Opening up wifi in airports
So I'm on my way to Argentina, and I'm stuck in Toronto Pearson airport for 8 hours, so I've got a bit of leisure time to fool around with my computer. But what is there to do on a computer without a network these days? That's why we have wifi! That's right, we now have the technology to connect computers wirelessly (wow!). Unfortunatly, airports being often the realm of private corporations, we mostly have a shopping mall disguised as a thing that can welcome and ship passengers, luggage and airplanes. So that means that wifi is very often not free in most north-american airports, contrarily to european airports (at least Paris has open wifi).
So I'm now on a mission: document all the technologies and restrictions to technology in the airports of the world I visit. I don't travel that much by certain standards, but I hope this will be useful and, who knows, that others will join in. Heck, there might already be some other effort like this somewhere else, but I'll start with this and merge along when I get the time/energy.
When a wifi hotspot is closed for some reason or another, there's very often a way to bypass the restrictions and connect anyways. The workarounds that I know of are NSTX (IP over DNS) and ICMPTX (IP over ICMP). The former working almost everywhere there's a restriction. And of course some airports have open access, willingly or not. In any case, it's time to open up the resource to everyone: there's no reason why you should pay 7$/hour to get internet access when you're still on the ground.
The page will be http://anarcat.ath.cx/hardware/wifi/airports/ for now, I'll try to update it as I go and welcome the whole hacker/blogger/geek community to contribute along your travels. We can grow this outside a single wiki page (a complete wiki? a Drupal? whatever) when the need arises.
It's time to open up the airwaves!