AT&T's bringing free wifi to the iPhone -- once it finishes wigging out
by Chris Ziegler 
posted May 12th 2008 at 3:17AM
Hey, do you guys want to hear our AT&T impression? It's pretty awesome. Okay, okay, here it goes: "Great news, we're offering free WiFi to iPhone users! Wait, no we're not. Yes we are! Oh, no, wait, cancel that." Pretty spot-on, right? Sadly, it looks like we might need something else to rag on shortly, since an AT&T spokesman started clearing the air with the New York Times late last week. The bottom line -- for the moment, anyway -- is that AT&T has "long planned" to offer up its WiFi hotspots as a free value-add for the iPhone and all of the other WiFi-equipped devices in its arsenal, but that the brief enabling of the feature thus far and the mention on AT&T's site were results of human error, and the company isn't prepared at this point to commit to an actual launch date or details on how the service will work. Hey, at least we know we're not just suffering from some brutal hallucinations now.[Via TUAW]
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
PSM @ May 12th 2008 4:20PM
That's the stupidest excuse I've ever heard. Human error? Like somebody accidentally clicked on the "enable free iPhone wifi" button, and all of a sudden all the hotspots knew to accept iPhones, and the website magically updated to advertise it?
But yet this feature that could be so easily activated by accident is so far from release that they can't give any kind of a timetable or even describe how it will work, despite the fact that it has already been working. WTF AT&T?
I think the only possible explanation is that the people who devised the plan originally were so stupid they didn't realize that spoofing the user agent of an iPhone is so easy, it's a standard feature in the menus of many browsers. It didn't exactly take a hacker to bypass that system.
I'm a little concerned that these are the same people who hold my credit card information and secure my data.
youngcalihottie @ May 12th 2008 11:37PM
lol. good call.
it might also have gone like "ok, turn it on. oh shit, look at that bandwidth! its gonna crash! turn it off, turn it off!" haha
but ya, way too easy to trick it. im sure youre right. thats the delay. working on a way to authenticate customers. why not just create a att wifi username/password?