Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

AT&T Accidentally Provides Free Wi-Fi To All

Posted by kdawson on from the no-longer-obscure dept.

SecureThroughObscure writes tells us about a hack broken by MacOSRumors: you can get free Wi-Fi at Starbucks, Barnes & Noble, and other AT&T hotspots if you know how to set your browser's user agent string (trivial on Safari), and know a valid iPhone phone number. ZDNet blogger Nate McFeters gives some more details and links. This can't last.

5 of 249 comments (clear)

  1. It might last... by sith · · Score: 5, Informative

    Even if every /.'er did this, it still would be a drop in a bucket compared to the number of folks who happily pay the fee.

    For example, many pay wifi points can be circumvented just by connecting to a VPN over UDP (since they're only filtering TCP requests). I doubt they're going broke due to that issue though..

    1. Re:It might last... by aesiamun · · Score: 4, Informative

      Here you go

    2. Re:It might last... by rocketPack · · Score: 3, Informative
      Alternatively (for those who don't want to download an extra program):
      • - Go to about:config in Firefox
      • - Right click/command click in the list and chose New > String
      • - For the preference name use "general.useragent.override"
      • - Use any value you wish, such as "Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU like Mac OS X; en) AppleWebKit/420+ (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/3.0 Mobile/1A543a Safari/419.3"
      • - You can verify your change by going to "about:" in Firefox and reading the information from the page!

      Can't help you with the 'finding a working iPhone number' part though!

  2. AT&T Intentionally provides free WiFi to all. by bughunter · · Score: 2, Informative
    1 - Put your coffee money in a Starbucks Card.

    2 - Take your laptop to Starbucks for a coffee.

    3 - Profit!

    --
    I can see the fnords!
  3. WIFI is becoming free, anyway by natoochtoniket · · Score: 2, Informative

    I have a friend who owns a small restaurant, selling smoothies and sandwiches. He has internet access from the back office, and uses it to communicate with vendors.

    He doubled his breakfast and lunch business over the last few months by putting up a wireless router and giving away wifi access. The sign says "with any purchase" but there is no easy way to implement that, so he just leaves it unsecured. Most people buy something anyway.

    It costs him almost nothing, and helps to sell food by making the location more welcoming to his customers. It won't take very long for other small food and beverage businesses to catch on.

    It's kind of like "air conditioned" businesses used to be. Fifty years ago, air conditioning was unusual. But customers liked it, so the businesses that had it got the customers. Now, every business has it. The only real difference is that wifi is a lot cheaper to provide.