Are unsecured cafe wi-fi networks deliberately hostile to VPNs?

I’m in Bill’s cafe in Cambridge, which offers ‘free’ Wi-Fi — which of course I don’t trust. So I switch on my VPN to find that, mysteriously, it can’t connect to its server. And I’m wondering if this is just some kind of glitch, or a policy by the firm that provides the Wi-Fi. After all, they don’t want clients sending communications that are encrypted and therefore inscrutable for advertising and tracking purposes. In this stuff, only the paranoid survive.

I had the same experience as John Naughton yesterday and Friday, signed in to the wifi in a bed and breakfast. No matter what, my VPN (Mullvad) would not connect. Rather than go unsecured though, I signed out of the wifi, but it definitely is strange and I think I am seeing something similar more and more often.

Thanks to an unfollowable stream on Twitter, I came upon the website of Joshua Nudell, an historian with an interest in ancient Greek breads. A post of his, translating from Athenaeus’s Deipnosophistae, refers in passing to "the loaf from rye (or spelt)". That's strange. So I left a comment on the post, as follows:

I don't know Ancient Greek, but I do know some ancient and modern cereals, so I am hoping you can elaborate on this. Does the list mean two different loaves, one of rye and one of spelt? Or does it mean that rye is sometimes known as spelt, which would be a very interesting reading indeed.

Thanks.

This could be interesting.

'Debatable' List Of '100 Most Jewish' Foods Leaves Plenty Of Room For Kibbitzing in The Salt is an interesting review. Makes me want to read the book. Also makes me want to promote today's episode about one Jewish food and one arguably Christian food. Coming in a couple of hours.

People in NYC probably already know of this astonishing resource but in case you don't, or are just visiting, you should.

https://www.eatingintranslation.com/2019/04/new-york-area-food-events-april-11-18.html

There is order in the universe. I know, because on the very day that I finally knuckled down and wrote a pathetic little spreadsheet to do some bread calculations for me, the Gods of Serendipity put Running a bakery on Emacs and PostgreSQL in one of my RSS feeds, and my gob is smacked.

“Amazingly, the link still works” 

Two amazing things

1) In a piece looking back over 1000 of his linkblog posts, Charles Arthur finds it remarkable that a link from 2010 still works.

2) The piece seems to be on Medium and nowhere else.

I reckon the two observatiuons are linked (haha). Which makes me wonder whether to even share this link. Will it still work in 2028? Or would Charles be better of owning his stuff somewhere else?

#indieweb

Once again, there is chatter about how @Withknown deals with hashtags and HTML I still believe that it often removes a hashtag from the content of an Instagram description, sent here by OwnYourGram. I'll test that in a moment. And there certainly were problems with certain characters in Titles and body. So this is a test of this <- and that.

Learn something new every day. I can use email to post to this site with Quill. Never needed it before, but good to know.

This is perhaps the single best strip I have seen all year.

Podnews has a piece that many podcasters could usefully read. The bit that resonated was this quote from Roman Mars:

If you have 100,000 listeners and you edit out one useless minute you are saving 100,000 wasted minutes in the world. You’re practically a hero.

Not quite a hero, I can at least count myself a mini-hero.