Free Boingo
So, I was at the Detroit Metro Airport (DTW) yesterday waiting to pick up the wife/kids from a trip they went on. Brought my Cloudbook with me because I hear airports have wifi access in them now. I figured it’d be cool to get on and read some news or watch TwitLive.tv while I was waiting for them.
Little did I know, the service provider for the airport, Boingo, doesn’t offer it free. They have 3 or 4 different plans you can pay for depending on the amount of time you want service in whatever airport you happen to be at. So that shot all my plans to just kill some time while I was waiting, until I started to do some Googling on my Blackberry.
I discovered that there’s a promotional plan for iPhone users which allows them free access for 15 minutes at a time. The only catch is that you have to watch a small advertisement (which didn’t even work on my laptop anyway). Well, I don’t have an iPhone, but what I did have is some more information gathered via Googling which you can use to make Internet Explorer pretend to be an iPhone (there’s other articles out there for how to do this on Firefox, which is honestly easier…go find em.)
This is the string you need (make it all one line, it just wraps here in my blog due to the width limitations):
Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU like Mac OS X; en) AppleWebKit/420+ (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/3.0 Mobile/1A543a Safari/419.3
And here’s where you need to put it in the Windows registry for it to work:
HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Internet Settings\5.0\User Agent
Create a “String Value” named Version under that area in the registry and put that iPhone string in as the data.
Now, when you launch IE, it’ll present itself as an iPhone. You should be able to get on Boingo’s wifi network and watch the mini ad. One thing I found out though is that if you continue to use that string after you’ve connected, some sites will format as a mobile version. So what I did was just go back into the registry and rename the “Version” key to something like “Boingo_free_Version” and then restart IE. Voila, 15 minutes of free internet access at the airport.
After 15 minutes is up, just repeat the process and you can continue. One thing you could probably do is export that key to a .REG file. Save it to your desktop. Then create the other version of the key (the “off” version) and save that to the desktop as well as a .REG file. Just double-click them to turn on/off the iPhone disguise.
If someone knows of a User Agent plugin for IE (similar to the one that Firefox has), sound off in the comments to this post.
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