News and notes from around the interweb:
- Former Frequent Traveler University speaker Chris Guillebeau’s new book on quests and lessons learned from visiting every country in the world, which I wrote about two weeks ago, has debuted at number 3 on the new York Times’ bestseller list! Congratulations Chris! Definitely check out The Happiness of Pursuit!
- Low hanging fruit: It makes sense why hotels that charge for internet require you to log in for access. But I don’t understand why hotels offering free wifi make you log in. Just a thought about how to make travelers’ lives better in a small way but that would improves things at the margin every day.
- 1000 free Best Western points
- The government has shut down the original Chinatown bus line
- The first American Airlines retrofitted Boeing 777-200 with new interior left Hong Kong for Dallas.
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Presumably they do this so that they can say you write fully aware of the T&Cs of the Internet access they’re providing and try and reduce their liability in some fashion? Others will also try and do it to harvest email addresses for marketing purposes.
You’re going to lose all credibility if you keep linking to the Reason Foundation.
@Haldami – I don’t expect to have much credibility with you, but it seemed like an interesting story, what in particular do you disagree with?
@Alan, truly though what liability? You think you’re downloading porn and download a virus instead and say it’s their fault?
Lol I didn’t say it was sensible or effective, I’m just not surprised that big corporations behave in this way – and it’s likely for their liability to you but also to the authorities, so they can say it was their customers downloading pirated content, etc. I can’t see them moving away from it, at least not in the States.
Depending on the login info required, they may use that info in their marketing. Alternately, although it might be free, they probably want to restrict the wifi to customers and not the public, thus the name and room number match that I’ve seen.
I’ll take it one step further; I don’t understand why any hotel is still charging for internet. (Besides, of course, the tried-and-true, “Because they can” reasoning.)
The law is unclear on whether a hotel offering a wifi hotspot is considered an ISP or not, and until it is defined in the courts or legislatively, a judge that determines a hotel is not an ISP could hold the hotel liable for any illegal activity on their network (torrents, child porn, etc), though have never read it happening and doubt it ever will. So hotspot owners, under lawyer advice, tend to require signing of T&Cs and disclaimers in case they do end up getting sued/prosecuted.
Also, hotels want to restrict access to the network for this very reason. In population-dense places it’d be easy to use the network for illicit purposes.
It’s not 1000 BW Points. It’s 1000 Miles and More Points
@Denis, I see that too, and it doesn’t exactly inspire me to want to subscribe to milenerd’s blog! 🙁
I’ve kept an eye on the Fung Wah shutdown and I don’t disagree with it, it might be better to link to a less biased, more “journalistic”-type and balanced outlet. See e.g., http://www.boston.com/news/local/massachusetts/2014/08/25/fung-wah-bus-rips-reprehensible-government-treatment/xJglirdKc4KmHiO4BzxgYI/story.html
That button to accept the terms of the free wifi was a major headache for me last week, when I tried to connect my Roku to the hotel TV. The Roku has no browser, so no way to accept the terms.
In the end, I had to download Virtual Router onto my laptop. That was a hassle, and if I hadn’t been lugging a laptop, I’d have been out of luck.
Re: Fung Lum – see http://www.boston.com/community/blogs/roads_and_rails/2013/02/fung_wah_problems_werent_a_secret.html for reasons why Fung Lum was shut down and, perhaps, why it hasn’t been relicensed. I’ve been on Bolt Bus and it was fine.