Free Public WiFi
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computer.rip
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
It looks like archive.org was not archiving during the "peak" of that day and only has snapshots from around 8pm that day, but you can see that they pared down the sites considerably even then: https://web.archive.org/web/20010911200318/http://www.cnn.co... Vs A few months prior: https://web.archive.org/web/20010503145728/http://www.cnn.co...
NYTimes is similar: https://web.archive.org/web/20010911205659/http://nytimes.co... https://web.archive.org/web/20010503145505/http://www.nytime...
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.
I was stuck at work and wound up watching the whole thing via a RealPlayer stream from the BBC with a 4x3 inch video.
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.
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 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 - they sell out of Target and hospitals amongst other things.
There are enough 3rd wave coffee shops around of varying levels of snobbery that people are aware of what’s available.
Starbucks gives familiarity and consistency.
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.
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.
> dumb as fuck
A strong argument can stand on its own merits without the need for insults or talking down. You're showing your hand by stooping like this.
Well by definition it's a lighter roast so maybe that's why?
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.
McD's coffee is also bad (acidic, weak flavor).
I'll take the consistency of McD coffee over almost any other establishment.
And given their traffic volume, it's almost always guaranteed to be fresh, at a fraction of the cost of coffee-centric cafes.
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.
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.
(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).
It's even better in South Korea.
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.
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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.
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).
Thanks for the memories
Imagine accidentally sending a text to the wrong number and getting a dirty phone call from Dr. Who at 2 in the morning...
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.
Frugal times.
Communications in general were much more asynchronous back in the days and people would just call if immediate attention was needed.
That's odd. I used to feel that the price of wifi in hotels was inversely correlated with the hotel room price.
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.
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?
That’s the leading hypothesis: those hotels court business travelers who will have someone else foot the bill.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I think of there wasn’t free wifi, Id just tether of the phone.
I haven’t travelled in years, but just checked my current software and it’s still there today.
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.
(English is not my first language).
"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".
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.
https://computer.rip/2022-07-21-preventing-loss-dot-jpeg.htm...
(love the title)
The alarm one should be be obviously named.
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.
https://goo.gl/maps/15nse3xEXAhAppQw6
The correlation holds surprisingly well but allowances need to be made for "no laptops" places and Italy.
Luckily playing the polite dumb tourist often is enough to get someone to enter the “real” Wi-Fi password for the non guest network.
Or sometimes there’s a login via Facebook button you can recognize via logos.
Are we sure that basking in the divine WiFi rays isn't giving us cancer?
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.
Today we have vastly superior possibilities and yet, apart from some niche efforts like the LoRaWAN, a "free mesh" is still not a thing.
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?)
This is an order of magnitude more complex than I trust a home router to do, though...
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.
- 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).
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extensible_Authentication_Prot...
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.
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?
Hotel WiFi is usually so-so, even paid, but still much better than 10 years ago.
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
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.
[1]: https://du.nkel.dev/blog/2021-11-19_pfsense_opnsense_ipsec_c...
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.
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.
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
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.
Dunno what kind of tracking and security risks I'm exposing myself to though...
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 VPN over the top, you leak even less.
You leak just as well, but now you're leaking to the sketchy VPN provider.
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.
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.
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.
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?").
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.
1. https://brajeshwar.com/2007/pune-indias-first-wi-fi-city/
Not the other way round.
(only slightly joking here...)
I truly miss Vietnam.
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".
There were others too; not sure why exactly it didn't work out though I can guess.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roofnet
https://web.archive.org/web/20080725163614/http://pdos.csail...
It's usually free in airports now, but sometimes limited to 30 minutes. At this point you can simply change your mac address temporarily.
Yes, but, see: Bluetooth
is this a humorous reference that I didn't get? BBB?
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.