I actually know the owner of the shop. The internet connection is through the same ISP I use at home, which is a smaller local company. Some years ago, they gave free DSL lines to retail businesses (restaurants, coffee shops and bookstores) to offer free public WiFi. That project has evolved over the years, and the businesses are now free to tune the service to fit their needs. This coffee shop has 2 bonded DSL lines, and I hardly ever notice much lag on it. Most customers are nice enough to not stream 720p YouTube videos all night. The 2 hour limit now put in place will probably curb some of that by making it inconvenient to stream large movies by cutting the connection mid video.

I know the owner didn't implement this himself. He hired it out to someone, and most likely someone who attends one of the regular Hack-A-Thon meetings or User Groups that occasionally use the shop for meetings, which I can safely assume that person has a day-job administering a large Linux network. I'm not frustrated with this network, because like I said I can still tunnel all my traffic through ssh on one of my servers. But I would imagine that anyone that required any email access outside of Gmail/Hotmail would get frustrated. The only reason I can see to restrict this traffic is to prevent some rogue laptop with spam-producing malware from sending out email, which seems less likely than some guy named Steve trying to get the latest report from his companies email server.

And if I do end up finding a way to break the network, or do something bad for everyone else that uses it, I'll be the first to let him know exactly what I did so it can't happen again. I'm not trying to do any blackhat sort of stuff, but every time I boot my laptop there, I have to remember than I don't have free reign, including cloning any git:// or svn:// repositories, downloading anything from an FTP server, or checking my email outside of mutt in a remote shell session. The whole idea of a network like that being secured in that way both makes me happy that some people take security seriously, and confuses me as to why its secured that particular way.