I had a faraday phone case at one point. They also make jackets with faraday inside pockets. I quit using the faraday pouch because if you use that as a convenient off switch, the phone works harder to find a tower, draining batteries. So to save juice you need airplane mode. There’s probably still reason to use a faraday bag along with airplane mode, but since I’ve parted with a GSM chip as well, it’s just not worth it unless you’re someone like edward snowden.

That’s insufficient. Mobile providers are not even getting your location through that Google mechanism that feeds Google. Their towers track your location even if you have GPS off.

I always tap “disagree” to location svcs when turning GPS on and take a hit on slow positioning. But that only cuts Google off. To cut the mobile carriers off, I keep my phone in airplane mode and also keep the GSM chip slot empty. In fact I don’t even carry a gsm chip. I believe in this state I can make emergency calls (IIRC, airplane mode automatically gets disabled when an emergency number is dialed).

Yet a vast majority of people have no problem when people are forced to subscribe to mobile phone service:

https://infosec.pub/post/11658371

This kind of information should be startling enough to at least see the merit in not having a mobile phone subscription. But no, people will just say “that sucks” and continue to being the sucker while also expecting others to be equally naive or cavalier too.

from the article:

AT&T told The Register said it should not be blamed for the failure of those buying its data to obtain proper consent, and said it will fight the fine.

Private investigators are treated as legitimate consumers of that location data. An angry ex-boyfriend or ex-husband hired a PI to find out where his ex was, who then simply bought the location data from a mobile carrier. The guy used the info to find her and shoot her dead on the spot (headshot while she was driving a car). The data sharing was “legit” in that case, in the US where privacy laws are generally non-existent.

It’s strange how that murder case gets omitted in these articles about mobile carriers selling location data.

Could I be in the wrong? No, it must be literally everyone else in this entire thread / national library network.

Is your position so weak that you need to resort to a bandwagon fallacy?

Grow up.

and an ad hominem?

You demonstrate being a grown up by avoiding ad hominems in favor of logically sound reasoning.

After reading your post, I would say, no harm intended, just don’t do it again.

You may be misunderstanding the thesis. This is not really about staying out of trouble. Or more precisely, as an activist up to my neck in trouble it’s about getting into the right trouble. The thesis is about this trend of marginalising people with either no phone and/or shitty wifi gear/software and a dozen or so demographics of people therein who do not so easily give up their rights. It’s about exclusivity of public services funded with public money. Civil disobedience is an important tool for justice outside of courts.

The security matter is really about competency and cost. The main problem is likely in the requirements specification conveyed to the large tech firms that received the contract. From where I sit, it appears they were simply told “give people wifi”, probably by people who don’t know the difference between wifi and internet. In which case the tech supplier should have been diligent and competent enough to ask “do you want us to exclude segments of the public who have no wifi gear and those without phones?”

You set a great example of getting mad at a bitch eating crackers.

I merely tried to get online using an ethernet cable. I didn’t get hostile. I was calm. And because I was calm, the librarian became calm. The only hostility was in the librarian’s single opening comment to me, and what you see in this thread.

The librarian who said it was okay to plugin (which they likely understood to mean plugin an A/C power cord) was young, not as senior as the edgy librarian. I’m not going to take down a kid and get them in trouble for not picking apart what it means when someone asks if they can “plug-in”.

People like Trump will throw his supporters under the bus when self-defense calls for it. I will not.

What would the point be? I didn’t need a defense. I got scolded and was walking out. Since I was calm, the librarian became calm. Police were not called and I was not detained. And if that had happened, I would have exercised my right to remain silent anyway.

And what does trust have to do with it?

I think they mean trust in the librarian to genuinely know the policy and what should work. They tend not to in this case because ethernet has become obscure enough to be an uncommon question, if ever.

Another library had ethernet ports all down the wall next to desks. They were dead and no one used them. It was obvious that the librarian had no clue about whether the ports were even supposed to function. When I said they are dead and asked to turn them on or find out what’s wrong, they then figured that if the ports don’t work, it must be intentional. So the librarian’s understanding of the policy was derived from the fact that they were dysfunctional. Of course if they were intended to work but needed service, ethernet users are hosed because the librarian’s understanding of policy is guesswork. There is no proper support mechanism.

I asked a librarian at another library: I need to use Tor. Is it blocked? I need to know before I buy a membership. Librarian had no idea. They just wing it. They said test it. Basically, if it works, then it’s acceptable. The functionality becomes the source of policy under the presumption that everything is functioning as it should.

Since ethernet has been phased out, modern devices no longer include an ethernet NIC, and there are places to plug into A/C with no ethernet nearby, the librarians and the public are both conditioned to be unaware of ethernet. So the answer will only be either: no or test and see.

When I entered I spoke to a different librarian about the locked PC room (due to a holiday or something). They said I could use wifi but need to give a phone number to a captive portal, which I already knew. My phone was not on me so I said: is it okay if I plug in over there by the catalog PCs? They said yes. Revealing what I mean by "plugging in”, well, i was vague for a reason. I know the population has become ethernet-hostile¹ so indeed asking for forgiveness is better than asking for permission in this situation.

¹ Another library in the area has ethernet ports but they are just decoys (dead ports). I asked the librarian what the problem is, why they are disabled, and whether we can turn them on. Librarian was helpless, and said “use wifi”, which didn’t work for me for different reasons than the other library. But the librarian basically said in so many words “not our problem… you can just use wifi.” At another library, I was able to connect but Tor was blocked. I tried to get support from the librarian. They had no clue but were also unwilling to lead me to someone who could give support. The way it works around here is the info systems are outsourced to some unreachable tech giant, and the librarians are rendered helpless. If the SSID does not appear, the librarian can send an email to someone to say it’s down, and that’s about the full extent of their tech capability.

They’re not at odds. We don’t have to choose between protecting UDHR Art.3 and Art.17. It’s foolish to disregard some portion of the UDHR needlessly and arbitrarily.

The real problem with @Blaster_M@lemmy.world’s comment was to blame the victim. It may be sensible to blame the victim, but let’s not lose focus on the perp.

Don’t try to strawman this. Human rights are violated when someone is deprived of their property (their data in the case at hand). If food is withheld from starving people in Gaza, your argument is like saying:

“Claims human rights are being violated because someone failed to drive a truck”

beehaw.org defederated from lemmy.ml. And I don’t blame them. I actually try not to post to lemmy.ml or any of the Cloudflare-centralized nodes (lemmy.world, sh.itjust.works, lemm.ee, etc) but it slipped my mind when I posted here.

(edit) sorry, i’m confused. I thought beehaw.org defederated from lemmy.ml, but both the post herein and the original are on lemmy.ml yet you can reach this one. So I’m missing something. I wonder if you are able to see infosec.pub-mirrored content and maybe the original community has no infosec subscribers? hard to say.

You’re very trusting of your corporate overlords. I’m sure they are grateful for your steadfast loyalty and trust.

No amount of money you pay for your phone up-front will make that malicious code magically go away. You can pay cash, and you can even tip the seller. The code that reduces your control remains in that device. If you don’t control it, you don’t own it.

If you fail to use rights granted to you by free software licenses, you can blame yourself.

You’re not getting it. Again:

If you don’t control it, you don’t own it.

Buying something does not mean you control it. You might have bought an Amazon Ring doorbell but if Amazon does not like your behavior they can (and will) render it dysfunctional.

If you don’t control it, you don’t own it.

I guess a closer analogy would be rental storage. If you don’t pay your mini storage bill, in some regions the landlord will confiscate your property, holding it hostage until you pay. And if that fails, they’ll even auction off your contents.

So in the case at hand the creditor is holding the debtor’s data hostage. One difference is that the data has no value to the creditor and is not in the creditor’s possession. It would be interesting to know if the contracts in place legally designate the data as the creditor’s property. If not, the data remains the property of the consumer.

This is covered by human rights law. Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Article 17 ¶2:

“No one shall be arbitrarily deprived of his property.”

If the phone user did not sign off on repossession of their data, and thus the data remains their property, then the above-quoted human right is violated in the OP’s scenario.

If the creditor wants to collect on a debt, there is a court process for that. I’ve used it. It works.

Locking the phone is not repossession. It does nothing other than sabotage the device the consumer may need to actually make the payment. The phone remains in the buyer’s possession and useless to the seller.

Power is also misplaced. What happens when the creditor decides to (illegally) refuse cash payments on the debt? Defaulting is not necessarily the debtor’s fault. This in fact happened to me: Creditor refused my cash payment and dragged me into court for delinquency. Judge ruled in my favor because cash acceptance is an obligation. But this law is being disregarded by creditors all over. If the creditor had the option to sabotage my lifestyle by blocking communication and computing access, it would have been a greater injustice.

#WarOnCash

You’re still not grasping how free software works. Users have a right to see the code and the right to change it. They also have the right to redistribute the code. Your complaint is unfounded because not a single user of a fully free platform is forced to have remote management code installed.