I've been at a lot of wireless hotspots in the past several months, and none frustrate me more than the wireless in my favorite local coffee shop, which shall go un-marred by this rant.

Thanks to the paranoid lunatics over at Green Bay Net who've locked down every single port except web browsing on Port 80, my productivity when doing some evening work from the coffee shop is cut dramatically. No email, (save for web based), no FTP, no Telnet, no VNC...nothing but browsing. Who the fuck gets anything done by just browsing?

Let's look at the equation here. The coffee shop put in wireless internet to attract more professionals from within and outside the area to come dine and work @ their coffee shop. Most professionals that could support the work-from-a-third-place environment are freelance types and corporate types, both of which are looking at this as an interim space of office real estate. They also are used to using applications like their VPN connections, Lotus Notes and Outlook. None of which work from thanks to the nutjobs who setup the wireless Internet access.

When queried about why they did this, GreenBay Net says that they're concerned about child porn and spam. Frankly, that's the most damn retarted thing I've ever heard. What a bunch of crackbrained nutjobs. Who_the_hell is going to go porn surfing or spamming from a low-bandwidth wireless connection in a public coffee house in Green Bay, WI. You've got to be kidding me.

Why can't this be managed by exception or through their terms of service. Anyone else know of companies that have such shortsighted, hamstrung policies on their wireless Internet?

[UPDATE:] Someone suggested using Google's VPN tool (Beta, of course) to get around this stuff. Installing tonight, will test tomorrow eve.