[qingcharles]

Yikes. I forgot you could get free WiFi practically anywhere you could get a signal because everyone's WiFi was open or easy to hack.

[Gigachad]

I miss when free wifi was everywhere. When I was traveling Italy my phone seemed to almost never have signal despite paying for roaming data. And I couldn’t find free wifi anywhere. The few places that did have it like mcdonalds wanted me to authenticate with sms which wasn’t working since I had no phone signal.

Used to be that every cafe and business just had an open wifi network. Now if they provide it at all it’s password protected

[bonoboTP]

Part of the general decrease of trust.

[ghaff]

Or just greater awareness of possible bad outcomes if you just leave your WiFi open.

[bonoboTP]

> Used to be that every cafe and business just had an open wifi network. Now if they provide it at all it’s password protected

I reacted to this. Not personal open wifi. In cafes the password is often on the wall, in the menu or otherwise easily obtained.

[ghaff]

It's a business and assuming they allow WiFi access on-premises for customers, it's just a business decision that issues associated with having open WiFi are minor relative to customers who won't frequent your establishment--or a hypothetical for a future date that they'll deal with when the time comes.

Probably increasingly irrelevant with increased use of just mobile phones and 5G anyway.