Comment by perching_aix
9 hours ago
Not OP, but the latter sounds pretty good actually, yeah. Never understood the free WiFi craze anyways. Just use cellular?
9 hours ago
Not OP, but the latter sounds pretty good actually, yeah. Never understood the free WiFi craze anyways. Just use cellular?
Not all of us have cell plans with hotspots ($$$), hotspots often have data caps, cell is often slower or congested, and there are some areas without cell signal. It's also kind of silly from a wider perspective to shove everyone onto the cellular network when most businesses have perfectly decent fiber internet nowadays.
Sure, I'm usually on hotspot, but I personally appreciate when businesses have wifi. Either way, there are always going to be shared networks somewhere.
What we should actually be doing is WiFi using SIM cards as authentication.
Have it count against your data cap (but make it much cheaper than cellular data). Pay part of that revenue to hotspot-owning businesses. If something bad happens, use the logs that telecoms are already required to keep.
It's very strange to me that we don't have something like this already.
And you should require your passport to get one of those?
ID card you mean ;)) Yes, and we already do.
So that every time you post on social media that you don't like the government, the government can find who said that?
What an incredibly short-sighted, dystopian view.
I live in a country that has mandatory SIM registration, and it's stopping exactly zero organized criminals – these can just pay a tiny bit more and buy burner phones and use out-of-country SIM cards – while it's making life more complicated and expensive for the average citizen.
Expensive because KYC isn't cheap, and guess who pays for that in the end... And that is assuming that your form of ID is even accepted as a foreigner. In a different country, I literally just spent two days sending back and forth selfies holding my passport(!) to little success. And I guess the customer support reps could now just use the same photos to impersonate me elsewhere, since passport photos provide absolutely zero domain binding and are just about the dumbest thing still seeing widespread adoption.
I don't often use registration-free public Wi-Fis, but I love that they exist, and I would hate if they'd be taken away too. I also just transited at an airport that requires passport scans for Wi-Fi usage, and it feels so backwards.
Thanks for being honest about this, though. I was always wondering who all these people were that are seriously in favor of all this dystopian stuff. Would love to hear why you think that it's a net positive for society.