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.
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.