Mobissimo

The title reminds us of the movie Elf, starring Will Ferrell, when he says to character Miles Finch, played by Peter Dinklage, who is now everywhere thanks to Game of Thrones, "You're an angry little elf." Was that a run-on sentence? Anyway, interesting article in CNN exploring whether people, elves and taller travelers alike, are getting angrier on airplanes. The statistics seem to say so, reported instances of unruly fliers rose 29% internationally between 2009 and 2010. Two top causes of bad behavior? Alcohol and cell phones. Lesson here? Yes, stay away from drinkers on cell phones. Read the whole article on CNN.

That's really the only thing we can think of when we look at this site which features a tagline prominently that says, "Who Needs Money, Beautiful People Travel Free - Travel Dating For Generous And Attractive People." Sounds suspiciously like a high priced escort service to us, disguised as a "new" type of travel site. We'd love to test it out but we're probably too ugly to make the cut. If you're not and want to test it out, head on over to Miss Travel. Wonder if the Secret Service in Cartagena was using this site. Watch the video below to see how it works, thought is seems pretty simple to us. World's oldest profession gets a new twist.

This infographic the seems to say so.

Looks like Marriott is in a lot of hot water today for inserting ads into web pages whenever guests surfed the internet using the Marriott gateway:

The hotel’s Internet service was secretly injecting lines of code into every page he visited, code that could allow it to insert ads into any Web page without the knowledge of the site visitor or the page’s creator.

The New York Times did a bit of informal investigating and seemed to confirm the same thing:

A test of the Courtyard Marriott’s wireless network on Friday verified Mr. Watt’s claims. The code was embedded in the pages of several Web sites visited, including Reddit, GigaOM and TechMeme.

The lines of code include references to “rxg,” which stands for Revenue eXtraction Gateway, a service aimed at generating money from Internet access points. On its Web site, a company called RG Nets, which makes Revenue eXtraction Gateway, explains that its system rewrites every Web page on the fly so that it can include a banner ad. “As you can see, the pervasive nature of the advertising banner on all Web pages guarantees banner advertising impression,” a narrator says in the video.

OK, sounds pretty scary. But lets be honest, this stuff goes on all the time. And frankly, if you're getting internet for free you should be willing to put up with some ads or other annoying things like surveys. Big problem here is that Marriott was doing it without their guests knowledge. Heck, they weren't probably even aware themselves. Whatever the reason, they should probably clean up this mess pronto.

UPDATE:

The guy who originally discovered this issue, has been updating his blog about the situation. Here are his latest updates:

Update, April 9, 2012: I just received the following message from a representative of Marriott:

As soon as we learned of the situation, we launched an investigation into the matter. Preliminary findings revealed that, unbeknownst to the hotel, the Internet service provider (ISP) was utilizing functionality that allowed advertising to be pushed to the end user. The ISP has assured the hotel that this functionality has now been disabled.

While this is a common marketing practice with many Internet service providers, Marriott does not condone this practice. At no time was data security ever at risk.”

Though I’d question the assertion that network-level JavaScript injection is a “common marketing practice”, I’m glad they say it has been disabled. I’m currently back in San Francisco, so I have no way to confirm, but I’ll likely be back in NYC staying at the same hotel in a month.

Update: Something has bothered me about Marriott’s official response above. I completely get that Marriott is a large sprawling corporation, and it’s likely that the right hand often does not know what the left hand is doing. I get that. I’ve worked in much smaller organizations where that has been the case. I also get that their response is a typical, old school public relations gloss over the problem—without any satisfying transparency as to how the problem came to be or any meaningful details about how it was ameliorated.

What bugs me about their response is that the device required to do this type of on-the-fly JavaScript injection of HTML is both rare and expensive. It requires specialized hardware (like the RG Nets’ RXG-A8) starting at a cost of $10,000. In other words, this hardware was procured precisely for the purpose of perpetrating this kind of attack. If Courtyard/Marriott/Hotel Internet Services didn’t want that feature, then they probably could have requisitioned cheaper, less specialized, and more robust networking hardware.

Which means that the optimal solution to this snafu wasn’t simply that “we’ve disabled the functionality”—it has to be “we’ve removed/replaced the offensive hardware”. Nothing less is sufficient. Otherwise, what’s to stop someone from accidentally (or otherwise) re-enabling it later?

If you saw the movie UP and fantasized about floating away from your daily responsibilities, take heart in this story. Thirty-eight year old adventurer, Johnathan Trappe, floated across the Alps in a lawn chair attached to 54 helium-filled balloons. Looks pretty fun, albeit a bit dangerous. But think of it as the ultimate low cost carrier. Watch the video below. Via GetOutdoors.