Today, whilst in the Christchurch International airport, I needed to do what I thought was a fairly standard kind of task. Access the internet. Basically every international airport I’ve ever been to (which granted hasn’t been that many) has had wifi available, sure they know how to charge for it, but in this case I didn’t really mind.

So anyway, I fire up to the laptop and look around, nothing. Nada. Not a thing. The wardriving app on the DS showed a bunch of APs, all with WEP or WPA switched on though. OK, that’s fine, no using my laptop. Frustrating as it meant I probably wasn’t going to be able to use VOIP, but you can’t have things everytime right?

So we follow the helpful signs saying ‘www’ to a (very) small internet ‘kiosk’ made up of two coin operated machines. The keyboards were filthy and the old monitors had been stuck in on a less than ergonomic angle, but hey, it was connectivity. So I put in my $2 and the counter winds up to 10 minutes, then starts ticking its way back down. Screen wise, I don’t get a desktop as such, just an application offering to start a browser for me, no other apps available. By this stage I’m a little frustrated, no VOIP and now no IM meant that getting the message through that I needed to was going to be difficult. I tried a third option and went for Microsoft’s browser based WebMessenger.

Big Mistake.

Not only did this fail to load, but it actually crashed the IE4 based browser causing the whole kiosk to lock up. Well not quite the whole thing, the timer was still counting down, but it was game over for me and I had no option other than to just watch my money literally tick away.

Where am I going with all this I hear you screaming? What I want to know is why the hell is it so hard to make a useable but secure internet kiosk?!!!? This technology isn’t exactly bleeding edge. Not trying to reignite the OS war or sound like a fanboy, but the first thing I notice is that all these systems are based on Windows, easily the least secure of all the major OS’s. Vendors are forced to lock the machines down, crippling it for the end-user, in an attempt to create some small amount of security when a comparable linux box would allow for greater functionality without nearly as many exploits. By the way, when I say that things are locked down, I don’t just mean that we’re forced to used IE and can’t open an Explorer window, I mean that little, useful things, such as JAVASCRIPT (!!) have been disabled. I’m not sure if anyone’s tried recently but its actually impossible to browse these days without javascript, not just ugly, impossible. Then of course you get things like today when the whole crappy box just packs up and takes you money.

Any people wonder why I hate Windows.