network access while traveling

[cellio]

I remember, when traveling in the 90s and into the 00s, looking for hotels with business centers, where I could use their computer to check my email. Technical and geek conventions that set up actual terminal rooms for this purpose were golden. (This happened even in the 80s for sufficiently-geeky contexts.) But mostly, the connected traveler was responsible for figuring it out or just doing without.

After reliance on quasi-public computers came the rise of laptop computers. I was late to this phase, only getting a laptop of my own in (I think) 2006. For the next while, I looked for hotel rooms that had ethernet ports. I took that laptop when traveling not for any work purpose but so I could access my email (and, on big vacations, upload photos somewhere so I didn't risk a single point of failure). I carried an ethernet cable for years. (I have a story from this time about having to fall back to a public computer, or rather a public computer's network connection that I probably wasn't supposed to touch, so public computers were still an occasional thing.)

A few years after the rise of hotel ethernet ports, places (hotels, restaurants, etc) started to advertise free WiFi. I still carried that ethernet cable because you could never be sure, and if there was an ethernet port I still preferred it. I only started to pay attention to public WiFi when I got a smartphone and later a tablet (which can't use ethernet). The smartphone's data plan had limits, so public WiFi seemed useful if I wasn't doing anything that required extra care. (Surfing yes, online banking no -- that kind of thing.)

I used a hotel's WiFi as recently as January, when I found evidence of some unwelcome probes that I couldn't explain any other way. After that I realized that for practical purposes I have unlimited data (it gets slower after 2GB/month but I rarely exceed that). At Origins a couple weeks ago, I dutifully took the piece of paper the hotel desk gave us with the WiFi access information, dropped it on a table in the room, and never touched it again, preferring to use my phone to create a hotspot so I could use my tablet. Much safer.

I'm back to arranging my own access and not looking for public accommodations. I feel like I've gone in a circle.

Comments

[jducoeur]

I'm now on 10.12.6 (Sierra) and unwilling to move to High Sierra because I heard it broke things (including security) when it came out. Maybe they've fixed the problems, maybe not, but what I have works.

I'm a newbie to the Mac ecosystem, but I'd be surprised if there were currently endemic security issues, given that my security-paranoid company recently mandated updates to Mojave for everybody. (We're in healthcare, so security paranoia is mandatory, and we pay a good deal of attention to it -- eg, when the Zoom debacle happened last week, everyone was strongly advised to delete the application...)