cross-posted from: https://slrpnk.net/post/25779751
The intative promises to be privacy-friendly with no tracking. Stating:
Your privacy is important. The WiFi4EU app ensures a private online experience with no tracking or data collection. Simply connect and enjoy free public Wi-Fi without concerns.
Source: https://digital-strategy.ec.europa.eu/en/policies/wifi4eu-citizens
Will be interesting to see how this spans and plays out in reality. Looks promising too, did a quick scan of their builtin permissions and trackers and looks good too. (Scanning tool is called Exodus)
It’s mind-blowing how at the same time some EU government guys pushing stuff like DSA while other do something like this (which is nice, and a complete opposite, if it’s not honeypot anyways).
What’s the problem with the Digital Services Act?
Yeah, of all the things to criticise the EU for the DSA is a bizarre pick. Challenging techbro dominance with simple and technically-sensible demands on the gatekeepers is a win for the average person in my book.
They tried to push it to the point of stripping encryption from internet altogether and when that didn’t work they tried demanding chat apps to be able to scan people messages before they send them. Maybe I’m confusing multiple entirely different things here, but I kinda heard that mostly with the abbreviation DSA flying around so I assumed it was sorta umbrella for all those things.
Nah that’s Chat Control. DSA is about online platforms while Chat Control is about private chats.
yeah the DSA seems good to me, largely because it mostly adresses vlops being shitty
Indeed from their history of constantly wanting more control and invasive measures, always sold in the name of security, protection of minors, etc… I’m highly sceptical and always asume the worst.
But those are all publicly available pieces of legislation. It’s quite a leap to go from that to just assuming they’ll secretly and illegally spy on you through public wifi networks, without any law allowing them to do so. Besides, if they have no problem doing that, why would internet through your European ISP be any safer?
Never said the rest is safer, doesn’t mean they are ‘privacy friendly’, they aren’t.
It’s quite a leap to go from that to just assuming they’ll secretly and illegally spy on you
Plenty of stuff like this or this or this
And they did as much against Pegasus as they do against israel.
Some words and recommendations.22 EU clients, at least, have acquired it.
quite a leap to go from that to just assuming they will not spy on you as a collective, more than is already ‘publicly available’.
Organisations that spy usually don’t advertise their practices.Plenty of stuff like this or this or this
Again, those are all pushes for legislation. None of which are implemented at this point. The EU is, for better and for worse, a bureaucratic monster. Anything it does has to go through a long process involving multiple oversight comittees, the commission, the parliament etc. It really doesn’t have the option for much secrecy. National governments are quite a different story.
. Anything it does has to go through a long process involving multiple oversight comittees, the commission, the parliament etc. It really doesn’t have the option for much secrecy.
Oh my sweet summer child.
When a German MEP Patrick Breyer asked the EU to release the names of the people who were a part of the so called High Level Group that wrote this proposal, they replied with a list with all names blacked out. Here is Patrick Breyer’s own blog post on the subject.
According to Edri ”The HLG has kept its work sessions closed, by strictly controlling which stakeholders got invited and effectively shutting down civil society participation.”.
And that’s why I trust no one! Oh, wait. I’m lonely and miserable.
Saddest man indeed
That’s cool. Here in the US, we’re this close to banning vaccines. *sad trombone sound
Having a union-wide regulatory framework for soda bottle caps, or mandatory categorization of cucumbers seems a lot less like a government overreach in comparison. Thanks, I guess… 🥲
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I hope you’re joking.
Title is wrong. It’s an old initiative, not even funded anymore. Ran from 2018 to 2020 with 120 Million EUR.
A bit offtopic about a pet peeve of mine, but this is why it’d be super nice if social media that end up getting screenshot had absolute timestamps. Thank you for letting us know.
my bad! I misread the context and had not heard of it before - yet living in the EU. I will change the title. I got confused as I saw their post on LinkedIn, and it was posted recently: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/european-commission_wifi4eu-activity-7359136374895046656-oXYi
It’s still active as in, they maintain the hotspots. But I just had a look at the map, and it looks like there’s spotty service mostly clustered around tiny villages, rather than providing coverage to areas that actual get significant tourism or other visitors.
One of their access points has saved my skin twice now in the past 2 months, so I’m happy it exists.
35E/month per access point for 3 years, it’s not too bad if they got actual use, if that means where ever you go there will be free internet at hand that can be relied upon and that will even save the precious RF bandwidth of cell phone towers and reduces cell phone subscription by an equivalent amount
if that means where ever you go there will be free internet at hand that can be relied upon
Yeah if that were the case it could be useful. Unfortunately the map looks pretty bad: https://wifi4eu.ec.europa.eu/#/list-accesspoints
They seem pretty evenly distributed to me ?
Sure there are a few everywhere, but the big gaps are the issue.
For example in your screenshot if you zoom in on Poitiers you’ll see there are none there, only in the two northern neighbor communes Neuville de Poitou and Jaunay-Clan. Similar for Nantes, none there, they are all in Saint-Sébastien-Sur-Loire and Thouaré-sur-Loire, the center and all the other suburbs have nothing.
Ah ok yes I see what you mean, Poitiers has none and is clearly some big place
While “Le Bourg” probably a rich place, has a whole bunch of them
Of course getting the density of Poitiers for all of Europe on 120 million for 3 years is never going to happen on this approach.
Even though 35$/month per hotspot is reasonable. It’s just not the right approach. In reality nearly every single building in Europe has an internet connection and wifi routers.
Since there is not really such a thing as “keeping the RF spectrum of wifi to oneself” The logical approach would have been to socially engineer the default that ALL wifi hotspot would offer any random guest, free throttled courtesy internet access. Something that the ISPs have fervently opposed, something industry has made sure would not happen, at least not by accident. Through hardware design and the dissemination of horror stories. A more competent state would have used this money to just massage the existing infrastructure in opening up to their fellow citizens rather than try and build a parallel infrastructure with brute force money.
I hope they get their shit together and strong arm vendors into a more pro-social private infrastructure, since that essentially free at this point for all intents and purposes.
Well I don’t know if that’s a good use of EU money. I’d rather see investments in large and difficult infrastructure, rail, software, datacenters, industrial sectors we’re currently lacking, grid investments - stuff like that.
End user internet access is more like thousands of small decentralised projects. The coordination might make it easier to use compared to if everyone did their own free wifi project, but that’s such a small benefit…
I’m sure we could invest in all of them and money wouldn’t be the problem.
So the initiative here is the initiative itself.
As always, it’s not like both aren’t possible. As a matter of fact, there is a lot of railway projects ongoing at the same time, to only quote one of your examples.
A government can take care of more than one issue at a time, luckily.
It may be a small benefit for you (I assume you are german based on your server), but not every european country or citizen has the same access to internet. This is a good initiative, but obviously not primarily intended for the richer citizens/countries of the union.
I would say it’s a small benefit for anyone. It’s not like people will walk to the town square, or the park or the hospital to use some free EU Wifi.
The title is also very wrong I found out. It’s not being launched. It’s not even funded any more.
Wifi4EU ran from 2018 to 2020 with a funding of 120 million EUR. They paid up to 15 thousand EUR for equipment and installation per municipality, the local municipalities had to pay for the internet service and maintenance.
This is the result: https://wifi4eu.ec.europa.eu/#/list-accesspoints
Still looks like a pointless exercise to me.
15k for several distinct hotspots in a city is pretty reasonable, depending on what equipment they are using.
Enterprise quality IT gear is expensive. Each access point can easily be 1k, and that excludes any routers/firewall/switching that you may need at each site. As an example, I’ve worked in places that had small retail locations that at a minimum had 8k of network equipment, with some locations pushing into the 100k+ range based on needs and size. That’s per site. The above is all in USD, but just equipment. Labor can add 30% to the costs.
15k euro for a whole city that includes equipment and installation sounds very fiscally responsible.
My city runs it’s own wifi hotspots all over the city, and it is quite a nice feature, especially if your data plan isn’t very good.
Your city can probably afford it, but some can’t, or won’t. Initiatives like this get the ball rolling.
I think this is mostly for non-EU tourists. You don’t pay for roaming in EU anymore so you don’t really need WiFi when traveling.
Recently mobile phone operators introduced a “fair use policy”, so it’s not really a”roam like at home” anymore, but data volumes can be limited to a fraction of what you are entitled to in your home country.
This is a point where WiFi might get more important again when traveling.
Well, speak for yourself. I don’t have a running phone contract because I don’t really use my phone much for calling or stick to open WiFi when I need to be online. Just got top-up mobile data for the times when there is no WiFi.
I definitely do want WiFi when travelling.
If I had this in the US, I’d be cancelling my cellular service entirely, I’d still keep my home service though, to VPN into it for a bit more security when using a public wifi connection.
I would also just transfer my phone number to one of those cheap voip providers, then just use voip from my phone everywhere.
Ehhh… I would maybe cancel the data part of my plan, but I dunno how comfortable I would be relying on notoriously spotty and insecure public Wi-Fi services to make or receive phone calls.
In my case, it’d be fine. I already mainly use data for phone calls, and I also have 2 phones, one of which is work-provided, so I’ll still have communications…
If this does what it says on the box its huge
Leaving the EU is one of the stupidest self harming things we ever did.
Who are you?
UK if I have to guess.
I’m the former prime minister of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, Tony Blair. Who are you?
And I’m glad that the UK left the EU, because now the EU has its own Cuba in front of its shores. Makes life more interesting, doesn’t it?
I’ll not sure I see the parallel.
Ahh yes, border free travel… wait a minute, why are the Austrian police on the border here? Wait a minute, why are they stopping us…
Because it’s border free travel for EU citizens. It’s still another country you enter, as of course, there are rules.
They stop you to check. You obviously pass through.
Also, there’s still illegal import rules.
It’s still schengen rules, so if you take a train the likelihood of being stopped at the border is pretty low. Austria may have border agents board the train and verify passports, but that’s still pretty uncommon in Europe.
Free Wireless ISP, you say?
cheapskate romanian sounds
Germans are gonna start getting out their old cantennas or nanostations and point it at the closest hotspot
Of course I would never do such a thing, being half german, living in Germany. Certainly didn’t live off a nearby restaurants wifi hotspot for almost 2 years.
Oh, sure. That’s fair. Just like how the US kicked the Natives off of their land. </sarcasm>
Classic European flavored racism. Are you aware that you are promoting racism or not? I think mindfulness is key here. People should consider their own internal biases and adjust to help make a better world.
Pretty sure they are themselves Romanian.
Can you even be racist against yourself?
Yes you can.
Yes, I live in Romania.
It was a joke, but also true.
I don’t see the racist part, but please excuse me if I’ve offended you.
descurcăreț - someone who makes use of the flaws in rulings. It’s not even a negative term.
<sincerity> Sorry about the other response I made being accusatory. I get the difference between self-deprecating humor about one’s family, and actual boomerang racism. Thanks for clearing things up. </sincerity>
If Hule wants to make cheapskate Romanian sounds he’s allowed to. It’s his goddamn choice whether he wants to be a cheapskate or not.
Honestly nowadays data plans are cheap on most mobile carriers and they’re obligated to have them work accross EU, so you no longer really need Wi-Fi when traveling.
Also, I can see this being easily and constantly exploited via Wi-Fi attacks where hackers set up fake Hotspots with the same name as the closest legit one.
I’m sure non-EU visitors will like it
Getting their credentials stolen thru WiFi attack?
This is not really a common or easy attack, especially for any meaningful service (that is probably in preloaded HSTS lists).
It’s not like this is the only shared network. In airports millions of people everyday connect to the same network.
Cries in Brexit
~£2 a day data charge on most UK networks
Isn’t Lebara less than that per month and includes roaming?
The more competitive networks tend to include EU roaming as standard. The ones that charge a lot - like the £2/day mentioned - tend to be the ones with captive customers like Sky, for example, where most of their customers also have TV and broadband from them so they’re stuck.
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Damn, this is so cool.
We could have had this in the States too, but, well, you all know.This will never be possible in the States. We still have areas with no cellular.
Surely that’s unrelated to the billions of dollars that the telecom companies stole from the taxpayer after promising to build out infrastructure?
Ironically enough there’s basically a private version of this through Comcast turning their rented CPEs into their own unlicensed wifi mesh, they call it WiFi Pass – they at least have the courtesy to give it to you gratis if you’re already paying for residential service.
This would be cool 20 years ago. Now it’s just a stunt.
Better late than never though
It shows you are american and not familiar with the EU.
‘privacy friendly’ is a euphemistic PR term, not unlike making the horrible Patriot Act worse and renaming it the ‘Freedom Act’.Do you have other examples? I am really curious when they said privacy friendly and ended up snooping.
I’ll copy my answer to an EU fanboy:
Never said the rest is safer, doesn’t mean they are ‘privacy friendly’, they aren’t.
It’s quite a leap to go from that to just assuming they’ll secretly and illegally spy on youPlenty of stuff like this or this or this
And they did as much against Pegasus as they do against israel. Some words and recommendations.
22 EU clients, at least, have acquired it. quite a leap to go from that to just assuming they will not spy on you as a collective, more than is already ‘publicly available’. Organisations that spy usually don’t advertise their practices.
Thanks to EU roaming rules…
Not quite. I’ve come across a few plans that don’t offer EU roaming, and also those where there’s far less data offered than the regulation requires, or found a loophole.
Let’s go for the examples of no EU roaming data:
T-Mobile CZ Twist IoT CR - IoT card, but it offers up to 500GB of data paid once a year (78 EUR), only usable in Czech Republic.
T-Mobile CZ 100GB edition - regular SIM, but also CR-only
Vodafone CZ GIGA 100 + 50 GB - also a regular prepaid, but no roaming
Swan Mobile (4ka) Sloboda Data - 300GB in Slovakia, but 0.144 EUR per MB in EU.For the last example, they’re also the same example that breaches the regulation with other packages. When I did the calculations, they exactly checked out for other 3 MNOs, so I guess I did them right, but they didn’t for Swan.
Further confirming this is the fact that they have already received at least 2 (as far as I could find) fines for breaching these RLAH regulations, that is 15,000 and 90,000 EUR, but I suppose that just ends up being cheaper for them, as it still isn’t fixed.Anyway, perhaps they did in fact fix this, with a loophole.
For example, take Sloboda Nekonecno+ for 25EUR/month with “unlimited” (300GB) data. 8.25GB of EU roaming does not look right there.
So what is going on?
On paper, it’s split up into base and additional package. Base package is 20EUR, and only has 2GB of data. Additional package with unlimited data is 5EUR/month, and as you could guess, cannot be purchased separately.So, for base package, you get full allowance, thus 2GB. Additional package is calculated separately, (4.06504065041 / 1.30) * 2 is 6.25. And thus 8.25GB instead of 31.27GB was born.
Are there any true unlimited EU roaming SIMs?
More Europeans than ever can watch the live-streamed genocide that we’ve been arming and encouraging!
Through various deliberately InterPol-managed servers that track your telemetry.
And have to walk on eggshells if they protest against it or get arrested for ‘supporting terrorism’.
I want to be European so bad.
So, if I live in the EU, what’s stopping me from cancelling my home plan and making the wifi experience worse for everyone?
The fact that there’s 93k access points and that’s not very many when you consider the size of the EU and the average range and speed of an access point.
Limiting the bandwidth use of individual devices is pretty easy, and basically standard procedure for public networks. Even cheap consumer routers that come with ISP subscriptions can do that.
