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.
So the protected class they are discriminating against here is “doesn’t want to use wifi”?
You had the means to access the Internet, you chose not to use them.
The protected class is the poor. The UDHR specifically protects people from discrimination on the basis of property. You cannot treat someone different under the UDHR for owning less property than someone else with regard to all the rights enshrined in the UDHR. Only serving people who bought a mobile phone and paid for a subscription violates that provision.
I did not have a mobile phone on me. I could have gone home to fetch my phone because incidentally I happened to have a phone with service at home. But I would not have had time to return to the library and complete my task before it closed.
I’ve also gone over 6 months with no phone service at all sometimes. If I were in one of those time periods, connecting would have been impossible. My phone access is touch and go. I let my service die whenever nothing critical comes up that demands it for a period of time.
And I will do it again. Not having a phone is a goal I will continue to meet, off and on, because it’s important to periodically test whether we have a right to unplug. It’s especially important to test this if you live in a GSM registration part of the world.
I guarantee that a librarian would have helped you if you told them you didn’t have your phone on you.
I don’t buy your story because you’re trying to paint yourself as a victim of some nefarious scheme when in reality you wanted to use a free service in a way the provider doesn’t allow.
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.
Did the library have the desktop set up for public use, as libraries all have nowadays?
Then they were providing you equal access to their internet connection, they just weren’t going to let you do it on your computer unless your computer connected to their internet connection by satisfying their security requirements.
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.