Wireless Weirdness...

While sitting in LAX yesterday waiting on a flight I fired up my notebook
and went on a wireless access search. At first all I got were two for LAX
(by the name it was obvious); one secure, one unsecured. So I attached to
the unsecured one fine and fire up Firefox. I had about 8 tabs open the last
time I used it (we were visiting our oldest daughter and her husband and a
guy in their apartment complex <22 units> works for Ticketmaster in IT and
had setup a wireless router for everyone to use - sweet)  and all but two
were hitting this stupid page asking you to signup for internet access.
Tried IE and got the SAME thing. And no way around it.

 

So how the heck did they hijack those browsers and isn't that really pushing
into a gray area ?

 

Thanks !

 

Chuck