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Comment by greggman | Hacker News Reader

I'm actually curious how anyone not a geek gets on Wifi at many coffee shops etc. Many captive portals don't seem to do anything and chrome just says "can't connect" or "cert bad". I used to go to test.com, now I go to foo.com. But I'm geek. What do all the non-geeks do?

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Most operating systems have started detecting captive portals and presenting a notification. All of the modern consumer ones (OS X, Windows, Android, iOS) appear to have this detection. (I don't use it so not sure how well it works, though.)

I used to stay a lot at a hotel that would "helpfully" exempt a good number of domains from the captive browser, including whatever macs and androids use to detect connectivity...

There should really be a standard for dealing with this, like a flag on DHCP saying "O HAI you need to login here", and providing a REST endpoint that will tell the OS the status of the connection at any given time.

As if such a standard would help for these WiFi providers that explicitly take steps to avoid captive portal detection?

Surely it's not in their interest to avoid captive portal detection, anyway? After all, it helps them advertise their product!

Bugs will happen, but it's a very simply operation, they simply load an HTTP URL that has an expected response (Google's is just a 204 No Content) and check if it matches.

Chromebook does as well. Works great.

1. Complain that the internet isn't working. 2. Talk to friendly geek who explains going to non Secure site forces pop-up 3. Forget that this work around applied in all cafe and not just the one were problem solved. Goto 1.

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