Here in Israel free wifi access is the norm, but in DE? They charge an arm and a leg. Switzerland (if we're talking about Swisscom anyway)? They are _insane_. The hotels already rip you off with prices like there's no tomorrow and charge for internet on top.
I fire up iodine on my client. If it works: Great. The network was obviously created by morons (it could easily be prevented). Morons won't be able to track me down the short while I'm on their network, on a trip, with a mac address like 'deadbeef' or somesuch nonsense.
If it doesn't work? I don't go online and leave to have a couple beers..
Strongly depends on where you are, apparently. When I was in Berlin, there was free Internet all over the place. In our hostel, the hotel across the street, just about any coffee bar, pub, sandwich stand, pizzeria ... Sometimes you had to ask for a password, other times you could just connect, and other times you had to catch some air network from the place next door.
Or maybe that was just Berlin Mitte?
Though I went to some places near Cologne and I didn't have to donate a kidney to get online either.
Connectivity in the more rural areas can be pretty bad though.
A friend of a friend runs an independent midsize hotel here in Germany.
They used to offer free internet access. Then one of their guests used the connection to download copyrighted stuff.
In due course a nasty letter from a lawyer arrived, demanding payment of around 1000€ and as fighting and losing would have been much more expensive, they payed. They were unable to recover the money, because there was no way to prove which of their guests at that time was responsible.
The very next thing they did was to shut down the free internet and bring in an outside company to provide it (with per day and per hour fees for the guests).
The reasons:
1) By having someone else legally responsible for the internet connection, they don't have any liability for future copyright violations.
2) All guests are now "helping" to pay back the money they lost.
That's exactly why in all likelihood, they would've won. It's the perfect setup and - in germany - an argument for securing the wlan not better than the default-setting suggests. I am always surprised by the "there is a chance we might loose and pay more, so we will pay"-attitude that seems to be common in such cases.
If you stay at a hotel with paid wifi and it is full of people who are either tethering from their phones or not using the internet then it will be fast.
Stay at a posh hotel where everyone pays out of their expense account and it's likely to be just as slow as if it was free.
Not to mention that you only need one person streaming 1080p to put serious strain on the bandwidth.
You are being charged for the lights and the shower when you pay the bill. Or was that you're point and I missed it?
It will come, give it some time. Hotels (imho) charge one for the internet because it's a separate utility, the onsite staff are not capable of fixing it [1] when it breaks. Which happens a lot. So they outsource it.
When 'internet' is as common a utility as water and light, and as reliable, it will be in the bill, you'll never see it.
The article mentions it is in the UK.
Relevant fraud statute appears to be this: http://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2006/35/section/2
It looks like all the criteria for it to be fraud are met.
However, it also looks like legislation in the UK disallows (and renders void) concerted practices which may affect trade within the United Kingdom, and have as their effect the distortion of competition within the United Kingdom, applying, in particular to practices which apply dissimilar conditions to equivalent transactions with other trading parties, thereby placing them at a competitive disadvantage. See http://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/1998/41/section/2
A concerted practice of charging the owners of well-known brands of smartphones less than the owners of less-known brands for an equivalent transaction would have the effect of lessening competition, because people might eschew a lesser known smartphone (increasing the barriers of entry to the smartphone market in the UK).
So there appears to be a good defence that price discrimination practices like this are illegal and void, and therefore circumventing it is not fraudulent.
Of course, out of an abundance of caution, I don't think it would be wise to volunteer to be a test case for this.
Edit: and IMO, it's toxic to the hacker spirit to be too quick in condemning ideas as illegal or immoral
Switching user agent is perfectly legal.
There exist wifi systems where setting a cookie "paid=1" will save you $15. You might think there are no legal consequences for "writing a text file on your own computer." I strongly suggest not testing that.
Safari even has a 'Develop' menu that lets me switch user agents in 2 clicks (without having to install anything first).
But if you think changing the user agent is somehow wrong, you could also go all the way of emulating the iPad browser on your laptop, and use that to sign in for the service.
If you change the user agent and then see that you get a different price, then you have clearly seen that user agent affects money.
As an example I remember years ago when people say fit to create "secure areas" in websites by using a JS username/password prompt which meant that you could easily bypass this by viewing the source.
Now at the point you have done that perhaps you have knowingly done something to bypass the security.
Question is, what happens if you had JS disabled in your browser (or were using a browser that did not support it) which would be something you are clearly within your rights to do and therefor had no idea that such a security mechanicism was in place anyway?
http://viktorpetersson.com/2011/09/25/how-to-get-50-discount...
I love that people get up in arms about the change to google's privacy policy but have no trouble funneling traffic through bit.ly and other link shorteners...
this is some other link shortening service, which the admins haven't gotten around to banning yet. but it's just a matter of time.
I will help you out. What happens when you go to cld.sg? Or what happens when you append a plus sign to the link above?
What's more important a consistent approach to privacy or "knowing how much interest someone's HN link received"?
[1] Conspiracy theory: jcloud is an astro-turfing account for sigma cloud. The jcloud account was created 377 days ago the same day a sigma cloud story was posted. Jcloud's first post was on the sigmacloud story and was complimentary of sigma cloud:
"Just discovered these guys. Nice interface actually.
Investigating a bit more but so far so good."
I have wondered about easily obtaining prepaid cards for travel, might be a business opportunity if there is no good solution yet?
I usually try to get my hands on a local card when I travel, but the rates (and availability) varies significantly between countries.
He is basically a one man shop owner but is very knowledgable and reliable.
I've seen plenty of international-travel SIM cards that give cheap[er] texts and voice calls, but none that include any data. And trying to set up a pre-pay data SIM from a foreign ISP in a language you don't speak/read is a nightmare ...
So I thought that, since I had permission to access this network anyway, I would break in -- just to see if I could. And I'd tell them about my results the next morning as we turned in our keys and headed off.
Actually since there wasn't any encryption there isn't much to say after that -- it was obvious that their system wasn't too sophisticated, so I just guessed "they check MAC addresses, don't they?"
Using the airotools-ng package for Ubuntu, I set my wireless card into "monitor mode", which (I'm not an expert) I guess is a fancy way of saying "it stopped ignoring everything it saw flying through the air in my hotel room." Normally your computer treats all of these other signals as noise relative to its own goal of connecting to the Internet -- but it's absolutely trivial to start listening to it. With the tool airodump-ng, I was able to see all of the routers at my hotel and MAC addresses of real users connecting to those routers. So I put one of those into my "Connect to the Internet" dialog box under "Cloned MAC address," and hey look, I just saved the desk clerk some time.
I mentioned that I'd done it the next day to the desk clerk as I checked out -- that any competent neighbor could steal their wireless access. I'll never forget his response: "yes, but they're all incompetent."
A similar experience: when I first came to live at my present household, I knew that we had shared WiFi but I didn't know the password -- and the guy who did know had just stepped into the shower. But it was using "WEP", a very old encryption policy which is vulnerable whenever you are transmitting data. So I fired up these same tools, found out that I was lucky -- he'd left a download running when he stepped into the shower or so -- and I captured a couple thousand data transactions. I didn't have to wait for him to finish showering before I had broken into my own Internet.
I'm always surprised by this sort of thing. The other day I had accidentally clobbered my sudo permission when reconfiguring Wireshark (something which can also listen to Internet traffic) to be more secure, and suddenly had no more root permissions. In about half an hour I had downloaded a live CD and burned it and broken into my own box with chroot magic to usurp root permissions to re-add myself to that group. (I have an encrypted disk, and I couldn't have done this without being able to decrypt it. However, most people that I know don't use disk encryption, so the point still stands.)
The lesson to take away: If some half-geek amateur like me can do these things, the professional inbreakers must have absolutely terrifying skills.
Except the difference here is that there is nothing to "break into" as there is no pretense at security..
I remember with Windows XP a friend had a failing hard disk that would no longer boot Windows and they asked if I could try and recover some data from it.
I plugged the disk into my tower and booted my own copy of Windows and tried to access the "My Documents" folder of the broken disk from there. It gave me some theatre about not being allowed to access the files there because I didn't have permission.
Then I rebooted my computer into Linux and mounted it with the NTFS drivers and of course all the files were there to be accessed. As an experiment I rebooted to my Windows XP again and logged into my local administrator account, this also let me access the files.
I can't help but feel that some of these measures perhaps give an illusion of security.
I also wonder with say computer forensics whether something like a file timestamp could be used as evidence in court since these could be easily tampered with by someone using a non standard FS driver.
[0] http://hsc.fr/ressources/outils/dns2tcp/index.html.en [1] http://code.kryo.se/iodine/
In relation to the legal questions raised elsewhere on this thread, I'm guessing that it's a non-issue when it's a built-in feature of the device. I think the argument could be logically extended to using plug-ins that switch user agent strings?
People who want to use their internet on the move are very likely to have a smartphone or at least a dongle and 3G is usually fast enough.
Here in the UK the train services used to provide free wifi to travelers but recently they decided to charge for it and give the option of a free trial.
On my last journey I tried the free trial and found that it was just as slow as it had always been but was now £5 an hour.
I would have been seriously disappointed if I had paid for that service. Luckily I could just use my mobile phone tethering and get nice fast access.
Surely a better model would be to provide access for free but use some DNS redirection of the popular ad services to redirect the ads to ones of your choice and reap the benefits of those clicks.
I also let a lady in the carriage use my connection for a few minutes to check her emails so it's not like you necessarily need your own connection either.
I certainly don't abuse it; simply from time to time you need some internet access (to check an email, to download some piece of software, to google for a technical problem) and I wouldn't pay 39 euros/month for a 3G "key" that I'd use maybe once a month, no thanks.
And if you can't trust Norwegian folk with your data, then you can roll your own "Turbo" with Ziproxy or at least SOCKS proxy over gzipped connection.