Don’t stay at the Days Inn in Sullivan, Indiana
The sign is next to the highway. The hotel is half a block off the highway. Image via Google Maps.
Just a warning to you all…don’t stay at this place.
What’s the problem, you might ask? Sit down and let me tell you. But let me begin by listing the things the hotel gets right, because it is not wholly terrible. The rooms are clean, the place is generally quite quiet, and the beds are actually fairly comfortable. Usually, I spend the first week on a work trip in agony as my body adjusts to the strange new mattress I’m exposing it to…but here, I haven’t had any issues. The bed is good, the pillows are decent, and I’m able to rest.
So that’s good.
The breakfast service is pretty much the stereotypical “continental”, but there’s three or four places you can drive to in under two minutes to grab a more protein-infused breakfast. I do appreciate the vitamin D-enriched milk on offer during the breakfast service, however…especially in the wintertime, I don’t often get to see much daylight, much less benefit therefrom.
The coffee is…actually, the coffee is pretty bad, but that’s not the issue that is, for me, the deal-breaker.
Here’s what is the deal-breaker: pop-ups taking me to various advertising sites. I was getting pop-ups in Firefox. And in Google Chrome. And in Internet Explorer. What is more, I was getting pop-ups in my Windows XP VM, my Ubuntu v9 VM, and on Ubuntu Netbook Edition (which I boot off of a USB key). Even more bizarrely, I was getting pop-ups in a brand-new VM which was booting Ubuntu v10 off of an ISO image, and was therefore a read-only OS!. Oh, and I was getting pop-ups — always the same damn pop-ups — on my iPhone, too!
And what sites was I browsing? Well…this one, and a few other news and gaming sites/blogs! I was getting pop-ups from clicking links on Aiera. And evidently, it’s just me, because you all are a classy lot of Dragons and Dragonettes, and at least a couple of you would have said something if the site had thrown you a pop-up.
If I’d just been getting pop-ups under Windows, that’d have been one thing. That I could have blamed on a particularly nasty piece of malware and wiped out with an appropriate application of…well, various pieces of software, really. But I ran all that software, and a full virus scan, and everything came back empty. I was even willing to consider that the pop-ups on the iPhone were a possible indicator that mobile malware’s heyday was about to arrive.
It’s the Ubuntu issues, though, that finally clued me in to what was happening. There is precious little in the way of malware that targets Ubuntu, and even less of it that could infect a live-boot ISO image of the OS running in a VM. Wherever these issues were coming from, it wasn’t from within my computer (or my iPhone)…it was from something external.
And honestly, I suspect it’s the frakking wi-fi here. I suspect this in part because, as I was enjoying a burger at the Cheeseburger in Paradise location in Terre Haute (about 30 minutes north of Sullivan), I found a wi-fi hotspot there and proceeded to browse the same collection of sites on my iPhone that I always browse.
And what did I notice? No pop-ups.
So look…your mileage may vary, but for me, someone offering me free wi-fi and then frakking with it so that it fires pop-up after pop-up my way when I’m browsing is pretty much a deal-breaker. Hell, it’s beyond a deal-breaker. The next time I have to come down this way, I won’t be staying here. And I’d encourage the lot of you to do the same.
That’s crazy as hell. They must be running a proxy and inserting javascript with each URL request to fire the popups. Serious security problem for those connecting to random wireless AP’s. 🙁
I’d call for an investigation to see if all Days Inns are effected. Could be some corporate plan to generate tons of ad revenue. Wish I had a laptop, as I’d find one near me and give it a test.
Tell me about it. And a double piss-off for me, since I frakking work in the network security space. If I see a pop-up, I go into “find it and kill it” mode, and it frustrates me to no discernible end that it’s noting about my computer that is the matter. An infection I can kill, but this? I am powerless to stop it, and insecure because of it.
I saw a couple Days Inns on my way from Sullivan to Louisville. Unfortunately, I will be staying at the Sullivan Days Inn until the 11th, so I’ll maybe investigate one or two of the others that I saw on my drive back. And I think I’ll check out the one in Edmonton as well. But yeah…if there are any Ultima fans near a Days Inn, maybe see if you can connect to the wireless at that location and surf the web for a bit. Do a few Google searches, especially; whatever this thing is that’s driving the pop-ups, it seemed to love serving up an ad when I clicked on a search result link.
Thank you for walkthrough, pal 😉
Never ever rely on the wireless in these kinds of locations. They’re slow, monitored, insecure, and very likely they’ll be retaining records of any personally identifiable information, including passwords, and probably selling them to third parties.
This kind of thing, as intrusive as it is, is fairly common in many hospitalities spaces that do offer wifi. I dont think that Ive stayed in a single hotel that offered Wifi that didnt do this to some degree, though never as bad as you make out your experience to be.
Bah missed the y in my name.
It’s a good thing I use lots of random passwords, then. 🙂
Sadly, internet connectivity is kind of a must for me and the work I do. Can’t get around that. Best I can do is, y’know, bitch about it and try think up workarounds.
If you use encrypted methods such as HTTPS and SSH you should be alright.
Incidentally you can now view the TFL site through HTTPS provided you accept my generic, I-dont-have-300$-to-pay-verisign site certificate.
Yeah, fair enough. I should set something up similar here.
Ah, I’m compiling what evidence I can; I’ll submit it to our netsec expert when I get back to work, get his thoughts, see if we can devise a means to counter it. There’s gotta be something.