Provided by Aircell, the service will cost laptop users $9.95 for flights of less than three hours and $12.95 for longer flights. Travelers using Internet-ready handsets will pay $7.95 regardless of the length of their flight. And make no mistake, the data show they will pay. Apparently, $10 is a pittance for distraction when you’re trapped in a center seat on a packed flight with “Paul Blart: Mall Cop” as your only in-flight entertainment.

“[People are] working, they’re doing their e-mail, they’re going into their corporate networks, they’re going to their Facebook page, they’re Twittering, they’re doing YouTube and other video sites, but they’re in fact doing more of it,” Aircell CEO Jack Blumenstein told the Dallas Morning News. “The data shows that people use almost twice as much of data during the course of a session and stay on almost twice as long as when they’re at a hotel or a hotspot on the ground. People clearly are engaged by it when they’re flying.”

[Image credit: Flickr/Bekathwia]

And he knows of what he speaks. Earlier in the day, Graham hijacked a Gmail session in front of a packed audience at the Black Hat security convention in Las Vegas. Using a pair of programs called Hamster and Ferret, which sniff the data transferred between a wireless router and a computer, Graham grabbed an unencrypted cookie used in a recent Black Hat Wi-Fi session and used it to hijack an attendee’s Gmail account. “I see 10 people’s cookies on my screen, I just need to click on the guy’s IP address and I’m in,” Graham said. “Once you get someone’s Google account, you’d be surprised at the stuff you’d find. … If I sniff your Gmail connection and get all your cookies and attach them to my Gmail, I now become you, I clone you. Web 2.0 is now fundamentally broken.”