Shoemoney - Skills To Pay The Bills

The GOGO InFlight WiFi Free Google Holiday Internet Scam

Posted: 30 Nov 2010 10:59 AM PST

Today I have a 3 hour flight from Minneapolis to San Francisco. Its on Delta. I am only “Gold” status on Delta so I only get upgraded about 50% of the time on domestic flights, but I like flying Delta because they always have WIFI on planes.

This year its even sweeter because Google is paying for it for you!!!! WOOT!!!! How awesome is that.

After take off when it was *safe* to use electronic devices I saw about a dozen or so people pull out their laptops… I was seated near the back of the plane so it was interesting to watch everyone lifting up their laptops showing others around them their screen. Evidently everyone was getting “The Internet is full” screen.

I was quickly reminded of those idiots I used to do tech support for on windows who would ask retarded questions like “Its asking me if I am sure I want to delete THE INTERNET”. (your probably to young for that). I ignored them… mostly because I was easily able to connect to the internet from my iPhone. I just had to enter my *cough* real *cough* email address and then it asked me this retardedly long captcha (really is this necessary? But I was online.

About 20 mins later I thought I would switch to my laptop. And here is what I got:

Hrmm what the hell… OK well that’s understandable right? I mean its free so they need to limit it. I will just pay for it (I also have a bunch of pre-paid GOGO inflight cards). HRMM whats this… only people who are paying subscriptions can bypass the line. GREAT… But wait whats this thing at the bottom about mobile devices?

Ohh… ok… so I can’t pay for daily access… or use any of my pre-paid cards… and I can’t access the in-flight wifi unless I want to pay for a year subscription. That only leaves one option. We have to figure out how to trick the system into thinking my laptop is a mobile device.

Before how I achieved this (easily) lemme point out how GOGO is making out like a bandit.

Google is paying a shitton to GOGO for presumable the same if not more then GOGO would normally bring in for *sponsoring* this service.
The WiFi is sponsored by Google Chrome… but only those on mobile devices can access it (and chrome isn’t available to them).

So GOGO is getting paid by Google like a mofo and it appears they are only letting people on who are using mobile devices that are using a fraction of their resources and can’t even take advantage of what Google is advertising? Amazing irony..

Ive been reading 2600 for so long that about 100 different ways to do this popped into my head. The easiest (and least likely to work) was just to change the useragent. So I opened Firefox and put in about:config into the address bar. This lets you edit the configuration of your Firefox browser.

I looked for the useragent string and just replaced what was in their with “iPhone”. I was fairly certain this would not work but what the hell…