I noticed a library that has ethernet ports, which I must say is quite impressive. So many libraries strictly expect people to use wifi which has downsides:

  • many (most?) wifi NICs have no FOSS drivers (ethernet is actually the only way I can get my FOSS laptop online)
  • ethernet is faster and consumes less energy
  • wifi radiation harms bees and other insects according to ~72 studies (update: separate discussion thread here which shows the research is heavily contested)
  • apparently due to risk of surrounding households consuming bandwidth, 2FA is used (which is inadvertently exclusive at some libraries)
  • enabling wifi on your device exposes you to snooping by other people’s iPhones and Androids according to research at University of Hamburg. Every iPhone in range of your device is collecting data about you and sending it to Apple (e.g. SSIDs your device previously connected to). From what I recall about this study, it does not happen at the network level, so ethernet devices attached to the same network would not be snooped on (and certainly SSID searches would not be in play).
  • (edit) users at risk to AP spoofing (thanks @NoneYa@lemm.ee for pointing this out)

I don’t know when (if ever) I encountered a library with ethernet. Is this a dying practice and I found an old library, or a trending practice by well informed forward-thinking libraries?

BTW, the library that excludes some people from wifi by imposing mobile phone 2FA is not the same library that has ethernet ports, unfortunately. If you can’t use the wifi of the SMS 2FA library then your only option is to use their Windows PCs.

    • @freedomPusherOP
      3•5 months ago

      There are several ways:

      • You can hit F12 in either Firefox or Chrome, look at the headers for a “CF-ray” field. (or a simple CLI way: curl -I "$URL" | grep -i cf-ray)
      • this page will check for you. (there is a clearnet version of that link but i don’t recall); caveat: if a non-CF host has CF hosts on the same domain, this checker treats all hosts on the domain as CFd.
      • You can do a whois lookup to see if the IP belongs to Cloudflare.
      • If you do a DNS query, that will often give clues (though AFAIK you cannot distinguish users of CF’s DNS service from those of their proxy service)
      • There are some browser add-ons here which will tag Cloudflare sites so you can avoid them. The BMCA plugin will auto-redirect visits to CF sites to the archive.org mirror. Note those plugins can be tricky to install.

      Note that your instance (lemmy.dbzer0.com) is free from Cloudflare.

      • Mario_Dies.wav
        2•5 months ago

        Very useful information, thanks!

        I’m in a minority here as a non-tech person, so I always appreciate the help.