In New York, Hacking Free Wi-Fi

I'm back at the airport in New York... a quick trip to the city for a meeting about a customized event registration system for a large religious organization, then off to meet with Random House's publicity team for my wife's new book, God in the Wilderness. Her book is coming out on April 8, and we have our fingers crossed that they won't cut an article that's supposed to be in this Sunday's NY Times Travel section. I also got to meet clients I've worked with for more than five years, but never actually met in person... crazy how the Internet can draw people together.

Okay... the last part of this rant and rave is that I'm using a free wi-fi signal at Jet Blue's airport. They have a 1 hour time-out on sessions. However, if you look at the URL it looks something like this:

https://jfkb6hotspot.jetblue.com/cgi-bin/hotspotlogin.cgi?res=popup2&uamip=10.0.0.1&uamport=3990&userurl=&redirurl=http%3a%2f%2fwww.jetblue.com&timeleft=3600

This is an example of using poor programming and leaving configuration variables visible in the URL string. Instead, I just added another zero to the 'timeleft' variable... increasing it from 1 hour to 10 hours of time. Since I have 983 emails downloading since I last logged into email this morning, it's nice not to get cut off :)

Here's to hacking wi-fi :)