AT&T Opens Hotspots to iPhone (and Others, via a Hack)

You know that AT&T has hotspots all over, especially now that they have them at Starbucks in addition to McDonald's and Barnes & Noble. While starting on Thursday, folks with AT&T DSL already get free use of these sites, so do those with AT&T's favorite smartphone: the iPhone.

How do you access it? When you try to browse, you go to a specially formatted page that asks for you to enter your phone number.

Ah, but they made a mistake. Change the user agent (which IDs your browser) to emulate the iPhone's Safari browser and you're gold. On OS X you can go into the "Develop" menu bar of Safari and change the User Agent to "Mobile Safari 1.1.3 - iPhone."

You can do this on other browsers as well, but you'd have to set the User Agent to "Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU like Mac OS X; en) AppleWebKit/420+ (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/3.0 Mobile/1A543 Safari/419.3."

In Firefox you can use the User Agent Switcher extension (or about:config). For IE you have to edit the registry (bleh) at:

HKLM\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Internet Settings\5.0\User Agent

Expect this hole to be plugged ASAP, however, so enjoy it while it lasts.