Johnson County Library

Johnson County Library Locations:

Central Resource Library, 9875 W. 87th Street, Overland Park
Antioch Library, 8700 Shawnee Mission Parkway, Merriam
Blue Valley Library, 9000 W. 151st Street, Overland Park
Corinth Library, 8100 Mission Road, Prairie Village
Leawood Pioneer Library, 4700 Town Center Drive, Leawood
(Note: The Cedar Roe Library at 5120 Cedar in Roeland Park is listed by at least one local directory as having public wireless access, but it does not.)

802.11g
SSIDs: wireless.jocolibrary, Wireless.Jocolibrary, Wireless.jocolibrary, possibly other variations

Surprisingly, of the three metropolitan area public library systems that now have Wi-Fi, Johnson County was the last to go live. And sadly, it is the one that at least so far has done the poorest job of implementing it.

It would be bad enough that its filtering, employing DansGuardian, is easily the worst overblocker of them all. It appears that even the library administration has finally begun to come around to this realization with its having established an online site review process, the only one currently available on a local filtered Wi-Fi network. A link on the blockpage delivers you to another page that invites you to paste in the URL but provides no indication as to when, how, or whether one should expect a response. (I should mention here that I accessed the site review page using Firefox, and from the looks of it, it may have been designed with Internet Explorer in mind.)

It might help matters if the library would become a bit more engaged in the process, perhaps dressing the blockpage up a bit and providing a little more information regarding why they feel a site should be blocked, rather than relying on the cryptic, "geeky" one-line messages produced by DansGuardian (example: "Weighted phrase limit exceeded"), in line with its foreign, open-source origins. (If anyone using this network has submitted a site for review, some feedback as to what happened next would be welcome here.)

Not being able to access the information you're after is one thing, but not being able to download critical updates and patches to keep your machine and data safe-especially if you're running Windows-could potentially be dangerous. While the network has markedly improved in this regard (even incoming POP mail was originally blocked, for some unfathomable reason), you may still have problems updating some of your anti-malware programs. The library's wireless FAQ, of course, lamely tries to justify this as being "for security reasons," which prompts the question "Security for whom?" How can a computer accessing only the Internet and not sharing resources with any machine on the library's network possibly pose a threat other than to itself-which it eventually will if it spends too much time on a network that doesn't let it defend itself? And why isn't this a problem for the other Wi-Fi networks around town?

And as if to add insult to injury, the heavy filtering and port blocking exacts a whopping performance hit on the connection. Despite its being 802.11g, there are few 802.11b networks around town that don't run off and leave it for dead.

I'm given to think that whoever set up this network kind of got things a little confused. He, she or they forgot somewhere along the way that what they were creating was not another enterprise workgroup to be treated as though it were made up of machines they owned and managed and were responsible for protecting, such as the library workstation network they already had, but rather simply a means for patrons to access the Internet, and get whatever they needed from the library that way. What was so hard about that?

Unfortunately, I'm going to have to recommend against using this one, at least in its present form and for extended periods, unless you have a high tolerance for frustration and are careful to bring your anti-malware and security patches up to date through another connection first.