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.
Would you trust the reply somebody like the librarian in the OP gave you?
I mean, if the answer is “no” would you just go around plugging into random Ethernet ports until you found one that works? Just because you don’t “trust” the librarian who gave you the answer? That sounds like a fast track to getting trespassed (or at least banned from using their public internet altogether) for abuse of services.
The library isn’t required to provide free Ethernet. They aren’t even required to provide free wifi. But they choose to do so because they recognize that wifi is a big reason people will come to a library to spend time. Which is sort of the whole point of the library. So providing free wifi goes hand-in-hand with the library’s ultimate mission.
But that wifi is provided on an as-is basis, because they can’t guarantee things like 100% uptime, good speeds, or any kind of troubleshooting. And any potential ethernet connection would also be as-is. And in this case, “as-is” could easily translate to “not available to the public at all.” Because again, the library isn’t required to provide any of it.
