Today, McDonald's, of all places, is actually the best place to get free wifi that's actually fast. They're quite committed to the goal of wifi in every locale and obviously they're everywhere
Additionally, certain grocery stores like Sprouts will often place the employee break area in the front of the store so customers can also hang out. There's outlets, a microwave, and free wifi. You'll sometimes have to ignore an annoying TV playing the same 4 commercials on a loop
When my college roommate woke me up the morning of Sept. 11, 2001 and told me jets had hit the twin towers, it happened to be the first year of my life that I did not have a TV in the home. We had internet and a big 19" CRT monitor, but that was it. To see what was going on, I dragged myself to the McDonald's that was within walking distance, sat down with my breakfast and watched footage of mayhem on the mounted TV. That's an odd little nook in technological history - being beyond traditional television, but the internet was still 1.0 without streaming video (or maybe just our speed wasn't fast enough).
The internet was still new enough that pretty much all major news sites reverted to a stripped down static page that day as they could not keep up with the load.
During the morning and afternoon though, I remember at certain points the NYTimes just having a headline, a picture of the airplane about to hit the second tower, and text and that's it.
Why is that interesting? The Taliban would not have reached the heights they reached without the US. They were instrumental in fighting the Soviets during the Cold War
There was streaming video -- but not that day, largely. The big US news web sites were struggling to serve up even basic HTML, never mind a stream of any kind.
I was stuck at work and wound up watching the whole thing via a RealPlayer stream from the BBC with a 4x3 inch video.
Someone at CNN spat their closed caption feed into an IRC channel. I didn't have cable at the time, so I had my TV on one of the local channels and my dialup connection with mIRC reading that.
I used Sprouts and McD almost every week as a low cost coworking. The McD coffee is like 30% the price of Starbucks, but I find the Starbucks wifi to be more reliable.
I've started visiting my local university library for a few hours to get work done (I'm not a student).
The WiFi is fast and reliable, the environment is peaceful and conducive to heads-down work, and the parking meter costs around what I'd pay for coffee.
My latest low-cost co-working spots are the public library and hotel lobbies.
The library unfortunately is only open 2-6p on Sunday. Big chain hotels have huge lobbies, seating areas, and free wifi. They are usually busy in the mornings with everyone checking out and so they have never bothered me.
I am far from the coffee snob, but Starbucks genuinely taste burned to me. And I know that’s not a hot take, it’s a pretty common line you’ll hear when people are critiquing it. But it is also repeated with good reason.
My opinion as well unless we're talking their "Blonde Roast", which is somehow decent despite Starbucks' apparent burnt-flavor bias.
I think the reason Starbucks stays afloat is not their coffee, but their 900 calorie "coffee drinks", which they market such that people can pretend to be coffee snobs while drinking what are essentially milkshakes.
> I don’t think very many of their urban or suburban customers in the US have this hang up
I think you might be surprised- ask them if they ever go to Dunkin' and they'll invariably indicate "no", sometimes with evident revulsion at the thought. We're obviously operating in anecdata here but that's been my experience.
Not in my experience. I work in hospitals mostly on academic campuses - if there’s a Starbucks, it’s getting a ton of business in that captive market.
Dunkin’ does a pretty amazing business amongst this same crowd on the east coast and Midwest.
Again I have no idea how anyone with a few functioning brain cells squares up colocated in Target with snobby. Perhaps your friends are just dumb.
I mean I have known people that think that Panda Express is exotic Asian cuisine - and literally have heard crab Rangoons referred to as an exotic delicacy by some dumbass I went to high school with - doesn’t mean these people aren’t dumb as fuck. These people don’t make enough money as a collective to keep Starbucks afloat though.
It also can't change at this point. Their flavor is recognized all over the world and many customers wouldn't be happy if it changed. But it's nice to have the blonde roast option at least!
My father was in the Navy. On the night shift, the coffee would become syrupy and he would drink that. He drinks coffee black. He tried Starbucks and will not touch the stuff.
My parents are smokers. There were few times cigarette ash accidentally got into my mouth. I swear Starbucks coffee and cigarette ash taste the same. I've had it from a couple of stores and both tasted the same. I can't help but think someone else in the comments is right in that people don't go for the coffee but for the stuff that hides the coffee.
The global consistency of some of these franchises really comes in handy. Same with usually knowing that a Starbucks or McDonalds in Country C will have free relatively-barrierless bathrooms in places where that’s often not a thing.
The global consistency of some of these franchises really comes in handy.
That was always the secret to McDonald's success.
There were plenty of hamburger joints along America's roadways when McDonald's started. But what McDonald's did is to provide a consistent experience.
The food may or may not not have been as good, but you knew exactly what to expect, which was a massive improvement over the way it was before when the price, quality, service and other things varied widely.
I heard a program about it on the radio several decades ago, and there's an entire economic theory about it, and it's the basis of modern franchising.
Costco is so consistent that when you walk the route through the stores you will meet the same categories of products in the same order.
For example: TVs are by the entrance, the over the counter pharmacy stuff is near the registers. The soy milk is about halfway around the loop, the breakfast cereal is about 3/4 way around.
I have personaly been to more stores where the loop runs clockwise than counterclockwise but I'm not sure that's actually a bias or just random.
Ditto with the menus. If someone has dietary needs and they don't know names of all the ingredients in the local language, they're likely to end up at a global chain.
The EU _nearly_ solved this (or at least solved for 99% of cases) by mandating 14 allergens (or, well, problem ingredients; gluten and dairy are more likely to be intolerance issues than actual allergies) which must be declared. They then fumbled this by not specifying a canonical ordering; number 7 is _usually_ dairy, say, but the ordering is not actually mandated. So you still need to know the local language.
(My personal favourite quirky use of the fact that there is no mandated order is by a Kosher deli in Dublin; they don't have numbers for dairy, crustaceans or mollusks because, well, it's Kosher so I suppose it can be assumed. They use the free'd-up address space to call out wheat, rye, barley and oats, which is going beyond the obligation; these can all be grouped together).
Still way better than the US, where if you ask about an allergen you usually have to wait while they look up ingredients, and hope they aren't careless about it, and sometimes just get "we don't know".
That's been my experience at local shops in the US, but if I go into a big chain I know that what I'm getting is the stuff whose ingredients I looked up on the corporate website earlier.
Unfortunately my allergen isn't on the list and is a common food ingredient. I know how to say it, read it, and write it in 22 languages, because I have traveled extensively and it's critically important to know. The EU system is nice, but insufficient.
In South Korea I recently only visited Jeju island. They have a lot of tourists there. There was lots of free wifi from businesses and some that seemed municipal. Fostering tourism might have played a role in that, I don't know. No clue how it looks like in the rest of the country.
Interestingly, the free wifi on Jeju typically didn't even have captive portals with T&C. They just let you connect.
In Singapore, captive portals are common. Cafes with free wifi usually require a password that you can get from staff by just asking. Municipial wifi is provided via Wireless@SGX https://www.imda.gov.sg/how-we-can-help/wireless-at-sg/wirel... at eg food courts and train stations.
I don't know if our telecoms have expressed much of an opinion. People still have mobile broadband plans.
I remember that time before I had a smart phone, but while I had a laptop & before there was security concerns to bother password protecting WiFi access points. I used to stop by roadside hotels/motels & whip out the laptop to do any on-the-go research since it was free & I didn’t yet have a taste for coffee (or the money) to want to stop by a café. The other highlight was using SMS/MSS via email & doing $NUMBER@verzion.net or whatever the address was. The SMS rates were high & I was always carrying my laptop & usually could nab open WiFi somewhere.
--
Other WiFi-related anecdote is my Fujifilm camera (RIP capacitor) chose to do its app communications between camera & smart phone over WiFi. I’m assuming this was a range thing, but it was interesting being in the wilderness & joining a LAN to get remote control.
I had completely forgot about sending MMS via mail! (Not Verizon, but my provider had a similar thing)
If I recall, some times the message would be delayed by quite a while, so it was not a reliable replacement for SMS, but still fun (and would allow me to send data from my PC to my phone).
I used it until recently but carrier spam filtering has become so aggressive out of necessity, that message delivery is intermittent to unusable. As usual, spammers have ruined everything and this is why we can't have nice things.
The only time this happened to anyone I know was around 2005. I sent a txt to my brother and accidentally used his landline number and he picked up the phone and a robot voice said “I left your jacket at the Grampians” and then disconnected. Such a useless piece of tech!
I did it out of necessity to save money. The delay was real, & I’m surprised dates tolerated it from me.
Later, I only had a minimal data plan (cheaper than with voice+SMS) + Google Voice & some forwarding app. I remember rushing from a Taco Bell $2 meal deal to a friend’s to take a job interview call after an email so I had enough data to actually finish out the interview.
Yet, it causes "the pain of paying" and micro-transactions in general go directly against common sense and general marketing ideas of building a luxury/exclusive hassle-free feeling brand.
Especially since the payment process at those upscale hotels often was/is seperate from the room-paying process and was a total hassle (making an account through some crappy GUI, entering credit card details manually, etc).
It definitely felt super cheap and greedy to me when I stayed in those up-scale hotels for work and wanted to use wifi.
Yes I will never forget or forgive being forced submit my details to some Marriot bonvoy spam club in order to qualify for free WiFi in an expensive US hotel where I was staying for a conference. It was otherwise a manual daily payment via a broken portal of fifteen dollars. The cost of roaming mobile data in the US (from the UK, at the time) was completely absurd so they had me over a barrel for the hour or so connectivity I needed from the hotel per day to check in with work.
They wouldn't/couldn't just add it to my room invoice either so I would have had to manually pay on a personal card, and expense each day. From memory the portal did not accept my card on the first try either.
I'll take my boycott of them for this slight to my grave.
Are mid-range businessy hotels really working with such slim margins that its worth alienating customers like this?
I had heard the explanation at one point that pricey hotels were the first to adopt wi-fi systems and locked themselves into expensive long-term contracts, so they were still trying to recoup the costs even as the tech got cheaper and more widespread. I guess it's been long enough now that that wasn't the real reason.
Wi-Fi and Internet access in general killed off an enormous revenue source for hotels: pay-per-view porn. They were very motivated to find new ways to get that revenue back.
Anecdotally having been on the road at the time, there didn't seem to be a correlation between price and whether they had it or not.
And often the 1½-star motel would just have a single AP in the office serving the whole horseshoe of rooms directly, while the big fancy hotel would need several APs per floor which made it a vastly more expensive and complicated deployment. If the cheap one was acting weird, the desk clerk could just power cycle it and most issues were resolved moments after one phone call. But everybody at the big hotels was afraid to touch it (probably had been instructed not to), and resolving problems took hours or days.
Not strangely; it's completely logical. By the same token, a bottle of sparkling water would cost you much more in an expensive restaurant. Those who live in upscale hotels and eat at expensive restaurants are usually much less price-sensitive.
Our big two 'budget' (haha) hotel chains, Premier Inn and Travelodge both charge for barely usable Wi-Fi. The former offering an unlimited free service but restricted to about 500kbps and a paid 'ultimate' service which runs at about 10mbps. The latter giving you 30 mins free and then you have to pay, unless you're in one of their premium rooms where its included. Total racket supplied by Virgin WiFi for both. Thankfully don't often need it with better 4G/5G signal but sometimes the rooms can be Faraday cages.
Most of the more posh hotels I've been to have free unlimited decent WiFi.
My theory is that it is a form of price discrimination. If you can afford to stay at a nicer hotel, then you are more likely to be able and willing to pay more for wifi as well. You can see it in other things too. For example, mid-range hotels often have "free" breakfast included, but higher end hotels charge you for breakfast. Room service prices scale with the price of a room.
It is a form of price discrimination, but it's actually more straightforward than that. These "nicer hotels" are primarily business hotels, rather than hotels targeted at personal travelers. Business hotels, at least in the US, take their guidance from the US Government in the form of the GSA. The US Federal government is one of the largest employers in the US, and most businesses limit their per diem rates for expenses to match GSA rates because these rates typically infer a tax advantage to the business. These rates are published annually by locality: https://www.gsa.gov/travel/plan-book/per-diem-rates
This of course isn't always true, but it does provide a strong price anchor. Importantly, the GSA historically separated per-diem for the hotel stay, food and beverage expenses, and "add-on amenities", which included things like WiFi. This is a major factor for why hotels historically charged for WiFi at higher priced places targeted at businesses (e.g. may have an attached conference center or meeting spaces) vs hotels targeted at personal travelers.
It was a business thing. Business travelers works get there company to pay for the WiFi. So it was expensive. And it wasn't a US thing. I ran into the same issue in Europe.
this is probably because bigger hotels are more likely to be booked by business travellers and these expenses get lumped into reimbursements.
smaller hotels need to compete for more discerning budget oriented travellers who will only pay charges seen as reasonable, or start avoiding hotels seen as fleecing.
As a business Traveller for bigcorp, I wouldn‘t really know how to expense such an item, it seems at least a big hassle. We book hotels through our system, travel too, food is on a fixed budget. Taxi receipts I can include with the travel reimbursement form. Other stuff is a hassle.
I think of there wasn’t free wifi, Id just tether of the phone.
Huh, that’s surprising - when I traveled for bigcorps and littlecorps “internet access” always had its own category in whatever process we had, be it Concur or someone’s hand rolled Excel sheet.
I haven’t travelled in years, but just checked my current software and it’s still there today.
I remember it as the quality and speed of the connection being inversely proportional. You would get 50mb/s for free at a cheap motel, but pay $25/day for "Business Class" wifi that might hit 768kb/s at the Ritz Carlton at off peak hours.
The cheap motel would have a connection and a cheap Wi-Fi router, and you’d get the whole bandwidth (even today sometimes I find a fat nearly gigabit pipe in the middle of nowhere).
The expensive larger hotel would have a fancy barely working system from Cisco that monitored and limited bandwidth. Sometime, however, there would be an Ethernet Jack under the table that would give you full 100mb/s.
No, it's correct as written. "Proportional" is a very strong statement. It means that one variable is a linear function of another, i.e. y = kx. "The power dissipated in a wire is proportional to the current through the wire".
"Correlation" can mean almost any kind of relationship where a change in one variable follows a change in another. "Smoking is correlated with lung cancer".
And "proportioned" (as opposed to "proportional") is not about a mathematical relationship at all, but about the proportions of somebody or something, as in the shape: a perfectly-proportioned body, a badly-proportioned room, a generously-proportioned seat; an accompanying adverb is usually (always?) required.
I discovered this site a few weeks ago and then spent days reading every post. I found the electronic asset tagging article very interesting and now notice every sensor tower at stores. The one about alarm wiring was also very interesting.
I love this writer. Terrific writer and excellent sense of obscure yet fascinating topics. My only complaint is that the posts don’t seem to timely appear in my RSS reader - not sure I’ve ever seen a new post show up in my feed despite being subscribed.
I hope it was clear that no criticism was intended toward you. I take some (well, all) responsibility for lashing my content consumption to an early 2000s technology and all the corresponding drawbacks.
I mean, the script that generates the RSS feed deserves all the criticism it gets. Looking into it again the main thing I remember is that I didn't put GUIDs on each post which is "recommended" but not "required" by the spec. That turned out to be easy to fix so I just did it.
One thing that bothers me about Free Wifi nowadays is traffic shaping. Here in Latin America, it is very common to have internet fast lanes dedicated to WhatsApp, when Telegram is unusable in the same connection. I notice sometimes I'm connected to a public wifi and Telegram stops working, then if I disconnect and go back to the mobile carrier it suddenly is back and alive.
Usually just before boarding a flight I remember that I should download some shows on NetFlix. Half the time airport wifi is too slow to do this, presumably because it throttles netflix to make it stream at the lowest bitrate.
I've always assumed slow airport wi-fi is that way because they have one 50mb connection being shared by thousands of users. I always connect through a VPN yet everything still runs slow. I don't think the airport is throttling specific sites.
Sometimes or maybe even most of the time, but I've definitely had the experience where downloading a file for work is fast, but Netflix is hopelessly slow.
I almost always just VPN through home, even on my phone (gets to use my pihole that way). It definitely depends from place to place though... sometimes using the VPN is dramatically slower than it should be. At least my uplink at home is now 100mbps from the 20mbps it was when I signed up, which helps a lot.
it seems that it has actually become less common for cafes to offer WiFi again
In touristy places wifi is usually available in cafes and there's a correlation between the quality of coffee and the quality of the Internet connection. Best tonic espresso I had in Barcelona was in the divine rays of 300 Mbit wifi6.
Kind of sad how ad-hoc mode was such a a failure. I always imagined how cool it would be to have a huge number of devices all connected to the internet through each other but it was hard enough to just get two devices talking.
It’s important to note that the WiFi ad-hoc standard is not a mesh network standard, and was never intended to be one. It is just a simplified standard for an Access Point with an easier to implement feature set.
Ad-hoc mode, also called WiFi Direct, gets used in other services. It is used in AirDrop and Android equivalents.
Hotspot mode destroyed the use of connecting to internet. It is easier for devices to connect to hotspot than setup ad-hoc connection. My impression is that there is assumption that WiFi Direct isn’t routed.
These days, would you use any public WiFi? Even on extended travel, I carry a portable router that plugs into the hotel/stay router/port and then use my own Wi-Fi. Yes, I do have VPN/DNS filter/protection etc on the Phone but you have "too many devices" that will pick that up and every one of them will try to connect to that WiFi. Easier to take care of a Laptop but it becomes a hassle/irritant.
For India, Internet over the phone is so cheap (and OK quality) that most people don't care about WiFi outside of their home/office.
Would love to know more how you deal with these situations?
These days I treat my home network the same as a public network. Too many "smart" devices to be worth trusting, so the devices I care about are locked down the same as they would be if I connected them directly to the internet - and sometimes I do. Frankly I have more trust that I can keep my phone or laptop up to date than any consumer-grade router (do you know which version of linux it's running? How often do you even get updates?)
Putting IoT devices on your guest network is a very common home security/privacy thing to do. They very often snoop when they can, and your router shuts that down on the guest network.
I want my router to allow my IOT devices to send out mDNS beacons, and for other devices to connect to them, but otherwise they're restricted and logged.
This is an order of magnitude more complex than I trust a home router to do, though...
Even on my UniFi gear its still a bit of a faff every time a manufacturer does it slightly differently (and still raises my suspicions when controlling google home devices doesn't work / not receiving mDNS broadcasts etc).
Beyond mDNS "snooping", has there been reporting of non-compromised IoT inappropriately listening on networks?
To be clear, I agree that putting IoT devices on a separate VLAN is a good idea but I do that because they're black boxes, not because they're malicious.
Well when you're setting up your Roomba in the roomba app, the amazon alexa app unprompted sends a notification to allow Alexa to control it. Only way could be the Echo is listening and hears the Roomba broadcast packets.
There are two categories of devices worth considering:
- Those controllable (only) through the manufacturer's server and requiring an Internet connection: put them on the guest network that only has a (NATed) route to the Internet and nothing else (ideally, of course, don't buy them);
- Those controllable over LAN and not requiring an Internet connection: put them on a jail network that has a route to the main network and is firewalled away from the Internet (and perhaps from initiating connections to the main network as well).
Where I live, most of the mass rapid transit stations are underground, and connection is sometimes spotty. The country has launched a secure public Wi-Fi service. Users on smartphones can authenticate using EAP-SIM[1], or laptop users can use an app developed by the agency to authenticate with WPA2 Enterprise PEAP MSCHAPv2.
The implementation here is rather annoying, because as soon as you enter the tunnel the wifi cuts off. But there's a 10-15 second latency where network connections just fail as the phone decides the AP is actually gone before it cuts over to LTE.
Then the whole process repeats again once you get to the next station.
Since LTE is usually reliable even in the tunnel, I usually remove the wifi connection. Granted it might help that I don't normally travel during peak hour, so the mobile network is usually fine for my needs.
It's made even more annoying by the fact that "Forgetting" the connection only works until the phone is rebooted, at which point the behaviour returns.
> It's made even more annoying by the fact that "Forgetting" the connection only works until the phone is rebooted, at which point the behaviour returns.
That seems odd. My phone doesn't connect to a network unless it's toggled to auto join, and certainly not post "forget". Can you not control this?
I'm not familiar with the networks in question, but I've run into a couple wifi networks connected to my lte carrier, and my unlocked phone pushes them hard. I imagine there's something coming from the SIM, and I could see the OS picking up SIM affiliated wifi networks on boot or sim insertion. Unless special care were taken, it makes sense that forgetting a network isn't remembered.
As far as I can tell, it's because the configuration comes from EAP-SIM (https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/RFC4186) which gets refreshed on every reboot. This cannot be controlled - it will always regenerate when you restart the phone.
Yes, I pretty often use WiFi in airports overseas, because roaming data rates are not fun (or data does not work), and whatever slice of free access the airport WiFi allows is usually enough to check mail and connecting flights, chat a bit over IM, upload a few photos, sometimes even review a PR or push a PR.
Hotel WiFi is usually so-so, even paid, but still much better than 10 years ago.
I get free international roaming nowadays, but 5 years ago I was in China and accidentally plugged my phone in to my laptop to charge.
Laptop started syncing something that had been blocked all week (Dropbox maybe), and the SMS flooded in.
The connection was so fast that within a minute or two I got the following message:
From Vodafone: So far you've used 83MB of data today in our Rest of World Zone, and spent £255. It'll cost £15 for each additional 5MB you use. We'll next let you know when you've spent £495 today but, if you'd prefer us not to, please contact your account administrator. Sent OCT 15 @10:45 UK
The network is compromised. Any other assumption is lunacy. This is why we have TLS. Plugging your own WiFi into a hostile network (read: any) does precisely fuckall to improve your security.
I do something similar, with a router flashed with openwrt. If there's a physical router/ethernet port I can plug into great, if not I run one of the radios in client mode to connect to the wifi.
All traffic is secured with wireguard to my home router, and then goes through my ISP. The wireguard tunnel is wrapped in an error correcting tunnel; it makes a huge difference on the usability a lot of public APs.
I think these setups are fantastic. Here [1] I wrote about my IPSEC-setup on a portable private Wifi network based on a Protectli that I connected to someone's Wifi.
Out of curiosity how do you deal with situations where the public wifi has one of those middle pages that you have to type in or click something (captive portal?) before the access point grants access?
Dnsmasq has a neat feature where you can populate ipsets/nftsets with responses to dns queries. So I have it populate a set with the IPs for sites like neverssl.com, and use a firewall rule to route requests to destinations in the set through wan without sending it through the VPN. Usually works.
Edit: I apologise I see you have answered this below.
What is your error correcting tunnel?
Given that Wireguard is UDP and that any tunneled TCP that gets dropped should just be handled by TCP, why encapsulate Wireguard in something else?
I certainly find Wireguard itself improves many Public Wifi networks, I've never thought to encapsulate it further.
> any tunneled TCP that gets dropped should just be handled by TCP, why encapsulate Wireguard in something else?
That's the thing, TCP doesn't really handle lossy connections well. A moderate lossy link might do udp traffic like video fine, but be practically unusable for TCP traffic.
Pretty sure I used the suggested config and it's been working flawlessly in the background.
Or something like that. With wireguard, it's just a matter of pointing the config at the local socket for the fec tunnel (or any other type of tunnel, there was a dicussion about making it look like TCP http traffic the other day), so it's pretty much plug and play.
Thank you! That’s very helpful to know. First time I’ve even heard of things like this but when using low quality networks I can see how this would be great!
Yes, I would. I use Wireguard client with kill switch. If I don't have a Wireguard connection, nothing works. The only caveat is the Wireguard server runs on my home connection. If down, 'my internet is down'. If slow, 'my internet is slow'. But actually it appears to be pretty reliable. Another downside is all the traffic is tunneled through my home IPv4 and I might not want other people to know such. But that too seems to be an edge case. Against a possibly hostile or hacked WLAN network which I decide to use, it works fine, though I generally use it over mobile (which I've configured to only use LTE / 5G NR, not lower as these are easier to MITM and I don't want a downgrade attack although in theory in such a case, too, Wireguard client w/killswitch would protect).
This is the way. Also good for those hotels/conference centers that give you a small number of “allowable” devices — when you have kids with multiple devices, maybe a game console, etc plus maybe an appletv you quickly run out. Instead the router authenticates and that’s that.
I terminate my VPN at one of my own machines mainly for (marginal) security but conveniently this lets me stream the same stuff as home since the services can’t tell the exit is a VPN
Reminds me of the time when mobile data was still expensive and I did not have it.
If I needed to chat with somebody and I was not home I would sit in the street waiting to get a few seconds of WiFi from busses would drive past. Worked quite well for sending and receiving messages.
I’ve sat outside a McDonald’s in the mottle of nowhere to connect to Wi-Fi more times than I’d like to admit.
Travelling in Europe by car I had Here maps downloaded to the phone, because it could tell me where McDonald’s were, and they always had a restroom and Wi-Fi.
A bit of an aside, but one of the biggest perks of having Comcast as my ISP (I don't love this, but it's the only wired choice I have at my house) is that for roughly 60 percent of my public computing, I connect to an "xfinitywifi" router and get good-enough service.
Dunno what kind of tracking and security risks I'm exposing myself to though...
Xfinity now allows non-Xfinity customers to pay $20/mo for this amazing perk. On one hand, xfinitywifi is fucking everywhere, which makes this immensely useful. On the other hand, it runs off of spare bandwidth from customer gateways...
> On the other hand, it runs off of spare bandwidth from customer gateways...
Usually, but not always. They have outdoor enterprise Hotspot 2.0 AP's all over the place in towns they usually advertise ssid as allcaps XFINITY instead of xfinitywifi.
If you just want to prevent providers eyeballing you, this can work well.
If you really want complete anonyminitiy you have to layer stuff, and consider something like Mullvad or another VPN that lets you pay in untraceable funds.
There was a time (end 2000's?) when multiple popular home wifi router models calculated their default wifi password from their MAC addresses. There where websites doing the calculation for you, if you gave them the router's MAC.
For me, this was the transitory technology between those laughable free (or sometimes even paid) wifis that where just broken and the time when a) hotels etc. had their wifi finally fixed and b) one could resort to cell phone internet.
Go to Vietnam and every business, even the teeny-tiny mom-and-pop restaurants run out of a street facing living room, will offer free wifi. It was truly an amazing experience being able to expect wifi everywhere I went.
And yes, they had passwords and offered secure wifi. You just had to ask for the the password if they didn't already have it displayed somehow. Working remotely, it was glorious.
It put into perspective how much the US's focus on individualization removes the warm feeling of camaraderie.
Edit: I love when I get downvoted with no comment replies. Real gutsy dispute there.
The article mentions that sort of "free wifi" (free as in "free with the purchase of a coffee or food"), but seems to be much more about things like Municipal Wifi (Free wifi for anyone in the city), and ad-hoc wifi.
I also miss the period where it seemed like we might get actual city-wide free-wifi meshes in major metropolitan areas, but alas, it is not to be. Cafe wifi does not replace public utilities.
> It put into perspective how much the US's focus on individualization removes the warm feeling of camaraderie.
Sorry, what? Large US cities, like SF, basically every cafe has wifi too.
A for-profit business offering wifi doesn't exactly give me a feeling of camaraderie, rather the opposite. Offering wifi is a way to ensure people talk to each other even less.
I assume you're getting downvoted because you're relaying a personal anecdote that isn't all that relevant, and also frankly just comes off as an excuse to make a dig at the US that doesn't really make sense ("Did you know cafes have wifi in vietnam? Doesn't america individualism suck?").
Pune, a city in India, experimented with a city-wide WiFi[1] in 2007. I think it didn't work out.
I've heard that in the remote hills/villages of India, there are WiFi routers deployed to connect the people there where phone/cell reception is bad or not available. These WiFi services helps with commerce, especially UPI[2] Payments.
Vietnam has a far more self centered culture than the US. The motorbikes and cars will never ever stop for a pedestrian and drivers can and will split lanes and cut people off. People would rather force their way into a crowded elevator than let people off first. Maybe it's just wifi that gives you warm feelings, which I get, but I must be missing the camaraderie.
I think you have the wrong idea about how pedestrians cross streets in vietnam. You cross, maintain a straight line and a constant speed, and the vehicles play frogger around you.
It's not illegal, but you are liable for any wrongdoing done by people using your connection (Störerhaftung), especially with regard to unauthorized filesharing.
There was an amendment to the respective law to alleviate this problem and relieve providers of any liability, but the amendment was not phrased clear enough and there's a conflicting ruling from the European Court of Justice. In effect, if you are sued by rightholders for copyright violations committed through your connection, german courts decided, you are still liable unless you identify the perpetrator.
1. Google's Public WiFi in Mountain View, CA: never worked. It was a misconfigured mesh network, possibly with a slow backhaul.
2. If you were a starving student, you could get onto the supermarket's slow free WiFi across the street with a long-range, high power 802.11b/g/a card w/ an external directional antenna that looks suspicious on its own.
3. When you were slightly less starving but still "hungry", the main places with fast WiFi were Starbucks with "Google WiFI".
It's funny how I remember that era, but from outsider perspective. Public WiFi was far less impactful thing around me because we had good 3G deployment pretty early on. Some highlights from that era for me were netbooks (remember those?) with builtin wwan, and having multi-SIM subscription so that I could have USB modem, netbook, and phone all connected with single subscription.
Over 10 years ago I was flying from a small airport in Ireland (I think). To get code for 30 minutes of wifi, you put 1 euro in an old school gumball machine and received a capsule with a fortune cookie-like piece of paper. To this day I think that as the best experience I've seen for paying for wifi.
It's usually free in airports now, but sometimes limited to 30 minutes. At this point you can simply change your mac address temporarily.
Scanning and tracking networks sounds like a fun thing, I wonder why I hadn't considered it before. I can't find any app for doing this in Android, does anyone have something like this they know of?
Finland (Helsinki specifically) did and still does have city-wide free WiFi, that in actuality is likely still the fastest in the world. Is it safe? That's another question, but boy does it work fine.
Hmm. But are they really "noted information security experts" though?
I would have thought information security would be incidental and only one of the hundreds of aspects of business that they might look at when safeguarding consumers transacting with businesses of all kinds -- many of which (say plumbing or construction or bakeries) may hardly have infosec at the forefront. There are far more prevalent poor business practices, of the routine type - say deficient services or false advertisements, that I believe go to BBB's attention.
I never came across BBB being quoted/cited in infosec and IT contexts -- it may be just my ignorance -- happy to be educated.
I meant it as a joke, the BBB putting out consumer protection pieces about scams and malware was common in the '00s and they generally weren't any better than what journalists with no background in the topic were producing.
Additionally, certain grocery stores like Sprouts will often place the employee break area in the front of the store so customers can also hang out. There's outlets, a microwave, and free wifi. You'll sometimes have to ignore an annoying TV playing the same 4 commercials on a loop