This makes sense…
May 5th, 2008 10:12 pm

So for a short while now, we’ve been able to get free WiFi at Starbucks on our iPhones. This of course, made sense with AT&T being in bed with Steve Jobs.

Strangely, you can’t do this anymore. This was very short-lived.

Then, I remembered a post on Lifehacker a few days ago, detailing how to get this WiFi for free on your laptop, by having firefox report a false user agent.

I’ve got $5 that says someone over at AT&T saw that and decided they needed some better way to validate that the WiFi device was actually an iPhone. Can’t they just look at the MAC address that’s connected? I thought MAC addresses have a portion of it which is static and represents the a company/model ID.

I’d love to have this theory confirmed/denied. Anyone?

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Posted in News by ken.sykora
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Alex C. Schaefer
May 6th, 2008 8:06 am

Yes, the first two octets can be used to test the manufacturer of the device - however, not the model. Apple I believe is signified with a 00:1E, and while they could do that in-conjunction with UserID checking, Mac’s would still have access.

The best way to do this would be to create a plugin only available for the iPhone’s Safari that negotiates over SSL a shared secret of some sort.

I actually never noticed I got free Internets on my iPhone in a starbucks, hopefully it’ll be back soon.

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