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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.

3 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!