Some cafes have the shitty practice of imposing a captive portal for Internet access. Sometimes they demand personal information, and sometimes the captive portal discriminates against people with older phones.

Currently these cafes have the field “Internet access: customers”. That’s misleading and unjustly described. Some of them should be tagged with “Internet access: only for customers with new phones”. It’s not really fair to say it’s for all customers when they use exclusive technology.

  • tofu
    13·
    2 months ago

    “new phones” seems pretty unspecified and also likely be outdated in some years. If there was a field like that, I guess it should be more specific.

    Have you tried asking in some osm community?

    • activistPnk@slrpnk.netOPM
      2·
      2 months ago

      Yeah, it would not be trivial to establish a thorough criteria that covers all variables which mappers would then pay attention to. It would be more sensible to simply have a flag that says “dysfunctional for old phones” and if any device cannot connect due to being too old, it should be sufficient to set the flag.

      There are countless ways incompetent IT folks can fuck up Internet service for the general public. It would be unsurmountable to catalog all such foolish/elitist implementations. But some of the info can be automated. A mapper who is at a location could run a tool that does a wifi scan. The mapper could select the relevant SSID for the establishment, and some basic info could be captured just from that: WEP/WPA/open… and if open then presence of a captive portal could be auto detected.

      If such an tool were made to improve maps, it could also double as enriching a DB for navigation use (for those who navigate offline and/or refuse Google location tracking).

      Have you tried asking in some osm community?

      No. Thanks for reminding me. I was planning to crosspost there.

    • Coelacanthus@infosec.pub
      2·
      2 months ago

      Maybe mark it a compose of 2G/3G/LTE/NR, such as LTE only/3G+LTE/LTE+NR.
      But there is another issue: the cell tower is belong to different MNO, so for some MNO you get 3G+LTE but for another MNO you get LTE.

      • tofu
        4·
        2 months ago

        I think OP is talking about WiFi with entry barriers in this case

        • Coelacanthus@infosec.pub
          1·
          2 months ago

          Ok. Mark it as Open/OWE/WPA/WPA2/WPA3/802.1X. The main reason prevent old phone connect is WPA version. The newer WPA version require newer hardware and software.

          • tofu
            3·
            2 months ago

            Check the OP. it’s about login portals.

            • activistPnk@slrpnk.netOPM
              1·
              2 months ago

              Indeed GSM is irrelevant because GSM towers cannot relate to any particular business. GSM standards are much less of a problem. When the country decides to abandon LTE, all non-5G phone owners are fucked nationwide.

              It’s a Wi-Fi problem. Captive portals are the biggest problem, and the most obnoxious problem because it’s an artificially created problem as a consequence of incompetence. I only had captive portals in mind when writing the OP, but there are also situations where someone configures an AP to not use 802.11b (for example) and then old hardware does not even see the SSID. My laptop cannot connect at some public libraries for this reason. Then WPA versions /could/ be an issue, I think, but I have not encountered that.