Interesting perspective, but I’d tend to argue that the technologies such as WiFi have massively increased inclusiveness and accessibility for magnitudes more people than it has raised issues for.

Not in the slightest¹. It has reduced inclusiveness. The groups being excluded were previously given full and equal access. To argue that nighttime access is possible is to inherently advocate for exclusive access to those who would sit on the sidewalk with their device while people who need access by other means are denied. What a bizarre and obscure corner case. It’d be somewhat elitist to be selective like that. Human rights calls for equal access to public services (UDHR Art.21¶2). That means if a service cannot be offered to all demographics it should be offered to no one.

It’s really hair-splitting esoterics to be concerned about what library access there is at night time on the sidewalk. Maybe it’s fair enough to say outside of hours there is no sense of equal access. I don’t want to die on the nighttime access hill either way. My post concerns equality during the day when the library doors are open. If there really is a notable need for nighttime access from the sidewalk, that can also be deployed in an egalitarian way by mounting exterior ethernet ports and removing the captive portals.

(edit)¹ well, Wi-Fi in the 2000s was inclusive because it did not generally come with a captive portal and it was offered in parallel to ethernet. Having Wi-Fi is an essential part of being inclusive now that wi-fi-only devices exist. But the way they are doing it in 2024 is exclusive, depending on the library. Some libraries still today do not have captive portals but that’s becoming more rare as libraries prioritize a paperless agreement above equal access.

I am also concerned with outsourcing. But worried about cloudflare are pretty far down the list. Adobe controlled DRM on most ebooks, and even third party cloud based catalogues, are way more concerning.

You’re thinking about the barriers and inconveniences to you personally. But when I speak about exclusivity, I’m talking about different demographics of people getting different treatment and different service. It’s unacceptible for a public service to say “sorry, some people just do not make the cut for the profile of those we are including.. our public service is only for people who subscribe to private GSM service” (precisely the demographic less in need of public service). It’s better to pull the plug to ensure equality than to create unequal access.

The DRM problem is not a problem of exclusivity w.r.t the public library, AFAICT, because the library secures whatever DRM rights are needed equally for all patrons. DRM does not cause someone who cannot afford a mobile phone to be refused service. Unless a DRM mechanism were to require an SMS verfication -- then I would be with you on that because that would be discriminatory and exclusive. Although I’ve heard that some forms of DRM prevent reading a page more than once. I can imagine that someone with an impairment of some kind might need to read a page more times than someone else to absorb the same book. In that case, DRM would indeed be adding to the exclusivity problem and would need a remedy in that regard. If a library could not negotiate an egalitarian deal in that case, then the egalitarian remedy is to drop that book from the library’s catalog completely, as that would ensure equal access.

Lets face it, the half dozen people per million (if that) who care about the FLOSS status of thier WiFi hardware’s firmware, probably are technically capable enough to find a way to access library resources securely more than most people!

It’s not a technical problem. It’s an ethical problem. When a public funded service is forces people to run proprietary non-free software on their own devices, it’s an abuse of public funding to needlessly force people into the private sector. In the US, the American Library Association has a bill of rights that states people are not to be excluded from the library based on their views or beliefs. Designing a library to only cater for people who are ethically okay with running non-free proprietary software would undermine that principle. It would be comparable to a public service denying service to vegans because of their ethical viewpoints.

Wouldn’t direct access to a library’s network via Ethernet in an uncontrolled manner pose a security risk though?

You would have to detail why. Ethernet offers /more/ security by not exposing users’ traffic and by avoiding MitM to a reasonable extent. It’s far easier to spoof a Wi-Fi AP from next door or even a block away than it would be to to plant an ethernet attached MitM box, which means getting behind the drywall or breaking into a utility room. Not to mention the mass surveillance of all iOS devices collecting data, timestamps, location of every other WiFi device in range and feeding that to Apple. Ethernet is trivially immune to that collection, whereas Wi-Fi users are exposed without a countermeaure. They can dynamically change their MAC daily or whatever but that’s not the only data being collected by Apple.

(edit) It’s worth noting as well that the NSA actually advises people not to use Wi-Fi.

Also, while propriety Wi-Fi and other technology-related solutions are sometimes frustrating, many libraries are ultimately budget constrained, making the use of standardized solutions far more economical than custom ones.

Economics does not justify excluding some demographics of people¹. If a public funded service cannot offer service in an equitable way, it’s better to not offer the service at all. When a public library offers a service, assumptions are then made in other contexts that the whole public has that access. Governments operate on the assumption that people they serve have access, and they use that assumption to remove analog means of contact and service. Some government offices have already closed their over-the-counter service. How was it that they could afford it previously but not anymore? Those budgets are themselves set by assumptions, like assumptions that everyone carries a mobile phone.

¹ exceptionally, public funding cannot for example cover every heart transplant everyone needs. But the library does not face those kinds of extremes. Ethernet cable is cheap enough. Getting people to agree to terms of service the old fashioned way (paper) is cheap enough. Priorities have to be really screwed up to be willing to exclude someone from service to save money on paper agreements.

Some of them do, while some libraries proactively take steps to /block/ people who make egress Tor connections from the library’s network, which is a revolting contrast to the librarians who care. The same libraries who block Tor also impose SMS verification on Wi-Fi users. Note that article is US based and only the US has a “Library Bill of Rights”. Outside the US it’s quite a different story.

I wonder if it’s because privacy is in such a poor state of affairs in the US to start with that the US libraries are motivated to give some refuge.

Hate to be a party pooper but the author is a bit off. From the article:

It’s a place I can get free wifi and where I don’t have to explain myself to anyone in any way.

This is precisely where libraries demonstrate poor governance.

First of all by offering Wi-Fi and not ethernet the library discriminates against people with old hardware, people who oppose the non-FOSS firmware that Wi-Fi cards depend on as well as those who don’t want to expose their traffic to all eavesdroppers in range and those who prefer to avoid spoofed APs and those who would rather be less wasteful with energy. I do not think I’ve encountered any library in the past decade that intentionally offer ethernet. The very few I’ve encountered with open ethernet ports apparently offer it by accident (ports that were likely meant for the libraries own assets but unused and left inadvertently connected).

Even if you are in the included group who are happy to see ethernet users marginalised, among Wi-Fi users are those who are discrimated against because they do not have a mobile phone, thus cannot get past the Wi-Fi captive portal that demands SMS verification. Which also inherently discriminates against people whose devices cannot handle captive portals as well. So libraries are less of a refuge from corporate bullshit than they were in the past.

And that we can do it without a profit motive, simply because we think that’s the way it ought to be.

It’s great that the library itself is non-profit. But that only mitigates part of the problem brought by corporate commercial greed. The library needs to evolve to:

• help people find refuge from tech giants, which means not imposing mobile phones on the public and ideally go as far as offering access to FOSS PCs. It should be mostly FOSS PCs, and perhaps 1 or 2 Windows and MACs for those who have various special needs. Most libraries are 100% MS Windows with Chromium (possibly Firefox as an alternative) and the search engine default is Google. So library visitors are still being immersed in the same exploitive commercial environment that dominates homes and workplaces.
• the library blocks Youtube front-ends like Invidious but not Youtube, which ensures delivering an a profitable audience to Google. I realise the library has to avoid copyright violations, but Invidious is not a clear offender. It’s murky gray area but the library should be fighting for the people considering Invidious nodes are not being shut down which highlights the weakness of Google’s position.
• mention of lending out Rokus is a double-edged sword. Yes it’s keeping pace with the times to get people access to streams but Roku is a smart TV which doubles as spyware designed to enrich corporations. I’m not sure if there is a FOSS alternative. I’m tempted to say Kodi but it would then have to be installed on portable hardware that the library could lend.
• cut ties with all e-book suppliers who lock their books up into Cloudflare’s exclusive walled garden. Cloudflare should not be a gatekeeper for who gets access to e-books.

Our governmental structures and agencies should not be in the service of business,

Indeed. But when a library excludes those without mobile phones, they are serving the telephony industry and undermining the human right to equal access to public services.

The author himself, J.Hill, deployed this blog from a website that is inside an exclusive walled garden that discriminates against some demographis of people. I agree with his push to defend libraries from right-wing assholes and in that sense we are united. But a fight is also needed within the library systems to stop libraries from discriminating against some classes of people. They are outsourcing their technology to tech giants who have made library access exclusive.

In that sense, it implies that we were encroaching on his space, when in fact he entered this thread (like his handle: a bulldozer) to demand that people recognize an approach to sysadministration that does not respect equal rights, privacy, or the environment, and ultimately undermines human rights and promotes consumerism to ease his job at his competency level, as if the public is expected to serve him. It’s not his lawn in either sense of the meaning.

He made it quite he expects everyone to go through hoops to make his job convenient when he said:

“That doesn’t change the fact that Networks and Systems are not configured for your convenience”

I can imagine that the guy wants to secure his network and is maybe paranoid about people breaking in which seems fair to me,

It would be a malpractice of security. Security is about confidentiality, integrity, and availability. To reduce availability needlessly is to work against security. If availability were not essential to security, then you would just unplug the all machines, making the internet unusuable to everyone, and call it “secure”. A competent admin can securely offer internet service to people without phones, and people without a wifi card.

It’s a good point about the irrational Tor hostility. But note the more perverse absurdity with his comment: that a public library is “his lawn”. If his inability and unwillingness to equally serve the whole public would be just in the private sector, there would be no issue because everyone he disservices can refuse to do business with him.

What’s sickening here is he said “I’m someone in IT for a Public Library”. So he is operating a public service in an exclusive manner telling people /get off his lawn/, which was financed with public money. And ~7+ of 8 people are okay with that.

I had a faraday phone case at one point. They also make jackets with faraday inside pockets. I quit using the faraday pouch because if you use that as a convenient off switch, the phone works harder to find a tower, draining batteries. So to save juice you need airplane mode. There’s probably still reason to use a faraday bag along with airplane mode, but since I’ve parted with a GSM chip as well, it’s just not worth it unless you’re someone like edward snowden.

That’s insufficient. Mobile providers are not even getting your location through that Google mechanism that feeds Google. Their towers track your location even if you have GPS off.

I always tap “disagree” to location svcs when turning GPS on and take a hit on slow positioning. But that only cuts Google off. To cut the mobile carriers off, I keep my phone in airplane mode and also keep the GSM chip slot empty. In fact I don’t even carry a gsm chip. I believe in this state I can make emergency calls (IIRC, airplane mode automatically gets disabled when an emergency number is dialed).

Yet a vast majority of people have no problem when people are forced to subscribe to mobile phone service:

https://infosec.pub/post/11658371

This kind of information should be startling enough to at least see the merit in not having a mobile phone subscription. But no, people will just say “that sucks” and continue to being the sucker while also expecting others to be equally naive or cavalier too.

from the article:

AT&T told The Register said it should not be blamed for the failure of those buying its data to obtain proper consent, and said it will fight the fine.

Private investigators are treated as legitimate consumers of that location data. An angry ex-boyfriend or ex-husband hired a PI to find out where his ex was, who then simply bought the location data from a mobile carrier. The guy used the info to find her and shoot her dead on the spot (headshot while she was driving a car). The data sharing was “legit” in that case, in the US where privacy laws are generally non-existent.

It’s strange how that murder case gets omitted in these articles about mobile carriers selling location data.

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.

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.

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:

Lifeline provides subscribers a discount on qualifying monthly telephone service, broadband Internet service, or bundled voice-broadband packages purchased from participating wireline or wireless providers. The discount helps ensure that low-income consumers can afford 21st century connectivity services and the access they provide to jobs, healthcare, and educational resources.

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.

You edited in the “wait five or ten minutes” after I had already replied.

I know five min was in the original version. Not sure if I added the ten but certainly it was not after you posted this. You are seriously paranoid and should get help for that.