Hacker News Reader

Comment by JumpCrisscross | Hacker News Reader

> At Triniti, Mr. Wynn offers free Wi-Fi, but after two hours a customer must have “a face-to-face interaction” with an employee, he says, to get a new password

This is the best approach. (The "a staff member will approach the uninitiated customer whose laptop is open for more than a couple of minutes with a gentle but firm request ‘to finish up what you’re doing and close the laptop, please,’ approach is the worst. No sign, no explanation--just a demand.)

> the Rose doesn’t provide electrical outlets; a dwindling battery should be a sign that it’s time to go

This is also fine, albeit ineffective against my MacBook Air.

View on HN

Or just set a purchase minimum. Must buy $x worth of stuff for every few hours you spend there. Seems fair.

Cafes aren't your free all-day office offering complimentary wifi for the price of a $2 coffee, they're businesses trying to make money to pay their rent.

Maybe you could have a wifi system that disconnects after a set time period. Buy something and your code gets renewed.

That’s what a cafe that I frequented in Chicago did (buzz). Two hours of WiFi with your purchase. I thought it was a great system

>"a staff member will approach the uninitiated customer whose laptop is open for more than a couple of minutes with a gentle but firm request “to finish up what you’re doing and close the laptop, please,”

Agreed - I understand that cafe owners dislike people lounging around for free, but I'd be seriously pissed if someone came to hurry me along after a couple of _minutes_.

In the 'old days', you had to either subscribe to the service (usually AT&T or something ran the wifi) or you got a printed code on your receipt that was valid for an hour or two.

Then a some point, most chains started offering free wifi. Which was useless because many of the places only have 2-6mbs which is useless with anyone else using it.

Starbucks at least went with 'Google wifi' and have ~ 100mbs service which is really nice. But they are empty for some reason, the local Barnes and Noble is packed with laptops and unusable wifi.

Not really, 4G is good now, local wifi is not needed

I'm guessing most people using cafes as workplaces are going to baulk at paying for 4G? It can get really expensive if you're working more than a couple of hours a day.

Not when you have 50gb per month.

I haven't paid-by-the-byte for 4G for about half a decade now. It's unlimited with my reasonably priced monthly contract (about $30USD/mo), from a mainstream provider in the UK (Three), lets me tether and gives me free data when I'm abroad too (I'm in the US and France a few times a year typically). I hope this doesn't sound too let-them-eat-cake, but I'm surprised that anyone with work-on-app-in-a-café-in-a-trendy-city lifestyle wouldn't have a sim plan with unlimited, or at least a very high allowance of, data.

Yes, I get what you're saying, maybe I just know a lot of tight-fisted people?

I have one colleague who won't answer an email or whatsapp unless she's on free wi-fi somewhere. This is an extreme example but I know others who are not much worse.

Tbh that sounds like an excuse to not be bothered by work 24/7

Maybe, although she doesn't worry about messaging me at 8pm?

I'm on that all-you-can-eat tariff with Three as well, but tethered data is normally limited to 30GB/month or so. Did you make any account changes to get unlimited or are you bypassing the tethering detection? I haven't seen unlimited tether plans, but it would mean I could work virtually anywhere.

Change your ttl to 65 and you'll be fine

Could you expand on this? I have always wondered how carriers recognize tethering vs normal use.

The TTL (time-to-live) field of outgoing packets is one of the ways to detect when someone has another device behind the connected device (phone). The traffic from this device has an extra hop to go through, so TTL of every TCP packet will be decreased by one, compared to packets originating from the phone, when it reaches the ISP.

This, together with the fact that default TTL different OSes set for packets they send is well known, and virtually no user ever changes these defaults, means that if the ISP detects different packets with TTL for example 64 and 63 coming from you, you very likely have something tethered to your phone.

There are tools like https://github.com/p0f/p0f (it does much more, than just this, though) to make exploiting this technique easy. I remember we used p0f to detect unauthorized connection sharing in a certain university dorm network, and caught quite a few people.

That and find a good library. Libraries are designed for people to focus. Cafes are not.

I guess your not in the UK? Libraries here are not quiet places anymore. Wi-fi often sucks too.

You are not trying hard enough. I was at Trinity College Library, Dublin a few months back. There are few spaces that are more peaceful and inspiring to work in than that one.

You have to understand that cafés like churches or pubs or the town square have traditionally been designed as the "The Third Space" in people's lives behind home and work. It were community building happen. It's designed for that, not for work. Howard Schultz founder of Starbucks tried to bring this to the US where he felt people were loosing touch with those community spaces but still had/felt a need for them. It has been very successful for his company to tap into that need. But on the flip side lot of misguided notions have developed in peoples(cafe owners/patrons) heads about what that third space is for or why they need it.

Dublin isn't in the UK though.

free wifi to freeloaders who aren't students though?

I can't speak for all universities, but my alma mater allows public access on a limited basis. For example, you can apply for courtesy membership if you have a basic need for research purposes. It can be as simple as, "I'm trying to build a static analysis tool, and I need books or publications on ASTs."

It makes sense to me, because one of the tenets of higher education should be to serve in the interest of the community.

Sure. My university has unsecured 100+ Mbps up/down and free access to libraries during the workday. Other universities I know of (USA) are the same.

I see. In Australia, they tie guest wifi login to one's student email address via the 'eduroam' SSID. This allows students from visiting universities to connect but not the general public.

I'm not aware of any such plans in the US. All carriers throttle "unlimited" plans so unlimited plans simply don't exist. Not with the major carriers anyway.

ATT unlimited plus says you might be throttled after 10GB of tethering, but in my experience, I haven't been restricted. I think it only throttles you if the tower you're connected to is saturated.

I suppose it's a matter of how much streaming video you need while you're working.

That's not really fair though - Three hasn't offered unlimited for years now, I also have friends who bought Unlimited few years ago and they will continue to have it until they switch plans, but that level of unlimited, where you can tether and where you can literally download 500gb+ a month and no one will care doesn't exist in the UK today. No mobile ISP offers such a thing as it stands right now.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com