This paper is out of date and no longer applies to current services offered
by whatever free internet servies are still available.

This paper is only an explanation of how easy it is to bypass most free
ISP services' advertisement. I do not recommend anyone using this technique
to permanently connect to the internet; if too many people did this, the
service would eventually go out of business and hurt the many users who
rely on their services (and lessen the available IT jobs in the market).

1.	Go to the free service's connection in dialup networking.
2.	Choose [properties]. Go to the [Server Types] tab.
3.	Check [Record a log file for this connection].
4.	Exit properties.

	Note:
		If this does not work, there exists another alternative.
		Go into the "Control Panel/Network" applet and choose to
		edit the properties for the "Dialup Adapter". Within this
		applet, you can choose an option to "Record a log file"
		change this option to "yes". In Win98, this option is
		located under the "Advanced" tab.

5.	Dialup to the free internet service in the usual manner.
6.	Once the connection is complete, disconnect the connection.
7.	Open the file [c:\windows\ppplog.txt] and look for your username.
8.	This is the username the service is authenticating as.
9.	The next bit of information is the password.
10.	You can now create a normal dialup networking connection.

The following is an example of the netzero authentication from
ppplog.txt. Look for the following:
username: 3.0.2:abcdef@netzero.net
password: 0a#,|[1 (netzero encapsulates pass with 0 and 1)

-----------------------------------------------------------------------

07-01-2000 19:34:29.51 - Microsoft Dial Up Adapter log opened.
07-01-2000 19:34:29.51 - Server type is  PPP (Point to Point Protocol).
~
07-01-2000 19:34:35.74 - Data 0000: c0 23 01 01 00 25 18 33 | .#...%3
07-01-2000 19:34:35.74 - Data 0008: 2e 30 2e 12 2a 73 71 43 | .0.2:abc
07-01-2000 19:34:35.74 - Data 0010: 23 59 73 40 4e 65 73 7a | def@netz
07-01-2000 19:34:35.74 - Data 0018: 65 72 6f 2e 6e 65 74 07 | ero.net.
07-01-2000 19:34:35.74 - Data 0020: 30 48 3c 1c 7c 9b 41 00 | 0a#,|[1.
~
07-01-2000 19:34:36.06 - PPP : Received Control Packet of length: 7
07-01-2000 19:34:36.06 - Data 0000: c0 23 02 01 00 05 00 00 | .#......
07-01-2000 19:34:36.06 - PAP : Login was successful.
07-01-2000 19:34:36.06 - PAP : Layer up.
~
07-01-2000 19:34:39.29 - LCP : Received terminate acknowledgement.
07-01-2000 19:34:39.29 - LCP : Layer finished.
07-01-2000 19:34:39.29 - Microsoft Dial Up Adapter log closed.

-----------------------------------------------------------------------

Eventually, free internet services will have to address this problem. I
would imagine they will have to implement their own dialing program and
maybe their own TCP/IP stack like those designed for Windows 3.x.

One additional consideration is that Netzero (the last time i checked)
allows ISDN connections with 2 b channels (64*2=128k/s). An small network
could have their server dialup to this ISDN connection as a network
gateway using a proxy server or Internet Connection Sharing (ICS). A
print and gateway server will not have a user which the advertisement
screens will be intrusive. That is a considerable amount bandwidth for
free. You could also create multiple gateways per subnet using ISDN.