[Raistlin]

Interesting that they continually refer to a special piece of 'kit', not sure what they mean there. All you need to perpetrate the attack they're using here is a wireless enabled laptop and some software.

They use a lot of fairly emotive terminology as well, they're talking about 'breaking into' peoples' mail accounts. They're not really doing anything of the sort - they're gaining unauthorised access to them, but they don't appear to be breaking into anything. It looks like they're simply capturing usernames and passwords as they pass across the network and then using them to log in.

The issue that they're exposing/exploiting here is that by their very nature these 'public' access points connect you to a network that contains people and systems that you can't know/trust. Anything you send across those networks is potentially available to all the other users, unless you take steps to prevent that from happening.

I won't go into how I think they accomplished the business of blocking him from signing out of his gMail account - that bit of the segment in particular suggests to me that they're doing something additional beyond just gathering passwords off the wire (or 'air' in this case). If they are doing what I think they're doing then that's the only truly clever part of what they're doing.....