Apple and AT&T providing free Wi-Fi access to iPhone users and oops… to everyone else as well!
Apparently, Apple and AT&T has decided to provide free wireless access to iPhone users at places like Starbucks. I imagine this is one of those deals where you get associated, it forces you through a proxy, and any request is redirected to an AT&T wireless services page, where normally you’d pay $9.95 for a day of Internet access or something like that.Well, the way they are determining if you should be free or not is by inspecting the user agent that your browser sends. The user agent is an HTTP header that is sent by browsers so that web pages can modify their presentation and control to best suit the needs of their browser… it was NEVER intended to be an access control. As the request to the proxy page to get setup for wireless leaves from your personal machine (from your browser and down through the TCP/IP stack and then out to their server), you can actually control what is sent and forge your own user agent to look like the user agent that is sent by the iPhone’s Safari browser.
admin @ May 2, 2008
