AT&T giveth and AT&T taketh away
Last week, AT&T quietly begin rolling out free wifi access for iPhone users at Starbucks locations around the country. No official announcement was made when the service was first introduced, and no official announcement has been made about the service being disabled either, but once hopeful Starbucks customers are finding that now to be the case.
This week, AT&T’s free wifi service has already been suspended. What gives you ask? It wasn’t so much a matter of “what gives” as a matter of “who takes”.
As announcement of free wifi at Starbucks spread to tech savvy users around the country, simple instructions for how anyone with a laptop computer could gain access to the free wifi network was also spreading around the web and before everyone knew it, the free wifi access points began going down as quickly as they had gone up.
The system was based on allowing free wireless internet access to a user based on their browser’s “user-agent” — something that it didn’t take regular laptop users long to realize and before the service provider realized what was going on, users everywhere were “spoofing” the system by changing one simple setting in their web browsers. If the user-agent on the laptop web browser was set to emulate that of the Safari mobile browser — which is built into the iPhone — this quick little “hack” allowed everyone with a computer full access to the service.
Clearly, AT&T caught up and has now temporarily suspended the service until they can figure out a better alternative for providing their real iPhone customers with free wifi access.
AT&T is replacing T-Mobile as Starbucks wifi provider and the transition is expected to be complete sometime this summer.
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