Secretssss of Free WiFi at Access 2006

The bulk of the Access 2006 conference is being held at a hotel-that-shall-not-be-named-for-reasons-that-will-become-apparent-shortly in Ottawa this week. I was at the CARL Pre-Conference on Institutional Repositories today and a kind man (Wayne Johnston from the University of Guelph) tipped me off that the hotel's pay-for-wifi system is a little bit flawed: they redirect any port 80 (plain old HTTP) requests to their “You must pay for Internet service” page, but any other TCP/IP ports are wide open -- including port 443 (HTTPS).

So if you use a service like Gmail, just go directly to the https://mail.google.com URL and you'll be fine. Or if you run your sshd service on port 443, then you're golden. Free wifi! Thanks hotel-that-shall-not-be-named-for-fear-of-killing-the-goose-that-laid-the-golden-egg for going through the motions of running a pay-for-wifi service but not really following through -- I can assure you that we all appreciate it!