Raise your hand if you like paying $10 or so for 24 hours of airport Internet access that you’re only going to use for 15 minutes.
While I certainly wouldn’t suggest that you use this trick for endless, free web surfing on a for-pay wireless network, maybe your conscience would allow you to just quickly jump on to grab your e-mail or some music for your MP3 player before you board.
Debuggable Ltd has the full story, but the basic gist is that when you open up your web browser in most airports that charge for wireless access, you’re re-routed to the service’s sign-up and payment page. The trick is to enter the web address you’d like to visit and add “?.jpg” to the end of the URL.
So you would go to http://www.crunchgear.com/?.jpg for instance. Apparently these for-pay networks don’t block image files (yet), so you’re able to slip through the cracks this way. The guy who discovered this even used a Greasemonkey script for Firefox to automatically append “?.jpg” to every URL he visited. Clever, no?
[Debuggable Ltd via Digg]
It’s kinda funny, but at a lot of places (not airports usually though) if you type in 192.168.1.1 you will get to the admin login for the wifi router. From there, about 50% of the time, typing in “admin” for both the login name / password gives you access to the settings and administration panels. I’ve used that so many times to bypass “pay-for” or non-public wifi for use on a lappy.
The Debuggable story is dated August 2006! Nice to see Crunchgear at the leading edge.