European Commission has a "Wifi4EU" initative, provides 93k high-speed private access points across the EU, free of charge.
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You don't have to trust them any more than you trust your local Starbucks WiFi
I don't really trust that either
That's the point, you don't have to. The system works on the assumption that the AP is untrusted.
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Why not both?
PWAs are easy to maintain & lightweight
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Title is wrong. It's an old initiative, not even funded anymore. Ran from 2018 to 2020 with 120 Million EUR.
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
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But why an App & not a PWA ?
Would have been nice indeed, however there is a web version: https://wifi4eu.ec.europa.eu/#/list-accesspoints
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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.
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PWAs are easy to maintain & lightweight
Not saying they aren't, just that a lot of folks will probably search their phone's app store and if they don't see it assume it doesn't exist for their phone.
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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?
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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.
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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
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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.
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.
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What will tracking MACs give them? They will now that such and such MAC address connected to such and such WiFi router. What will they do with it? What is the risk here?
Your MAC is unique to your *physical" device so there's that, also you could track movement globally. I guess there are other things I'm not thinking about but 2 just on top of my head is clearly 2 too many IMO.
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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
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.
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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.
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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.
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Your MAC is unique to your *physical" device so there's that, also you could track movement globally. I guess there are other things I'm not thinking about but 2 just on top of my head is clearly 2 too many IMO.
I get that but what the European Commission would do with this info? They would be able to tell that you visited Berlin in May or that you went to Portugal in June. And... what? They will not sell this data to advertisers because that would be just stupid. Would they share this data with police? For what purpose? Would Ursula von der Leyen use it to track her political opponents? See where they went on holiday? What would be the point?
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you wouldn't be happy with that. i looked up how the Wifi routers are distributed, and (in Austria at least) small towns have 1-2 routers placed in the municipal buildings they have, servicing the town square. Which means you would have to sit around inside or outside of city hall all day.
Yes, it's not like poor people or children with abusive parents need library wifi to do anything important like looking up how to deal with life's shit when their parents never taught them how. </sarcasm>
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Free Wireless ISP, you say?
cheapskate romanian sounds
Oh, sure. That's fair. Just like how the US kicked the Natives off of their land. </sarcasm>
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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>
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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.
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.
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. 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.
