How to Hack Boingo WiFi
Posted by Nirav | Filed under Apple, Miscellaneous, iPhone
I’m currently at Oakland International Airport, with about an hour and a half to go until my flight, but I don’t want to pay Boingo Wireless $7.95 for 90 minutes of web access from my laptop. On a whim, I hopped onto the Boingo network from my iPhone to see if anything was different for phones. And it was: mobile browsers can gain internet access for 15 minutes if they watch a 15 second Flash ad.
Now, ironically enough, iPhone doesn’t support Flash, so on that device I’d see 15 seconds of a blank screen. However, I realized that I can spoof Mobile Safari (the iPhone browser) from Safari on my laptop. So I did, and voila, after sitting tight for 15 seconds, my laptop was granted internet access.
And of course, the first thing I did was hop on twitlive.tv to see Leo Laporte’s live streaming iPhone 3G coverage. If there’s someone monitoring this network, I want to see their face when they notice that some random cellphone is getting fullscreen video streamed to it.