This hotel has free WiFi, but the system inserts advertisements at the top of each page. This, of course, breaks half the web sites. It’s also very slow. But the best part is that something that it does has a side-effect in Firefox that makes it act strangely. It’s like they’re doing “injection test” (a computer science term for inserting bad data to see if a program will freak out) and FireFox is freaking out.
I turned on my VPN thinking that might avoid the problem I found that I couldn’t view any web pages. Oddly enough, I can ssh just fine.
The hotel knows that this sucks. There is an announcement in the room that says that the week of June 15th the WiFi system will be replaced. “This will allow you to access the internet without banner ads as well as with a secure network and will be faster.” I think “with a secure network” means “and you’re VPN will work”.
Oh, not only do they insert adverts, but they include a revenue-sharing search box from Yahoo. Ugh, Yahoo.
Here is a screen shot of their log, the banner, and the yahoo search box.For an up-scale hotel, they really got screwed by this “free WiFi” company.
Alas, I think about once a year a new company forms that thinks advert-insertion is going to make them a lot of money. They get a few customers, everyone complains, and they go out of business as they lose their customers. The truth is that WiFi at hotels is no longer a perk, it is a required feature.
Will companies ever learn that ad-insertion just doesn’t work? Nah. I just read an article about Vodafone adding ad-insertion technology to their phone-based web stuff... and it is breaking all the major e-commerce sites. Ugh.
Update: (1) yes, I set up an SSH tunnel. (2)
here is a link to the vodafone article![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
