Some things don't get better with age...

...and unfortunately, the Johnson County Library's wireless network is among them.

I stopped in at the Central Resource Library on another research errand and decided to haul my laptop along just to see if there's been any improvement in their Wi-Fi's dismal level of usability and performance, which I detailed last October. Believe it or not, it seems to have only gotten worse. Their DansGuardian filtering implementation has reached the point of being simply ridiculous. For instance, I was on TV Guide's website and couldn't even access different dates in the online listings grid. Gee, with more and more laptops doubling as digital video recorders these days, that's sure to make the library more popular with patrons.

And if you're a Windows user running Spybot for anti-malware protection, you should still be cautious about spending too much time on this network. Although the free versions of AVG Anti-Virus and Ad-Aware can now update themselves through this connection, access to the update servers for Spybot is still blocked. The potential threat this poses-especially in today's environment with its increasing number of "zero-day"exploits that are discovered only once they actually start hosing computers-to anyone using a public broadband network should be obvious. Apparenty, to whomever is administering this network, it's not.

All right, I'll spell it out. Spybot provides real-time protection the same way a firewall or an an anti-virus program does; it starts when the computer does and runs continuously while the computer is running. Preventing it from updating itself, or preventing the laptop owner from doing so manually by blocking access to the update servers will eventually create the same vulnerability as running an anti-virus program with outdated definitions. Sooner or later, a new exploit will find its way onto a computer before the updated definition file designed to combat it does. Well, is the risk obvious now?

If anyone with the library would care to attempt to justify any of this, feel free to leave a comment.

And if you're a Johnson County resident, taxpayer, or voter, I'd like to ask you something. Is this really the best you can do?