The access to Wi-Fi is open to all coffee-drinkers who purchase a $5 Starbucks Card $5 and join the Starbucks Card Rewards program. The company has further sweetened its offer by adding complimentary syrup and milk for certain drinks, free refills of hot and cold coffee, and a free "tall" beverage to its current offer.

However, the terms of service imposed by AT&T (Starbucks’ WI-Fi provider) do feature some strange rules:

"You agree that all connections to the Internet via ATTIS’s connectivity shall be for the limited purposes of accessing electronic mail, operating a basic web browser such as Netscape Navigator or Microsoft Internet Explorer, or downloading files via the ‘ftp’ protocol typically implemented in web browser programs."

In other words, you can only use the free Wi-Fi for the doing the same thing you could do on the web ten years ago. You can’t stream videos, can’t use skype or even simple text messenger service, not to mention that you can’t upload a file to an email, which beats even the very essence of ridiculous.

And speaking of “ten years ago”, that’s when the Netscape Navigator browser was still alive. It’s been dead for some time now.