Zombie topic. See this 2010 HN thread:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1780058

Can anyone comment if this is still going on?

Yes I have seen it in the last year or two at science conferences.

I remember the first time I saw that in an airport, it was right after I got a laptop and went on a trip, I don't remember where, I just remember that most airports had only just begun offering wifi (not free) and there was of course talk of airplanes getting outfitted (though it didn't end up happening for a number of years), anyway I tried connected to the official "BOINGO" network, only to discover, much to my chargin that it required money, which I didn't have, so then i tried to connect to anything else in the airport, and the free wifi thing was the next option... I of course knew nothing about web security at that point...

Techdirt articles are unpleasant to read. The pages loads slow and there's a whole bunch of distracting crap around the page.

Loaded just fine for me, and there's no more crap on the page than many places you'd find such articles.

Whenever I visit the Tech(x) sites, I just disable JS. That helps with the loading.

If it's really annoying, I use the web inspector in FF and remove the relevant HTML until it's comfortable to read. It's a bit of work, but it also depends on how badly I want to read the content.

viewtext.org was great for stuff like that (and didn't require an account, unlike readability). Hasn't been up for a while though, unfortunately.

I just use the readability bookmarklet, doesn't require an account:

http://www.readability.com/bookmarklets

Have you been to techcrunch lately?

I've seen this network in loads of places, not just airports, in the UK. Trains? yes. Starbucks? yes.

The hotspot on my phone is named "$12.99 per minute". I get a chuckle every time I overhear someone in a public place bitching about how expensive the WiFi is...