air fares

[cellio]

When I flew to Boston in early November, I think my round-trip ticket was $120 (not on a discount airline). I'm looking at options for my trip in July and the cheapest tickets are more than twice that, with the non-sucky ones being over $300. What happened? Is that all just summer effect? Oof. (Yeah, fuel prices -- but they aren't that much lower last fall...) JetBlue, by the way, is not competing all that favorably with old-school players like United. I'm using kayak.com to find fares.

Direct flights are even more expensive. Does anyone know the most expedient way to find out which connecting airports have free wireless? So far I've seen JFK, DCA, LaGuardia, and Cincinnati among the options.

Comments

[zevabe.livejournal.com]

How does such a thing work? I suppose I'll have to be on guard against something new whilst out roaming with my laptop (I am new to the wireless experience.)

[cellio]

You sit down at a {coffeeshop, airport, bookstore, etc}, pull out your laptop, and see a connection named something like "Starbucks wireless" or "Logan" or whatever. Maybe it's the real thing, or maybe someone has set up a computer and an AirPort (or whatever) with an open wireless connection 50 feet away. (He's probably mooching off the real one, inserting himself between you and that.) Anything you type that's not encrypted, he can sniff.

I don't know how to set it up, but I know it's possible. The attack really relies on the fact that most people don't question a network connection in a place where they expect to find one.

[zevabe.livejournal.com]

How do I defend against it, aside from not using wireless in such places? I don't need to use it, but the convenience can be nice.

[cellio]

I'm not sure, unfortunately. :-( When I use public wireless, I use ssh to connect to my shell account (so the password is encrypted) and I don't type passwords or credit-card numbers into my web browser. I don't have a lot of wireless experience, though -- only got a laptop last year.

[alaricmacconnal.livejournal.com]

At least in Windows, if you bring up the list of available wireless networks each "network" will have an icon associated with it. If it says "Computer to Computer" (picture of two computers), it is probably someone sitting with a computer.

At BOS (Logan), the legitimate network specifically pops up a message warning about "Free Wireless" networks when you connect to their website.

[cellio]

Thanks for the information. I wonder what the Mac equivalent is. I wonder if anyone who knows is still reading comments. :-) (My laptop is actually a Mac, but that's my only exposure to the OS and I don't know a lot about it yet.)

[stevemb.livejournal.com]

When you log on to a wireless network, you should get an indication of whether or not it is secured. If it isn't, you don't want to send any important private information.

The catch is that a secured network either means that you have to obtain (and probably pay for) a password.