Missed flight. Boingo WiFi hack saved the day. July 18, 2008 4 Comments
I’m flying home today to Regina, SK for a family reunion and what not. I caught the bus to the airport this morning and arrived 25 minues before my flight was leaving. I went to check in and the robotic man said “We’re sorry sir, you cannot get on that flight anymore. You’ll have to find a different one”. I was in shock. I quickly said “We’ll can’t I just get on? I don’t have any baggage to check.” He replied with more “Sir’s” and big words like “system lockdown” and… “airplane”. I then had to re-schedule my flight. Fuck.
I had to talk to the ticket lady and she said the best way for me to get home was to take a flight from Ottawa to Toronto, Toronto to Winnipeg then Winnipeg to Regina. So there I am sitting in Ottawa airport bored out of my mind. I decided to pay for some interwebs and surf the digg waves. I got on there and just as my time was running out I decided to search how I can get on a Boingo network for free.
I found this site that talked about switching the user agent to make Boingo think you’re using an iPhone. iPhone users get a 15 minute free trial. So I did that and got my free 15 minute trial but being the webby addict that I am, I needed to shoot up with more – I needed more of a fix.
Here’s what you do to get unlimited interwebs:
- Go through the steps here to get the user agent switcher for firefox.
- When your trial is up clear your cookies
- Go to Start > Run and type “cmd”. This will bring up the command prompt.
- Type ipconfig /release
- Now type ipconfig /renew
- Get back into your firefox browser with the user agent set to an iPhone and browse away!

FYI for safari users: after enabling the Developer menu you can go to Develop > User Agent > iPhone. Don't meddle with pesky firefox extensions ;)