This is a weird one. The MGM Grand offers high-speed wireless and wired Internet connections. Being somewhat security-conscious — and being in town for Black Hat and Defcon — I figured it was safest to use the wired connection so that people couldn’t sniff everything I was doing.
Luckily (apparently) for me, the wired connection didn’t work. I follow the Ethernet cable around to underneath the desk, where it’s connected to a black box with an antenna sticking out of it, and a power plug that’s not plugged in. Sure enough, the MGM Grand’s wired Internet connection just goes to a D-Link bridge onto their wireless network, so you’d only get a false sense of security if you used it. You’re really using an unencrypted wireless network when you’re plugged into that Ethernet cable.
Just something to be careful of.
Interestingly, their network also blocked access to my home computer for the first day I was here. I couldn’t SSH into my home machine, and couldn’t even ping it. But it was up, I was able to SSH to a friend’s Linux box and connect to my home machine from there. So I had to wind up tunneling SSH over SSH so I could use my home machine as an encrypted proxy connection to protect everything. I had to SSH to my friend’s machine, and then tunnel an SSH connection over that connection to get to my home machine. Then I could tunnel my web browsing over that connection.
And then the next day I was magically able to connect directly to my home computer. Weird stuff. Maybe they were blocking my connection to try to get me out of my room and back to the casino so I could give them more money.