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)

  • hisao@ani.social
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    8 days ago

    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).

      • hisao@ani.social
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        7 days ago

        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.

        • Wappen@lemmy.world
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          7 days ago

          Nah that’s Chat Control. DSA is about online platforms while Chat Control is about private chats.

      • rmuk@feddit.uk
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        7 days ago

        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.

    • Bloomcole@lemmy.world
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      8 days ago

      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.

      • PonyOfWar@pawb.social
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        8 days ago

        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?

        • Bloomcole@lemmy.world
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          8 days ago

          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.

  • raspberriesareyummy@lemmy.world
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    8 days ago

    Get fucked Leyen-cunt and chat control shitpiles. Of course you treasonous monsters want people connected everywhere so you can spy on them whereever. I hope you all die miserable, hated and alone one day.

  • u/lukmly013 💾 (lemmy.sdf.org)@lemmy.sdf.org
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    8 days ago

    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.

  • REDACTED@infosec.pub
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    7 days ago

    This seems a bit wasteful. Everyone already has a phone with network connection, most having infinite data, and statistics are rapidly improving. I don’t remember the last time I had to use public wifi, feels a bit outdated and insecure.

      • REDACTED@infosec.pub
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        7 days ago

        What do you mean by this? It’s literally a thing. As soon as I cross a country border, I even get a message saying “Keep enjoying unlimited data abroad”, while torrenting nearly terabyte a month. Paying 26€ per month.

            • Rbnsft@lemmy.world
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              7 days ago

              Roaming not but there might not be the same price and package somehwere Else in the EU…

            • PlutoniumAcid@lemmy.world
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              7 days ago

              They don’t charge roaming, but they are allowed to sell limited-data plans. Those plans are also limited abroad. This is okay.

              Sure you can get unlimited plans but they axe extremely expensive and not worth it for normal people. I don’t stream terabytes on my phone. I use my unlimited home DSL for that.

            • iglou@programming.dev
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              7 days ago

              Not charging roaming does not mean that your unlimited plan carries over abroad. It just means you can’t be charged more for using your plan abroad.

              It is still legal and widely done to have different limits abroad vs domestic.

            • AwesomeLowlander@sh.itjust.works
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              7 days ago
              1. Not everybody in the EU is living in the EU.
              2. I didn’t mention roaming. Not everybody has the same unlimited data for cheap package
              3. From my understanding, the no-roaming charge law is being ignored pretty widely, in spirit if not in letter (different quota if at home vs roaming).
    • iglou@programming.dev
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      7 days ago

      Just because you have the option and can afford it does not mean every european citizen can have it or afford it.

      EU policies aren’t just for the privileged.

    • brennesel@discuss.tchncs.de
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      7 days ago

      most having infinite data

      That’s a bold claim. Do you have some official figures to back that up? Where I live, I don’t know of anyone with truly unlimited mobile internet.

      The cheaper unlimited tariffs cost around €30, but have at least one of the following restrictions:

      • Speed limit after x volume used
      • Poor network coverage
      • <15MBit/s speed
      • Significantly increased costs after 2 years of contract term
      • Cancellation by provider if consumption is too high
      • only a few Gb at full speed included in EU roaming

      Genuine unlimited contracts with stable network coverage and 300 Mbit/s usually cost around €80-100 per month here. And unlimited EU roaming is still not included by default.

      • REDACTED@infosec.pub
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        6 days ago

        That’s a bold claim. Do you have some official figures to back that up?

        I somehow assumed that if we have reasonable plans, limits and laws in east europe, surely you have it better in central european hub, you know? But no, I lazied out on checking the official figures, but where I live, I rarely hear about someone paying for limited plan, it’s just not worth it to save 10€ and worry about hitting walls.

        Speaking of slow speeds, I live in semi-rural area and here’s my speedtest: https://www.speedtest.net/my-result/a/11047555422 (on 5G)

      • xav@programming.dev
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        7 days ago

        Here in France we have “Free” (which is not free, costs 20€/month) which is not unlimited but something like 250GB/month last time I looked, and frequently increasing. I never ran out of data.

  • giacomo@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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    8 days ago

    oh dude, they promised to be privacy friendly! maybe I’m just to american to believe in promises.

    • AwesomeLowlander@sh.itjust.works
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      8 days ago

      You don’t have to trust them any more than you trust your local Starbucks WiFi. We’re at the point where your traffic should no longer be vulnerable just because you’re on the wrong WiFi network.

        • hisao@ani.social
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          7 days ago

          How do we know intelligence agencies are not in collusion with certificate authorities though? What if they actually have access to ROOT CA private keys and can just automatically strip https from most of the traffic in their mass surveillance software? This is something I found with a very quick search: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DigiNotar

          • PlexSheep@infosec.pub
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            7 days ago

            Yeah sure but defending against nation state intelligence agencies is a thread model few people have. It’s also not really realistic unless you go to paranoia level mitigations.

      • 8fingerlouie@sh.itjust.works
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        8 days ago

        My traffic is not vulnerable, but my device might be.

        When you connect to public WiFi, you also share it with others, and maybe someone on that network wants to test out their new hacker skills ?

        Maybe not as much of a problem for phones, but that juicy developer laptop running unauthenticated MongoDB with a dump of the production database… yup, that now “mine”.

        Ideally all those services should be listening on 127.0.0.1 / ::1, but everybody makes mistakes. Maybe the service comes preconfigured to listen on 0.0.0.0.

        • loudwhisper@infosec.pub
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          7 days ago

          Someone runs MongoDB unauthenticated, bound on 0.0.0.0 with production data, on a computer without a VPN, and the problem is the WiFi?

          Like I get what you are saying, but this sounds like saying that we should ban speedbumps because imagine there is a guy with a loaded gun pointed at a kid with no safe, finger on the trigger, and high on coke, if the car hits the speedbump the toddler is gone. Yeah, but I would hardly say the speedump is the same.

        • Honytawk@feddit.nl
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          8 days ago

          Just keep your firewall set to public network and you will most likely be fine.

          Anything can be hacked, even on your private home network.

          • 8fingerlouie@sh.itjust.works
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            8 days ago

            Again, people make mistakes, so they may think the firewall is on, but that one time 3 weeks ago when they were debugging something and they turned off the firewall for it, yeah, we never got around to enabling it again.

            Also, my home network is a lot more secure by default than shared public WiFi. At home I have decent control over who and what connects. Sure, people could in theory crack my WiFi password, but the risk of that is low compared to sitting on public WiFi.

            • AwesomeLowlander@sh.itjust.works
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              7 days ago

              Nothing we can do to prevent that, unless we want to turn all laptops into walled gardens. PEBKAC is not the fault of the WiFi network.

              • TheSaddestMan@lemmy.zip
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                7 days ago

                I mean, we could switch to Linux distros (so that you can fine-tune DNS and VPN settings without corporate BS), but the intricacies that introduces to connecting to the WiFi safely are not casual in scope. Most people are better off buying a lightly-used Mac (or not, it’s been a while since people have been happy with Apple) or replacing their laptop with a Fairphone or Graphene OS phone than switching to Linux from Windows 10.

                Windows 11+ however… is another story. Anything but letting the IngSoc Smart TV become the OS. The issue is that computers come bundled with Windows and so they use “Secure Boot” to trap you. You can’t use Secure Boot without Windows, and you can’t play many online games if you do not have Secure Boot (even if the excuse as to why is a filthy lie) so if you’re gaming you basically have to hope that Steam OS triumphs.

                Best option is to just go to places where the wifi service is affordable but not free so that the operator needs to keep tabs on whether users are doing something other than browsing the internet or playing games (i.e. stealing people’s info or putting malware on their machine). Unfortunately, there doesn’t seem to be any great demand for internet cafes anymore in my location.

                • AwesomeLowlander@sh.itjust.works
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                  7 days ago

                  Most people are better off buying a lightly-used Mac (or not, it’s been a while since people have been happy with Apple) or replacing their laptop with a Fairphone or Graphene OS phone than switching to Linux from Windows 10.

                  I don’t really see the connection there with somebody bringing down their own firewall, hosting open services, and basically putting out the welcome mat. You can burn yourself on any OS (and if you can’t, I don’t want to be using or pushing it).

                  Best option is to just go to places where the wifi service is affordable but not free so that the operator needs to keep tabs on whether users are doing something other than browsing the internet or playing games

                  What place charges little enough for the WiFi to be affordable but has somebody live monitoring network traffic?

      • prole@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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        7 days ago

        You don’t have to trust them any more than you trust your local Starbucks WiFi

        I don’t really trust that either

          • WhyJiffie@sh.itjust.works
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            7 days ago

            except when not. HTTPS helps with security, but there’s privacy leaks all around all kinds of network traffic. apps and services you use, websites you visit (DNS, SNI), when do you do something, like arrive or receive a voip call, …

      • shalafi@lemmy.world
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        8 days ago

        I feel like the OP you’re responding to. Explain how I should be comfortable? The idea creeps me out, but I admit I haven’t delved into security for a few years.

        • AwesomeLowlander@sh.itjust.works
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          8 days ago

          You don’t HAVE to be comfortable. But if you use any sort of public WiFi, this is no riskier than any of those networks. They can grab some metadata unless you use a VPN, but likely less than what your ISP already has on you anyway. Basically, there’s no reason this should be putting up any major red flags. We’re past the days when a malicious access point could MitM most connections due to lack of encryption.

        • neukenindekeuken@sh.itjust.works
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          7 days ago

          Every site uses HTTPS which encrypts your data in transit. Even if they sniff the packets, they would spend literal decades trying to decrypt it.

          Just be wary of visiting sites or sending traffic not over HTTPS. Its rare, but it does happen.

          • WhyJiffie@sh.itjust.works
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            7 days ago

            HTTPS does not protect against everything. there’s many other protocols that apps can use for whatever use case, and even HTTPS traffic leaks lots of information directly or indirectly, like the websites you visit (because of DNS, and TLS SNI)

        • Saik0@lemmy.saik0.com
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          8 days ago

          HTTPS is used on virtually every site out there these days. That is used to encrypt your traffic from the get go. So specifics of the traffic/request won’t be obvious/known. The EU could be big enough to force manufacturers to inject their certificates into devices… could be a man in the middle attack. But you can always just remove certs you don’t trust from your devices.

          DNS by default is often plaintext. You can setup your device to use DoH or other encrypted versions of DNS.

          That leaves just the raw connection analysis… eg, that your device is sending traffic to some known IP… many site share hosts so that can be hard to determine though often not really… Proxy or VPN services can make it impossible to do this type of analysis… but then those services will be able to tell.

          Ultimately being able to say that “Shalafi sent some packets to an IP that google owns and received a bunch back” could be email… could be youtube… could be any number of things… at some point it become educated guess at best. And what specifically happened (ex: Watched a video about tying shoes) is simply unknown. It would take a bunch of external additional data to actually tie you to anything directly, eg server logs or other sources… which usually means more than one party is already working together against you. At that point you’ve got bigger issues usually.

          • WhyJiffie@sh.itjust.works
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            7 days ago

            this is such an oversimplification. maybe it’s hard to distinguish between google services, but if you play some online game, chat over whatsapp or signal, or have a voip call, that’s an entirely different story. these can probably be told apart by DNS requests or active connections, and in the case of communications, messaging and voice calling is obvious to tell apart because of the difference in the volume of data. when having a voip call, through a service that supports peer to peer calls (most do, and it’s default on), an observer may even be able to deduct something about who you are speaking with, like what general area they live at.

            then what if you have apps that try to establish connections to services at home. like smb or nfs, https services. your smb/nfs client may leak your credentials, I think even linux does not encrypt smb communication unless you request it in a mount option, and with HTTPS you leak your internal domain names because of TLS SNI.

            • Saik0@lemmy.saik0.com
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              7 days ago

              Forgive me for not covering 100% of this advanced topic in my 3 paragraphs on Lemmy… Nuance gets long, and most people have attention spans of a squirrel.


              maybe it’s hard to distinguish between google services, but if you play some online game, chat over whatsapp or signal, or have a voip call, that’s an entirely different story.

              Already covered as

              That leaves just the raw connection analysis…

              Where specifics can’t be divined… but other details might.


              these can probably be told apart by DNS requests

              Addressed already with

              DNS by default is often plaintext. You can setup your device to use DoH or other encrypted versions of DNS.


              when having a voip call, through a service that supports peer to peer calls (most do, and it’s default on), an observer may even be able to deduct something about who you are speaking with, like what general area they live at.

              Actually this is quite unlikely. ASNs are not as structured as you think. It takes an external database that specifically tracks DHCP’d ISP addresses. Case in point, when I moved to my new house… Google maps though I was a good 60 miles away from where I was… it was after repeated access to google maps and other service for about a month before maps started getting accurate with where I’m accessing their service from.

              And that point is covered with

              It would take a bunch of external additional data to actually tie you to anything directly, eg server logs or other sources… which usually means more than one party is already working together against you. At that point you’ve got bigger issues usually.


              then what if you have apps that try to establish connections to services at home.

              If you purposefully steer your car off the road… of course you’re going to crash. If you’re going to expose non-encrypted things onto the internet…

              At that point you’ve got bigger issues usually.

              I would suspect the untrusted wifi to NOT be the leading thing you’d want to care about in this situation. But even then… I would start making reasonable assumptions such as you’re likely on a DHCP connection without static addressing… your site and resources will rotate IPs every once in a while. Makes tracking you even harder.


              with HTTPS you leak your internal domain names because of TLS SNI.

              Encrypted SNI (ESNI) / Encrypted Client Hello (ECH) exists… Cloudflare for example supports ECH, and they transit a LOT of data.

              But once again… would be outside of the scope of discussion here. Yes… an ISP can make an educated guess of where you’re likely to be going… and maybe even make a reasonable guess of what you could doing… But certainly not the details of it.


              And this all ignores the fact that a random coffee shop isn’t going to do full packet inspection to get this data to begin with. It’s not worth it for them. They gain very little from collecting meta data without some bigger company backing them to do so… Which falls under

              It would take a bunch of external additional data to actually tie you to anything directly, eg server logs or other sources… which usually means more than one party is already working together against you. At that point you’ve got bigger issues usually.

              Edit: Typo that changed meaning. Fixed.

              • WhyJiffie@sh.itjust.works
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                6 days ago

                Forgive me for not covering 100% of this advanced topic in my 3 paragraphs on Lemmy…

                Quite obviously the problem is not that you did not write an 560 page essay, but that you were misleading by basically saying “nah, it’s fine, nothing could leak, everything is ultra secure nowadays”.

                If you purposefully steer your car off the road… of course you’re going to crash. If you’re going to expose non-encrypted things onto the internet…

                did you just ignore a whole lot of points here? DNS, SNI? smb clients? whatever else? its not like I’m using HTTP. things are largely encrypted, the rest is out of reach!

                Encrypted SNI (ESNI) / Encrypted Client Hello (ECH) exists… Cloudflare for example supports ECH, and they transit a LOT of data.

                how many sites exactly support that configuration? do you need additional configuration for that in e.g. nginx? if so, most selfhosters probably don’t have it, because it’s talked about almost nowhere.

                and is it finally enabled by default in firefox? will firefox just retry without encryption when the connection fails?

                But once again… would be outside of the scope of discussion here. Yes… an ISP can make an educated guess of where you’re likely to be going… and maybe even make a reasonable guess of what you could doing… But certainly not the details of it.

                it is certainly in scope. the discussion is not about security and your accounts getting hacked by evil EU, but privacy and data mining, for which all of these is a treasure trove.

                And this all ignores the fact that a random coffee shop isn’t going to do full packet inspection to get this data to begin with. It’s not worth it for them.

                probably not the coffee shop but the networking equipment, where even cheaper models include some form of “smart cloud security”

                • Saik0@lemmy.saik0.com
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                  6 days ago

                  The fact that I addressed some of these items literally line by line and you bring it up again as if I didn’t address it tells me that you’re arguing in bad faith. Have a good day. Find someone else to complain to.

      • Honytawk@feddit.nl
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        8 days ago

        There are tons of things the EU is doing well, dude.

        From resisting the technocapitalist rethoric of the US, to standing up against imperial bullies like Russia.

        I’m not saying it is perfect, nothing is. But sometimes it feels like the EU is the only reasonable beacon in a sea of corruption.

        • qweertz (they/she)@programming.dev
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          8 days ago

          The EU only cares about blocking the private sector from getting their citizen’s data. They actively harm privacy when it’s about government access

        • Bloomcole@lemmy.world
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          8 days ago

          LOL ‘dude’
          The EU just bent over to get fucked by US tarrifs.
          They shouldn’t worry about Russia as much as they should about US imperialism that causes all the trouble.
          But these sell outs will gladly suffer as good obedient vasals. 🤡

  • Mac@mander.xyz
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    8 days ago

    Damn, this is so cool.
    We could have had this in the States too, but, well, you all know.

    • Bloomcole@lemmy.world
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      8 days ago

      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’.

      • sem@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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        7 days ago

        Do you have other examples? I am really curious when they said privacy friendly and ended up snooping.

        • Bloomcole@lemmy.world
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          7 days ago

          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 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.

      • Glitchvid@lemmy.world
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        8 days ago

        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.

      • Mac@mander.xyz
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        8 days ago

        Surely that’s unrelated to the billions of dollars that the telecom companies stole from the taxpayer after promising to build out infrastructure?

  • Arcane2077@sh.itjust.works
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    7 days ago

    So, if I live in the EU, what’s stopping me from cancelling my home plan and making the wifi experience worse for everyone?

    • herrvogel@lemmy.world
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      7 days ago

      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.

    • Blackmist@feddit.uk
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      7 days ago

      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.

  • Zer0_F0x@lemmy.world
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    8 days ago

    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.

        • loudwhisper@infosec.pub
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          7 days ago

          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.

        • ChaoticNeutralCzech@feddit.org
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          7 days ago

          I have a free 1 MiB/day plan. I only pay €8/year to top up the prepaid SIM. This would be AMAZING in 2005 but now the number of webpages that work on my 2G feature phone via Opera Mini is shrinking. Not to mention, there is no privacy because of the transcoding server. A stock-firmware 4G smartphone would eat through this data in a minute just with background apps calling home.

          With the right software (rooted Android, custom clients, transcoding server at home) one could theoretically get all day of use of text- and sparsely image-based services such as email, RSS, SSH, timetables, Lemmy… I’d need at least a data blocker for backhround apps, a kiB meter in the notification bar and a confirmation pop-up for every transaction above 10 kiB (this can be estimated by content length).

    • deafboy@lemmy.world
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      8 days ago

      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… 🥲

  • Kazumara@discuss.tchncs.de
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    8 days ago

    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…

    • Baleine@jlai.lu
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      8 days ago

      I’m sure we could invest in all of them and money wouldn’t be the problem.

    • iglou@programming.dev
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      7 days ago

      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.

      • Kazumara@discuss.tchncs.de
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        7 days ago

        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.

        • rainwall@piefed.social
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          7 days ago

          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.

        • Blisterexe@lemmy.zip
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          7 days ago

          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.