Slashdot Mirror
WiFi Free-For-All
my_LART writes "Information Week reports that WiFi access is becoming a free commodity. Pittsburgh International Airport (PIT) has recently dropped its pay-per-use model and has installed free access to the WLAN in the food court and will be expanding access to the gates. On a similar note, Choice Hotels International is planning a WLAN rollout at its 370 Comfort Suites and 140 Clarion properties by the end of May. Choice Hotels International plans on expanding the rollout to two more of the company's brands by the end of the year. While this is great for us Road Warriors, how can this make financial sense? Choice Hotels can certainly markup the cost of the rooms by a few dollars per night, but how is PIT planning on reclaiming the costs? Regardless, lets hope other airports and hotel chains follow suit."
Normally, people that would do hacking, credit card fraud or just plain spamming would be traceable, not anymore so when half the internet is made out of freely accessible hotspots? Or would they block all interesting ports except port 80 and 443 to allow casual webbrowsing?
My local trendy cafe/art gallery, The Canvas (Lincoln and 9th in San Francisco, right on the corner) now has free wireless during business hours. You can walk in, and its full of people - most with a laptop, but they also have one important thing: the food they bought at the cafe. So, the Canvas can get 1.5 mbit DSL for $40 a month, and get at least 40 more people a day buying more food, probably at least amounting to the total cost of the DSL per month, every day.
Please forgive my ignorance, but wouldn't these kinds of WiFi access points be an ideal place to upload a virus or any other type of malicious code onto the internet? I mean, it would be almost untraceable, right? If so, it would seem that almost anyone could write the code/test it on their own machines, and then unleash it on the world from one of these points.
There are two kinds of people in the world: those with loaded guns, and those who dig.
I've used a dial up line near the gate to sync my email so that I could keep working on the plane. Wireless access would simply make this easier. In addition, many Wireless systems I've used try to "force" the windows browser to a specific start page, which may be leveraged as an advertisement for shops that are local to the Access Point.
Hmmm.. new business advertising model? Setup free WIFI, but hijack the initial page to a custom advertisement for the business hosting the hotspot?
I could write something witty for my sig, but instead wrote this...
You've apparently never travelled on business. There's times that you have to go straight from the airport to the customer site, and you're far more likely to have WiFi available at a hub airport than a spoke airport. As such, it can be quite useful to be able to connect to the corporate VPN and download email with updated status at the customer site in the 15 minutes available at the gate.
Good god. I "work from home", so I often go to the local cafe with free WiFi for a change of pace. All my work stuff is done through encrypted VPN, and I use a software firewall and SSL for everything else. So I'm running EffeTech's HTTP Sniffer to debug my app server, and by default it dumps ALL HTTP traffic on the LAN. So I saw all full HTTP request and responses from all the laptops in the cafe. Mostly dull web surfing, but a lot of people check email using plaintext connections, which blew my mind.
~ The Fudge Report @ http://mywebpages.comcast.net/fudgereport/
However, in places like Chicago (Midway, O'Hare) or here in South Florida (Palm Beach Int'l, Ft, Lauderdale Int'l, Miami Int'l), people do have a choice of which airport to utilize. I for one would certainly give some weight to WiFI access, since we (USians) have to arrive at the airport so early to jump through security hoops. I'm often at my gate with an hour or 2 to kill. Be nice to have Slashdot^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H..er...work to help kill the time....
/. zen: Imagine a Beowulf cluster of Beowulf clusters...
It's exciting to hear that wireless internet is becoming more prevalent in public places. It seems the US of A has been several paces behind other countries such as S. Korea when it comes to adoption of widely available, public internet access. Hopefully the ease of setting up wireless networks will remedy this situation.
My excitement to have instant information (via the Internet) at my fingertips, is, however, rather subdued when I consider the lack of precaution many people take securing their computers and networks. The recent spate of worms has proven a _real_ bother - my school network has been slowed to a grinding halt with the excessive bandwidth consumed by all this malware floating about.
The possibility that these worm issues escalate in direct proportion to the number of communities who go wireless is a concern of mine. I'm curious if any of you have read studies comparing wireless and wired networks, with respect to the rate of security issues that develop within large-scale communities?
When I'm looking to travel, even when I'm looking at a particular airline, there's often a choice of routing for comparable price and travel time. When that happens, the quality of the connecting airports does play a role in my decision, and the availability of WiFi does factor into my opinion of the airport, as do other amenities.
The library is a public place. Anyone can use it for whatever means.
What one can do to abuse wifi is pretty well known. It appears they think the risk is worth it. Why let a few bad apples ruin it for all?
If the admin is capable and has a minimal budget, he can alleviate a lot. Bandwidth shaping (let it burst at first, but after so much data throttle it back). I guess one could filter known attacks.
Also people are actively working on these problems. Check this out.
Roland van Laar has a new, significant wi-fi patch for FreeBSD 5.1 and higher. The patch, available for download and testing, blocks clients with an empty or 'ANY' ssid and disables ssid broadcasting using the underlying firmware feature. SSID (Service Set ID) is used to identify wireless clients to a wireless / wired gateway.
Putting wifi in the airport works the same way as serving nasty food on a short flight. It means fewer irate passengers because they have something to do.
Coffe shops, book stores, airports, hotels, what's next!? You know where I want to see WiFi access? How about the doctors office, or the DMV? Where I unwilling have to spend hours of my life waiting for someone or something! Or what about WiFi at the grocery store so I can post my shopping list to my blog and then read it off to myself from the comfort of the grocery store asiles.
**Ends Rant**
-This sig has been discontinued after a sudden realization.
Everything else being similar I'd go where I could get free internet.
At this point its probably more expensive to bill and track than it is to deliver. I hope it rapidly becomes a case where no wifi is the exception. Heck there might be cases where no office connection is a feature!
LS
to be honest, i get a lot of work done in airports. It also keeps me connected (i know i know, its cliche, but true) At the narita airport in tokyo japan, after spending hours upon hours of mind numbing hours on a plane form the states, there was nothing more that i wanted to do than to track down somewhere to plug in and get to my email/regular sites/etc. turns out i was there for 14+ hours. i paid for the wireless connect so i could keep myself sane. that might be a valid use: maintiaining sanity. Narita has an amazing lounge which is accessable for all airlines with well lit desks, comfy chairs and a juice bar. the wireless (which was relatively cheap, at that) plus the lounge made me all the more inclined to request my return trip be connected through Narita. I believe that mindset/ market is what PIT is attempting to appeal to as well.
I bet airconditioning and heating costs a lot more than WiFi+Internet.
;).
And the airport provides these to anyone who walks in for free.
Heck without the dynamic access controls and payment stuff it's only slightly more complicated than providing piped in music and announcements.
Of course if more people started supporting my suggestion of using http://here/ to get more info about the network you are using "here", there'll be more scope for some interesting stuff. e.g. malls can redirect you to a different website depending which Mall Zone's "here" you are in - listing specials. Heck you might even be able to vote for the piped in music you want
Similarly for a cafe - you could chat/play games with patrons locally.
If you really can do that, you can do it right now to most users on the Internet. Most users don't have a hardware firewall in place. If they have a software firewall in place they will have on on their laptop, so no differences there. Do you think you need to be in the same room with the guy to send him that virus? Do you think those users are logging your IP address so that you can only magically infect them from a public IP address? The flaws in your logic are that you don't just send a worm and have it somehow infest another system, unless you're Will Smith or Jeff Goldblum; and if you could such attacks would be much easier to carry off driving around an office park or the 'burbs than to do so in a location where cameras have taken your picture, security people have made you show ID, computers have a record of your being there, and a bunch of bored gun-ho security monkeys are looking for a fight.
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
I flew there for the first time a few months ago, and was happy to find open WIFI in the food court, as well as shops and food that were not jacked up to normal airport prices. Nothing there was any more than at a regular shopping mall. Since then, I have intentionally scheduled my flights back to where I work so that my layover is at PIT. If I'm stuck there a few hours, I could care less. It's perfect for catching up on mail and surfing. In my case, it IS making a difference.
WWJD -- What Would Jimi Do?
(Smash amp, burn guitar, take home the groupies)
Wow - imagine the uproar at companies providing better services! Is it so implausible to think that things can get better for the same price?
They don't have to look at it to get it.
According to the DoJ report that was released a while back (I don't have the URL), they claim that 42% of all P2P pornography is kiddy porn.
Believing that number to be true (I think its high, but whatever) you could set up KaZaa to download lots of porn on the public network to your laptop and look at it when you get home. Noone would be the wiser.
The other implication to this is the RIAA.
"Uh, PIT. We need you to give us the names of all the people that used your network to download Britney Spears songs."
We'll probably see some ridiculous figure like, "RIAA's Profits Dropped 2000% Since PIT Opened WIFI Hotspot."
-Eric
hrrm.
I got bumped off a flight and spent 8 hours waiting around Pittsburgh International Airport last August. Huge airport. I think I had a drink in every bar there(gotta be a tleast a half dozen). Wi-fi access certainly would have helped pass the time...especially if it was free!
once you go slack, you never go back
Cost to DSL providers for providing net access to a residence is down to $20/mo. Quintuple that to $100/mo for shits and giggles. Tack on another $100 for the access point.
For a year, that's $1200+$100 = $1300 / 365 = $3.56 per day per access point. If your business can make an extra three and a half dollars per day by having net access around, you should set up wifi.
Of course, if you TRY to charge, and TRY to set up all these complicated access mechanisms, you have to spend all this money on support -- money you never make back.
--Dan
PIT can simply write (or download root kits and assemble) virii/worms based on commonly known platform vulnerabilities such as this.
Then, they can loose such nasties in the gate area to gather valuable privacy and financial data of oblivious surfers.
Or, they could bump the passenger egress airport fee by a buck...
I got fired, formed my own consulting company and now our business is taking off and my old company is in Chapter 11.
But that's beyond the point. One of my favorite places o go is a locally owned coffee house. About 4 years ago they bought a couple used laptops and rented then out for $7 an hour. About 18 months ago, they started giving free WiFI, guess what, they've made a lot more money, because people like me use it to work away from work. I deal with customers from 10 AM - 5PM, then about 5:30 goto the coffee shop, grab a bite to eat, a bottomless cup and do my work until about 8PM, then go home. Guess what though, I am so regular as soon as I walk in, they tell the exact bill and everything's ready togo. We often meet clients there as well because of the asmostphere. $100 in gear and $80 a month for a commerical Cable connection is pretty cheap to bring in repeat customers. Hell, they proably almost recover the bill from me alone. When they switched to free mode, two new coffee houses were opening in the area. Guess what, they are still in business, one is out of business, and the third is still there, but doesn't do near the business as the local favorite.
Hotels are another story. I was at a meeting/seminar at a hotel and I was the first to test their WiFI connection. Its extremely handy and we quickly booked our next daylong seminar because of the easy access. Now others offer the same, but its a convience, and if they can improve bookings by 5 - 10%, it will more than pay for the service.
My last story is that of our favorite all night diner. Its not uncommon for us to work until 1 or 2 AM. Usually take an hour off for news and Leno's monologue then go out for coffee and a late night snack. Well, we noticed that they too put in free WiFI access. We sometimes have working lunches there as well, although its not widely used as say the coffee house.
"The problem with socialism is eventually you run out of other people's money" - Thatcher.
See, the people traveling are a captive audience, if they want to fly, they have to show up, and unless you live in an area with multiple large airports you're stuck with that airport maybe possible back east, but where I live the nearest large airport outside of town is 4+ hrs away).
OK. You already have pointed out the multi-airport part of it. The other part is the layover part. Almost every flight most people take today includes a layover. The costs are much better if you accept one, & longer international flights pretty much require at least one.
I am a smoker. And before, I didn't care where my layover was. Now that they are making some airports completely non-smoking (i.e. no smokers closet), I definitly go out of my way to make sure I don't get stuck at a non-smoking airport for my layover. The more people travel and understand that some airports have these types of creature comforts, they will tend to select the terminals that have wireless available.
I don't know if PIT is going to have a bandwith saturation problem. SFO it ain't... I've spent many an hour at the gate and rarely see people with a laptop in hand.
>>Meanwhile, anyone who flies through PIT will see banners everywhere celebrating "Yesterday's Airport of Tomorrow". Um, yeah...I suppose that makes it the airport of today...they put up plaques explaining the glorious and futuristic history of the airport, and how traveller friendly it is. Citizens of the Twenty First Century, fly PIT, fly the Future!
While I appreciate the fact that you pay attention to the banners there, you're a little off in terms of what they mean. Those banners refer to the OLD Pittsburgh International Airport (now since relegated to cargo planes), which, when it opened 50+ years ago, WAS The Airport of Tomorrow. As opposed to some other airports, Pittsburgh International IS pretty modern and with the times. Like many other airports, the biggest complaint there is the lack of a larger security area, which was originally designed NOT with post 9/11 security measures in mind. The banners for the new Pittsburgh International make note of how it used to be a farm.
BTW--here's your trivia du jour -- Pittsburgh International is the largest major airport in America not directly serviced by an Interstate -- They are trying to get Route 60 (and 22/30) designated as part of I-376 so they no longer have that distinction.
sig--we don't need no goddamn sig
The airport in my little town of Fredericton NB Canada has had free wireless for quite a while, and in the past several months, the whole downtown area of the city has had free wireless. Yes, you can walk downtown, sit on a bench, open your laptop, and surf the net on 802.11g! In the next couple years, they will cover the entire city. Sweet.
Music speeds up when you yawn, but does not change pitch.
Here in my little town (Fayetteville, NY) nearly every small business around runs their own wireless network. If the weather's nice i can sit in the little park in the town square and connect to usually 3 or 4 networks. (for free of course)
I once had an admin walk up to me and ask if i was connected to a wireless network, so when i truthfully answered that i was connected to his, instead of being upset, was thrilled and wanted to know how well it was working!
By the way, that network was located in the bank. I haven't investigated how secure it is though, because i want to keep it all good.
I'll admit to paying for wifi at MSP, but I also get to expense it, so the cost doesn't matter to me. What drives me batshit is the scarcity of *outlets* at airports! Maybe this is how they plan to pay for it, by putting in paid electricity!
What's the deal with outlets at airports, anyway? I know it'd be far more expensive to add outlets in the middle of the floor or in places where there was no easy access to power, but it's hard to find ANY outlets, and when you do find them they're often far from your specific gate, in the middle of a hallway, or just nonexistent. Part of the reason I find this so surprising is that most electical codes require an outlet every 6 feet or something, yet in an 2000 sq ft area I found three, with only two in a usable place -- and when I dug around in my bag looking for something, I had two people approach me asking if I was leaving, eyeing the outlet.
Battery power is fine if you don't turn on the laptop during the flight or carry a couple of extra batteries. I don't (weight, etc), and I like to save my batteries for watching DVDs during the flight. But with outlets so scarce, I think I might be forced to get a couple of extra batteries just to deal with the lack of power.
Besides the tongue-in-cheek reference to paying for power, the other idea that occured to me is the dreaded advertising model for wifi -- give away access, but transparent proxy all web requests and add popup and banner hijacking advertising. Sure, it won't affect those of us that use VPN or ssh tunnels to our own proxies, but they can solve that with NAT and/or locked-down access.
Believe it or not, but the best way to pay for airport wifi is to get the airlines to sponsor it. That way they can proudly claim to support the white collar worker in his ever growing lust for a permanent state of being "at work". Actually, the Longbeach Airport, in Longbeach, CA also has free wireless access, sponsored by the greatest airline out there... JET BLUE!! It makes flying in/out of there a real pleasure.
One of the products our small startup as tried to market in Southeastern Virginia is basically free to the customer wireless internet access. Everyone knows how much a DSL circuit costs, and we see it as an added benefit for customers. The business can use the internet circuit for other uses as well, weather it is POS or security.
It is actually kind of odd, but I went to the local airport board and said "If you will pay the $100/month DSL fee, we will provide all of the hardware, installation, and support to provide free wireless internet at Norfolk International Airport"
I got turned down. They said I should bid on putting in for-pay kiosks. They couldn't get involved without a competitive bid process. $1200 a year we are talking, they spend that much on one run of advertisements (15 or so) on the local radio station.
We have a setup that blocks outbound pop3 requests, as well as a few other important things to prevent abuse (spammers, some attacks). With the number of cameras and the number of other open wireless access points why would someone go to an airport to commit a crime.
It is a rough sell. We tried malls, but they don't want people to do anything but quickly buy things and leave. Hotels want the signal in every room, and many are serviced by lodgenet.
So at this point we have only managed a limited number of deployments. The airport though, I figured it would benefit everyone so I would put down the money for the hardware. Good publicity and a useful service.
Doh. Our setup has a splash page with ads and security information that the user must view, then they are free to web browse. We still might end up in one of the local malls, time will tell. We are going to try to get one of the other businesses at the airport to sponsor it, but no telling if it will work. TMobile has one of those hotspot things, but it is only at one particular gate (how useful).
Southeastern Virginia REPRESENT!
You have to work for a Airline at least once to appreciate the true humor of your comment.
My wife and I have been through many unknown airports with limited "amenities" You havent lived till you have flown through PQI (Presque Isle, Maine)or YHZ (Halifax NS).
As an employee you often need to do "creative" routing to get to your desired destination. So a choice for free WiFi could make the trip pleasant for myself and my wife while waiting to go elsewhere.
Or you can sit in a MX (Maintenance _not_ mail exchanger) breathing JET-A fumes or you can go to a place with free WiFi and surf while waiting for the next segment on the way to Hawaii.
The article includes a quite to the effect that this is the first airport in the US, and second in the world with free wifi. That's not true, I have found free wifi in a few large airports. And my smalltown local airport (TRI) has extensive free wifi throughout, plus free public terminals.
TRI's network is sponsored by $LARGE_POLLUTING_LOCAL_COMPANY, which happens to fly lots of employees to Atlanta on a semi-daily basis. I belive that it was economical for them to sponsor the free wireless because now their employees can get some work in at the airport. It probably paid for itself quite fast.
see shy jo