{"id":207,"date":"2010-12-30T13:43:13","date_gmt":"2010-12-30T21:43:13","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.slimjimmy.com\/weblog\/?p=207"},"modified":"2012-11-16T10:44:17","modified_gmt":"2012-11-16T18:44:17","slug":"free-wi-fi-annoyances","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.slimjimmy.com\/weblog\/archives\/2010\/12\/30\/free-wi-fi-annoyances\/","title":{"rendered":"Free Wi-Fi annoyances"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Some people might think that I&#8217;m crazy for complaining about free services, but squeaky wheels get grease, and I truly believe that these wheels need greasing.<\/p>\n<p>Most free Wi-Fi hotspots require accepting a <acronym title=\"End User License Agreement\">EULA<\/acronym> before they can be used, and they usually accomplish this by intercepting a user&#8217;s first attempt to view a web page and by showing a web page with their EULA form instead.  This isn&#8217;t so unreasonable, but pretty much every EULA page that I&#8217;ve seen sucks.<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li><strong>EULA requirements disrupt service.<\/strong> While most Internet traffic involves the web, there are still other protocols that aren&#8217;t uncommon.  Some Wi-Fi hotspots block <em>all<\/em> traffic until the EULA is accepted, but this means that things such as email and instant messaging applications can fail without providing any explanation why.  Admittedly, I don&#8217;t think that this is fully the fault of the hotspots themselves since they can&#8217;t control the error messages (or the lack of them) in the individual applications.  Perhaps some standardization effort is warranted here.<\/li>\n<li><strong>Most EULA pages are not designed for mobile devices with small screens.<\/strong> Free Wi-Fi hotspots might have been predominantly used by laptops not so long ago, but smartphones with Wi-Fi are becoming increasingly prevalent.  At least on my Palm Pre, I almost always have to zoom in and to do a lot of scrolling to find the checkbox or button to accept the EULA, and then I have to zoom in some more so that it&#8217;s big enough to tap on.<\/li>\n<li><strong>Most EULA pages don&#8217;t automatically redirect to the original destination.<\/strong> If I go through the effort to type out a web page address on my tiny keyboard only to be redirected to a EULA page, at least redirect me to my original destination after I accept the EULA.  Don&#8217;t make me type out the address <em>again<\/em>.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p><strong>In some cases, free Wi-Fi hotspots actually do me more harm than good.<\/strong> Since I have an unlimited data service through Sprint, if my phone suddenly decides to use a free Wi-Fi hotspot instead of my cellular data service, I suddenly have to deal with all of the EULA nonsense (or, as mentioned before, things just start mysteriously failing).<\/p>\n<p>Unfortunately, there aren&#8217;t strong economic incentives to fix issues with free things.  Alas.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Some people might think that I&#8217;m crazy for complaining about free services, but squeaky wheels get grease, and I truly believe that these wheels need greasing. Most free Wi-Fi hotspots require accepting a EULA before they can be used, and they usually accomplish this by intercepting a user&#8217;s first attempt to view a web page [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2,6],"tags":[36],"class_list":["post-207","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-rantsraves","category-usability","tag-phones"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.slimjimmy.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/207","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.slimjimmy.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.slimjimmy.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.slimjimmy.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.slimjimmy.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=207"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.slimjimmy.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/207\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.slimjimmy.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=207"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.slimjimmy.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=207"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.slimjimmy.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=207"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}