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Comment by snuxoll | Hacker News Reader

I really wish there was a standard way of handling captive wifi portals, macOS and GNOME try to detect these portals and show them but sometimes it is unreliable.

It'd be really nice if there was a reserved DNS entry (like captive.portal or something) that operating systems could try to resolve and if it points to anything other than an expected value (loopback address, maybe?) it will bring up a window to sign into the network instead of relying on these nasty hacks that leave users confused when they can't visit a site over HTTPS because they aren't authenticated / paid / whatever.

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There is; both Router Advertisements and DHCP include options for captive portals[1]. In the case of DHCP for example, the DHCP server can send the URI of the portal, which the OS can display to the user. The mechanism in [1] is what OS X uses, I believe.

[1]: https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc7710

This is a proposed spec, no one has implemented this. I was in the BoF for this session a few years ago.

I think OS X opens captive.apple.com

It does, and so does iOS when you connect to a WiFi network that has a portal.

It's so annoying that I even wrote a script so I could connect to Starbucks WiFi without having to use a browser. This was back when I was on Linux using a tiling window manager but I still use it on macOS because it's useful.

https://github.com/imwally/starbucksconnect

Hey, thanks mate. With the various meetups I go and corporate networks I'm using, it's always a pain to lose all my saved chrome tabs to portal redirects because I forgot to open Firefox to get through the portal first. I might be able to leverage this to help.

So far I have had quite a few issues with HSTS, not allowing me to access web sites, or authenticate with WiFi networks, to the point that on Android 4.3 I use the outdated system browser for authentication and only afterwards switch to Chrome.

I'm glad that there isn't a standard. Implementing a captive portal should be a painful experience that ultimately results in giving up and not using one.

I have a feeling that should it result in giving up, they will stop providing WiFi rather than stop using captive portal.

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