The wifi is for public use. The Ethernet isn't. How is that so hard to understand?
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I'm not surprised. I know people who don't even know what an ethernet cable is. I've worked enough IT to realize that a tangled mess of 6 cables can be as horrifying as a Predator to people. It doesn't help that everything is slowly going to POE, POE+ and even ++ now so it's doubling as power as well. In analog video days I could look at the back of a random device and instantly figure out it's purpose. That's rapidly becoming a rarity. For a worrisome section of the population, plugging in an ethernet cable is the equivalent of building a table or performing a back flip.
And when it comes to hacking, good god nobody knows anything. I remember we had a dozen students in high school (around 2000ish?) get suspended for "hacking" and really it was just that a section of the student body found a network storage location without any password protection and were using it as a flash drive on school grounds. Literally they just suspended anybody who signed their name on the homework assignments stored there.
The real crime was that drive had lunch pins for all the accounts in plain text to run their system, without a password!
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
You are on spot there, but sadly even legislators are far from understanding the reasons why this matters so much, let alone the general public.
Whatever security policy they have, it shouldn't require you installing a random executable to your system. And it was flawed enough that it didn't care to give your device access.
And by the way, it's so awesome you carry an ethernet cable around!!
It's not the librarians issue to worry about. It's the IT team supporting your library. If there wasn't a sign that said "not for customer use", then it's fine.
it's clearly there to be used, a lot of places have ethernet jacks for that...
the librarian is just a luddite and you probably had a black hoodie and a
terminal open so she assumed you were selling fentanyl to pedophile ransomware communists...
Idk what I read because it is so stupid.