As mentioned in a previous tip (http://www.tipstrs.com/tip/3281/Free-ATandT-wi-fi-for-iPhones) you can now get free wi-fi access at all AT&T hotspots like Starbucks and Barnes & Noble using an iPhone. But what that tip fails to mention, is that you can actually hack this so that you can get free wi-fi access even if you don't have an iPhone. They are controlling the access by checking the user-agent of the browser, and by asking for (and confirming) that you have a valid phone number for an iPhone. So, if you have your user-agent on your browser's computer, and you know the phone number of someone with an iPhone, you can get access at Starbucks and the like using your computer too.

If you are using Safari, this it's really easy to send the iPhone user-agent. If you have the "Develop" menu in Safari, just go there and select "User Agent" -> "Mobile Safari 1.1.3 -- iPhone" (the 1.1.3 will change with time so you may see something slightly different). If you don't have the "Develop" menu, then you need to get it. Close Safari and open a terminal window. In the terminal window enter: defaults write com.apple.Safari IncludeDebugMenu 1 and press Enter. You can then restart Safari and you'll then have the "Develop" menu options available.

If you are using Firefox, you can install the User Agent Switcher add-on (http://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/59). Once you get this add-on, you can set the user agent to anything you like. For reference, here is a valid user-agent for the iPhone:

Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU like Mac OS X; en) AppleWebKit/420+ (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/3.0 Mobile/1A543 Safari/419.3

Once you are using the correct user agent in your browser, and you have a valid phone number of an iPhone user (hopefully you know someone with an iPhone), you can get free wi-fi access at Startbucks or any other place where the service is provided by AT&T.