this post was submitted on 29 Apr 2024
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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.

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[–] [email protected] 5 points 7 months ago

10+ years ago you had to bring your own ethernet cable to the University library because the WiFi couldn't handle all the students at peak times. Wo der if it's still the case.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 7 months ago (4 children)

If it was a publicly available Ethernet port, it was likely for public use. The fact that she thought it was malicious speaks to ignorance on her part, not yours.

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[–] [email protected] 4 points 7 months ago

I'm not surprised. I know people who don't even know what an ethernet cable is. I've worked enough IT to realize that a tangled mess of 6 cables can be as horrifying as a Predator to people. It doesn't help that everything is slowly going to POE, POE+ and even ++ now so it's doubling as power as well. In analog video days I could look at the back of a random device and instantly figure out it's purpose. That's rapidly becoming a rarity. For a worrisome section of the population, plugging in an ethernet cable is the equivalent of building a table or performing a back flip.

And when it comes to hacking, good god nobody knows anything. I remember we had a dozen students in high school (around 2000ish?) get suspended for "hacking" and really it was just that a section of the student body found a network storage location without any password protection and were using it as a flash drive on school grounds. Literally they just suspended anybody who signed their name on the homework assignments stored there.

The real crime was that drive had lunch pins for all the accounts in plain text to run their system, without a password!

[–] just_another_person 2 points 7 months ago

It's not the librarians issue to worry about. It's the IT team supporting your library. If there wasn't a sign that said "not for customer use", then it's fine.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 6 months ago

it's clearly there to be used, a lot of places have ethernet jacks for that...
the librarian is just a luddite and you probably had a black hoodie and a terminal open so she assumed you were selling fentanyl to pedophile ransomware communists...

[–] [email protected] 0 points 6 months ago

Idk what I read because it is so stupid.

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