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Free Public WiFi
- charles_f 3y ago> the 802.11 protocol that underlies WiFi is surprisingly complex and offers various different modes Yes, but, see: Bluetooth
- 1letterunixname 3y agoReminds me of: 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".
- QuinnyPig 3y agoTo pick a nit, “World of Hyatt” launched in 2017.
- toastal 3y agoI 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.
- JD557 3y agoI 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). Thanks for the memories
- pests 3y agoDid you ever get a text on a landline? Startled me the first time - some 90s era robotic voice reading it out.
- dools 3y agoThe 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!
- jesprenj 3y agoIn Slovenia I remember having had a "smart" landline phone in ~2009 that could send and receive SMS. ISDN?
- kotaKat 3y agoTom Baker used to be the voice used on British Telecom for a time. Imagine accidentally sending a text to the wrong number and getting a dirty phone call from Dr. Who at 2 in the morning...
- toastal 3y agoI 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. Frugal times.
- Scoundreller 3y ago> This was in the age when the price of a hotel room was directly correlated with the price of the WiFi service That's odd. I used to feel that the price of wifi in hotels was inversely correlated with the hotel room price.
- gumby 3y agoStrangely, in the US at least, the cheap hotels would have free or low cost WiFi while the upscale places charged an arm and a leg.
- nine_k 3y agoNot 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.
- cpeterso 3y agoPrice discrimination: people staying at expensive hotels can afford to pay for Wi-Fi or they're on a business trip and will just expense the cost.
- albert_e 3y agothis 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.
- ant6n 3y agoAs 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.
- pests 3y agoIs the blog author on here? 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.
- nocoiner 3y agoI 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.
- jcrawfordor 3y agoI'll check on the RSS. It's not very well generated and I've had issues with some clients not liking it before.
- nocoiner 3y agoI 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.
- jcrawfordor 3y agoI 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.
- nocoiner 3y agoHopefully this makes a difference for NetNewsWire. Thanks so much, and nice talking with you!
- albert_e 3y ago> attributed to the Better Business Bureau, noted information security experts is this a humorous reference that I didn't get? BBB?
- tetris11 3y agoThey're a non-profit for consumer protection, well meaning with the knowledge they have: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Better_Business_Bureau https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Better_Business_Bureau
- albert_e 3y agoHmm. 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.
- alibrarydweller 3y agoI think this was wry humor.
- jcrawfordor 3y agoI 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.
- zokier 3y agoIt'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.
- baumschubser 3y agoThere 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.
- blfr 3y agoit 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. https://goo.gl/maps/15nse3xEXAhAppQw6 https://goo.gl/maps/15nse3xEXAhAppQw6 The correlation holds surprisingly well but allowances need to be made for "no laptops" places and Italy.
- bombcar 3y agoInternational “free Wi-Fi” is often gated behind some confusing tracking/login pages that are only available in the local language. 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.
- thelastparadise 3y ago> divine rays of 300 Mbit wifi6 Are we sure that basking in the divine WiFi rays isn't giving us cancer?
- syntaxing 3y agohttps://www.cdc.gov/nceh/radiation/nonionizing_radiation.html https://www.cdc.gov/nceh/radiation/nonionizing_radiation.htm...
- pluijzer 3y agoReminds 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.
- bombcar 3y agoI’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.
- Brendinooo 3y agoA 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...
- bombcar 3y agoEverything important goes over https so at worst you’re leaking some DNS, which probably isn’t a major issue. If you VPN over the top, you leak even less.
- thelastparadise 3y ago> 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.
- ceejayoz 3y agoSo run one at home or on an EC2 instance somewhere.
- bombcar 3y agoIf 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.
- wintermutestwin 3y agoHard to be more sketchy than a company that successfully lobbied your government to allow them to steal user data from their captive customers.
- nunez 3y agoXfinity 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...
- culi 3y agoToday, 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
- itake 3y agoI 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.
- bigwheeler 3y agoSomehow the McD coffee is better too.
- Forgeties79 3y agoI 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.
- RankingMember 3y agoMy 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.
- epcoa 3y ago“ which they market such that people can pretend to be coffee snobs” 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.
- emmelaich 3y agoRoofnet (to be Meraki, bought by Cisco) started provided free municipal wifi in conjunction with some municipalities around 2010 or so. There were others too; not sure why exactly it didn't work out though I can guess. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roofnet https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roofnet https://web.archive.org/web/20080725163614/http://pdos.csail.mit.edu/roofnet/doku.php https://web.archive.org/web/20080725163614/http://pdos.csail...
- myself248 3y agoHuh, that sounds strikingly similar to Ricochet's geographic routing protocol.
- giovannibonetti 3y agoOne 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.
- johnwalkr 3y agoUsually 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.
- brewdad 3y agoI'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.
- johnwalkr 3y agoSometimes 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.
- tracker1 3y agoI 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.
- elf25 3y ago[dead]
- BnRJ401E29F8Q3v 3y agoFinland (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.
- Fatnino 3y agoI Palo Alto there's a statue of Nikola Tesla that also happens to be a free wifi ap.
- johnwalkr 3y agoOver 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.
- moonbunR 3y agoAre they really safe to use them on computers?
- komali2 3y agoScanning 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?
- Brajeshwar 3y agoThese 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?
- nunez 3y agoYes but I use Tailscale and route through my exit node
- delta_p_delta_x 3y agoWhere 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. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extensible_Authentication_Protocol#EAP_Subscriber_Identity_Module_(EAP-SIM) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extensible_Authentication_Prot...
- xobs 3y agoThe 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.
- 3y ago
- whydoineedthis 3y agoGo 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.
- TheDong 3y agoThe 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?").
- yawnxyz 3y agoIn Sydney, most places don't have wifi (including cafes)
- Brajeshwar 3y agoPune, 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. 1. https://brajeshwar.com/2007/pune-indias-first-wi-fi-city/ https://brajeshwar.com/2007/pune-indias-first-wi-fi-city/ 2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unified_Payments_Interface https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unified_Payments_Interface
- RyanShook 3y agoKind 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.
- callalex 3y agoIt’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.
- userbinator 3y agoIt's been a while since I've looked at this in detail but I believe ad-hoc mode essentially gives you the equivalent of a wireless Ethernet hub.
- benterix 3y agoIt was a "failure" in the sense no significant mesh network was ever created because it was against the interest of service providers. Today we have vastly superior possibilities and yet, apart from some niche efforts like the LoRaWAN, a "free mesh" is still not a thing.
- ianburrell 3y agoAd-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.