

The History Of The Fake "Free Public WiFi" You Always See At Airports - cpeterso
http://www.techdirt.com/blog/wireless/articles/20101011/03194311357/the-history-of-the-fake-free-public-wifi-you-always-see-at-airports.shtml

======
ilamont
Zombie topic. See this 2010 HN thread:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1780058](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1780058)

~~~
easy_rider
Can anyone comment if this is still going on?

~~~
davorak
Yes I have seen it in the last year or two at science conferences.

------
vxNsr
I remember the first time I saw that in an airport, it was right after I got a
laptop and went on a trip, I don't remember where, I just remember that most
airports had only just begun offering wifi (not free) and there was of course
talk of airplanes getting outfitted (though it didn't end up happening for a
number of years), anyway I tried connected to the official "BOINGO" network,
only to discover, much to my chargin that it required money, which I didn't
have, so then i tried to connect to anything else in the airport, and the free
wifi thing was the next option... I of course knew nothing about web security
at that point...

------
coin
Techdirt articles are unpleasant to read. The pages loads slow and there's a
whole bunch of distracting crap around the page.

~~~
eksith
Whenever I visit the Tech(x) sites, I just disable JS. That helps with the
loading.

If it's really annoying, I use the web inspector in FF and remove the relevant
HTML until it's comfortable to read. It's a bit of work, but it also depends
on how badly I want to read the content.

~~~
yareally
viewtext.org was great for stuff like that (and didn't require an account,
unlike readability). Hasn't been up for a while though, unfortunately.

~~~
nilliams
I just use the readability bookmarklet, doesn't require an account:

[http://www.readability.com/bookmarklets](http://www.readability.com/bookmarklets)

------
tehwalrus
I've seen this network in loads of places, not just airports, in the UK.
Trains? yes. Starbucks? yes.

------
wkearney99
The hotspot on my phone is named "$12.99 per minute". I get a chuckle every
time I overhear someone in a public place bitching about how expensive the
WiFi is...

