iPhone users have a reason to stick with at&t and that reason is free wifi access at any Starbucks. To use this service on your laptop, simply connect to the acces point on your iphone, sign in with your phone number and click the link in the text message you receive. Now just clone your iPhone's mac address on your laptop and voila, free wifi at starbucks.
For those that don't know what this means, there are a few ways to accomplish this. if you have a jailbroken iphone, simply open a terminal and input the command
ifconfig
The network interface should be en0 or en1 and the corresponding ethernet address should look like so 00:XX:XX:XX:XX:XX. This is the value you want to use on your laptop.
If you dont have a jailbroken iphone then you can use a wireless sniffer to locate your iphone's mac address after it connects to the access point. I use Kismac with the rt73 drivers and a D-Link DWL-G122 Rev C wireless dongle.
http://trac.kismac-ng.org/
http://www.amazon.com/D-Link-DWL-G122-Compact-Wireless-Adapter/dp/B0002DQUHC/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=electronics&qid=1252471092&sr=8-1
To find your iphones mac address using this method, you'll want to fire up Kismac and start a scan. ATTwifi is on channel 11 so go ahead and switch to that. Now you want to connect to the network with your phone. You will see it pop up as an Apple Computer. The "client" field is where you will find your mac address.
Now that your iphone is associated with the network you can go ahead and clone the mac address on your laptop and get some real internet access.
To change the mac address on your Leopard (OSX 10.5.X or greater, I believe) system you will want to ensure that your network interface is powered on but not connected to any access point. Open a terminal and input the following command
sudo ifconfig en1 lladdr 00:XX:XX:XX:XX:XX (this is the mac address of your iphone)
You will be asked to input your password at this point, which is okay. This is because in order to access system resources, such as the mac address ("link level address" in OSX), the command needs to be run as a root user.
On a linux machine, the process is identical with the minor exception of using the command
sudo ifconfig (your device) ether 00:XX:XX:XX:XX:XX
On a windows machine you can use a program like Irongeek's MadMACS to alter your machine's mac address.
http://www.irongeek.com/i.php?page=security/madmacs-mac-spoofer
And that's it. You should now be able to connect to any starbucks wifi access point on your laptop. The values you changed will persist until you change them or you reboot your system.
