Sometimes your connecting flight is delayed by 4.5+ hours and you find yourself stuck in an airport for the rest of your life. Nowadays most airports have a “free” wifi hotspots, but it usually limits you to only 30 minutes and force you to pay for anything longer. I believe internet access is a utility, but corporate America doesn’t share my views just yet. Here’s how to get around that if you’re on macOS.
Once your original free wifi session expires, hit the wifi icon in the top menu dock and select “Join Other Network…” Type in any fake network name, select join and once it begins to connect, hit cancel immediately. This keeps your computer’s wifi up but not connected to a network, thus allowing you to spoof your MAC address.
Open terminal
(if you’re unfamiliar with terminal, hit command + space and search “terminal”).
Copy and paste this into your terminal:
sudo ifconfig en0 ether aa:bb:cc:dd:ee:ff
The “aa:bb:cc:dd:ee:ff” is the new spoof MAC address. Change this to any value you want.
You may have to enter your system password, but that should be it! When you join the airport hotspot and you should be able to select the free trial once again.
This command spoofs your computers MAC address and allows you to use the “free” wifi trial as many times as your flight delay has forced you to be in an airport. If/when you need to change your MAC address back, just reboot your computer.
To check and make sure it worked, type this command to check your computer’s current MAC address:
ifconfig en0 | grep ether
To save time, keep your terminal window open in the background and when you’re ready to spoof again, simply hit the up arrow to autopopulate the previous command. Be sure to change the MAC address by a letter or two and then reconnect to the airport hotspot!
If this trick worked for you, hit me up on twitter @blcwright.
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