says $300/month is the high end figure, not an avg. Anyway, a national avg of $144/month just for a mobile phone plan is absurdly extortionate.
About Lifeline:
So they get a discount. But you say free? Does the discount become free if income is below a threshold? Do they get a free/discounted hardware upgrade every 2-3 years as well, since everyone is okay with the chronic forced obsolescence in the duopoly of platforms to choose from? In any case, I’m sure the program gets more phones into more needy hands, which would shrink the population of marginalized people. That’s a double edged sword. Shrinking the size of a marginalized group without completely eliminating it means fewer people are harmed. But those in that group are further disempowered by their smaller numbers, easier to oppress, and less able to correct the core of the problem: not having a right to be analog and be unplugged (which is an important component of the right to boycott).
This topic could be a whole Lemmy community, not just a thread. In the US, you have only three carriers: AT&T, Verizon, and T-Mobile. I’ve seen enough wrongdoing by all 3 to boycott all 3. I would not finance any them no matter how much money I have. T-Mobile is the lesser of evils but it’s wrong to be forced to feed any of the three as an arbitrary needless precondition to using the library’s public wifi. It’s absolutely foolish that most people support that kind of bundling between public and private services.
US govs do not (AFAIK) yet impose tech on people. I think every gov service in the US has an analog option, including cash payment options. That’s not the case in many regions outside the US. There are already govs that now absolutely force you to complete some government transactions online, along with electronic payments which imposes bank patronisation, even if you boycott the banks for investing in fossil fuels and private prisons. And if you don’t like being forced to use their Google CAPTCHA (which supports Google, the surveillance advertiser who participates in fossil fuel extraction), that’s tough. Poor people are forced to use a PC (thus the library) to do public sector transactions with the gov, as are a segment of elderly people who struggle to use the technology. There is also a segment of tech people who rightfully object, precisely because they know enough about how info traverses information systems to see how privacy is undermined largely due to loss of control (control being in the wrong hands). It’s baffling how few people are in that tech segment.
So the pro-privacy tech activists are united with the low-tech elderly and the poor together fighting this oppression (called “digital transformation”) which effectively takes away our boycott power and right to choose who we do business with in the private sector. A divide and conquer approach is being used because we don’t have a well-organised coalition. Giving the poor cheaper tech and giving assistance to the elderly is a good thing but the side effect is enabling the oppression to go unchallenged. When really the right answer in the end is to not impose shitty options in the first place. It’s like the corp swindle of forced bundling (you can only get X if you also take Y). You should be able to get public wifi without a mobile phone subscription.
The UDHR prohibits discrimination on the basis of what property you have. The intent is to protect the poor, but the protection is actually rightfully bigger in scope because people who willfully opt not to have property are also in the protected class.
It’s all quite parallel to Snowden’s take. The masses don’t care about privacy due to not really understanding it.
“Ultimately, arguing that you don’t care about the right to privacy because you have nothing to hide is no different than saying you don’t care about free speech because you have nothing to say.” ― Edward Snowden
The idea that activists need both free speech and privacy in order to fight for everyone’s rights is lost on people making the /selfish/ choice to disregard privacy. All those mobile phone users who don’t give a shit about mobile phones being imposed on everyone are missing this concept. The choice to have a mobile phone is dying. It’s gradually and quietly becoming an unwritten mandate.
Banking is also becoming bound to having a mobile phone. There are already banks who will not open account for those without a mobile phone. So we are losing the option to have a bank account but not a mobile phone.
Guess I should answer this. The enormous class of people with mobile phones (likely 100% of those in this channel) are happy to be in the included group and amid any chatter about expanding the included group to include those without a phone (a segment they do not care about), they think: “that extra degree of egalitarian policy to support a more diverse group will cost more and yield nothing extra to me; yet that extra cost will be passed on to me.”
Which is true. And very few people among them care about boycott power because it’s rarely used by willful consumerist consumers of tech and telecom svc. But the ignorance is widespread failure to realise that as mobile phones become effectively a basic requirement for everyone, the suppliers will have even less incentive to win your business. The duopolies and triopolies can (and will) increase prices and reduce service quality as a consequence of that stranglehold. Most people are too naïve to realise the hold-out non-mobile phone customers are benefiting them even from the selfish standpoint of the mobile phone customers. And the fact that they are paying an invisible price with their data doesn’t occur to most people either, or how that loss of privacy disempowers them.
They will pay more in the end than if they had supported diversity and egalitarian inclusion.
You can use it but on their terms. Your privacy doesnt mean anything to them, they are protecting themselves. Captive portal is likely making you agree to not abuse the service.
Also you’re choosing not to participate which is fair but they don’t need to support that.
Not without a phone.
Have you forgotten that an agreement can be made on paper?
Nothing about a captive portal requires wifi. There are many ways to get that agreement. Neglecting to make the agreement part of the ToS when you become a member is just reckless.
Their terms require a phone so yes, on their terms. Why would they make an exception for anyone?
Their captive portal requires wifi and thats all that matters. And why would they want to deal with paper agreements for WiFi?
You don’t have to be a member to use WiFi, someone else could have given you the password if there even is one, so ya even if you did agree when signing up it would make sense to still require that.
I implement these kind of setups including a couple libraries and while I would have Ethernet ports available if within budget, I would not allow you to bypass captive portal, the agreement, or traffic filtering. I don’t care what you are doing but I am required to try not to allow easy access to questionable content. If someone is doing something illegal it’s gonna involve the library if you get caught (that’s why the phone number but maybe they are just being shitty with it). Not worth the risk. Also a lot of those decisions are made by a board so being upset with the staff won’t accomplish anything. Wifi is cheap, pulling cable can be very costly in comparison and depending on building type can be hard, damaging or, not feasible. Those ports could also be broken because people don’t respect shit, that could also be the reason for their reaction.
This is all I got for you, good luck but if you want your privacy you’re likely going to have to go somewhere else.
I keep a copy of everything I sign. The ToS I signed on one library do not require a mobile phone. It’s an ad hoc implementation that was certainly not thought out to the extent of mirroring the demand for a mobile phone number into the agreement. And since it’s not in the agreement, this unwritten policy likely evaded the lawyer’s eyes (who likely drafted or reviewed the ToS).
Because their charter is not: “to provide internet service exclusively for residents who have mobile phones”.
Paper agreements:
That’s not how it works. The captive portal demands a phone number. After supplying it, an SMS verification code is sent. It’s bizarre that you would suggest asking a stranger in a library for their login info. In the case at hand, someone would have to share their mobile number, and then worry that something naughty would be done under their phone number, and possibly also put that other person at risk for helping someone circumvent the authentication (which also could be easily detected when the same phone number is used for two parallel sessions).
Exactly what makes it awkward to ask someone else to use their phone.
Then go sue them over their lack of Your Particular Setup-compatible wifi, I guess.