"Free Public WiFi" worm?

So over the last few months I've noticed a disturbing trend.  EVERY airport I'm in (which is nostly SEA, ORD, CLT) always seems to have a 'Free Public WiFi' ad-hoc wifi network up and running as shown below (I'm typing this blog post from the D concourse where I'm presently waiting for a delayed flight).

Given that I see this in EVERY airport I travel to no matter what time I'm in that airport - I sort of wondered whether this wasn't an example of organized crime trying to get me to associate so that they could maybe hope to sniff some un-secure POP / SMTP login creds so that they could then try to use those creds over at eBay or something. 

To my dismay I found this URL (https://blogs.chron.com/techblog/archives/2006/09/free_public_wif.html) which seems to imply it's a 'feature' of Windows XP (one I think we've since patched).

Last time I was in Chicago I connected up and I'm pretty sure I got a 192 address not a 169 address like that would imply . . . I'll try connecting up to this one here in Charlotte and see what I get . . . don't think I'll have time to download Wireshark to see what's going on before I board . . . and I don't even know if it'll work on 64bit Vista anyways . . .