That’s a you and your hardware problem, not a public library IT problem. You need to purchase hardware that is adequately supported by your chosen Operating System.

Forcing people to buy more hardware is yet another variation of discrimination against the poor. Imposed needless consumerism is also reckless from an environmental standpoint. If you choose not to step your competency up to the level needed to serve the public without costing them more money, you’re only getting off the hook in the view of right-wing conservatives who are happy to have library service cheapened at the expense of equal rights.

Not being “your problem” is simply a problem of an ill-defined contract that allows irresponsible policy.

This is a you and your hardware problem. Buy hardware that is adequately supported by your chosen Operating System.

It’s not a hardware problem. It’s an ethics problem, and the problem is on your part whether you choose to acknowledge it or not. If you lack the higher level of competency needed to practice your trade ethically, you should try to gain the competency you need to be inclusive of people in different economic standings and diverse hardware.

This one is a semi-serious complaint however I’ve never seen a portal system where the Librarian’s didn’t have the ability to issue a day pass for use.

Not a single public library in my area has a day pass option as an alternative authentication. If the patron has no phone, the library helpless and the user is not getting online with their own device.

Aside from that you sound like someone who should be technically able to stand up an ephemeral phone number for the purpose of receiving SMS.

There is no way to get a phone or an active SIM chip gratis in my area. The only difference between a burner phone and a non-burner phone in my area is you quit using the burner phone early. It has all the same problems as a permanent phone. You can get a pinger number online, but it only works if you’re already online. Apart from that, your suggestion is absurd as an official policy in response to public complaint about phoneless people being officially excluded.

Same as above.

It fails here too, for the same reason.

What an absolutely petty complaint.

What an absolutely pathetic failure to support a claim to the contrary.

I’d bet that as soon as you enter a code your VPN stops being blocked. They’re not trying to block VPN they are preventing you from sidestepping their ToS.

This is not a /me/ problem. You are responding to a list of demographics of people who are excluded from a public service. If not every single person has a gratis VPN (and they don’t), this is a broken argument. To say every user must acquire a VPN because you cannot provide a means of access that thwarts the most trivial MitM possible is a reckless abandonment of duty.

I’ve dealt with Patrons like you before and the instant someone starts yammering at me about ClearNet / Tor I know exactly what kind of person I’m dealing with.

So your emotional bias adversely hinders your judgement and ability to service a diverse range of users. It shows.

You selected your path for whatever reasons you chose and the inconveniences that come with that path are yours to deal with. Suck it up buttercup, you weren’t promised that a privacy respecting internet lifestyle would be easy or convenient.

Inconveniences are borne out of the kind of incompetent infosec that you’re peddling. A competent tech firm can do this job without violating data minimisation principles and without violating Article 21 of the UDHR.

BTW if you’d plugged your laptop into one of my systems you’d have gotten vlan’d into the same Captive Portal System that the WiFi has which is precisely how any publicly available Ethernet port should function. Your little length of wires coated in vinyl with plastic shoved on the ends still wouldn’t have gotten you where you wanted to go.

And that would still be violating peoples’ Article 21 rights to equal access. Imposing a mobile phone is among the injustices I’ve mentioned. I would still favor the ethernet regardless of the captive portal for many of the reasons I’ve mentioned. In the very least it avoids discriminating against people without functioning wifi h/w.

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.

After reading your post, I would say, no harm intended, just don’t do it again.

You may be misunderstanding the thesis. This is not really about staying out of trouble. Or more precisely, as an activist up to my neck in trouble it’s about getting into the right trouble. The thesis is about this trend of marginalising people with either no phone and/or shitty wifi gear/software and a dozen or so demographics of people therein who do not so easily give up their rights. It’s about exclusivity of public services funded with public money. Civil disobedience is an important tool for justice outside of courts.

The security matter is really about competency and cost. The main problem is likely in the requirements specification conveyed to the large tech firms that received the contract. From where I sit, it appears they were simply told “give people wifi”, probably by people who don’t know the difference between wifi and internet. In which case the tech supplier should have been diligent and competent enough to ask “do you want us to exclude segments of the public who have no wifi gear and those without phones?”

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.

You set a great example of getting mad at a bitch eating crackers.

I merely tried to get online using an ethernet cable. I didn’t get hostile. I was calm. And because I was calm, the librarian became calm. The only hostility was in the librarian’s single opening comment to me, and what you see in this thread.

I guarantee that a librarian would have helped you if you told them you didn’t have your phone on you.

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.

You need to read Article 21. And as you read it, keep in mind it’s a public library.

(edit) There was a day when black people were denied access to the library. I suppose you would have said “Bruh, denying books is not a human rights violation” without any kind of legal rationale that articulates the meaning of Article 21.

Bizarre that so many here think it’s human-rights compliant to block poor people (those without phones) from public internet; who are in fact the people who need it most as governments are abolishing analog mechanisms of public service. Would be interesting to survey that same crowd on how many of them find it okay to block black people from publicly owned books. People can’t be this obtuse. It’s likely a high density of right-wing conservatives here, who understand human rights law but simply condemn anything they regard as competing with their privilege.

That “right” is exclusively available to people who:

• have a mobile phone
• who carry it with them
• who have working wifi hardware

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights has no such limitation on Article 21.

You can use it but on their terms.

Not without a phone.

Captive portal is likely making you agree to not abuse the service.

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.