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Comment by rkaregaran | Hacker News Reader

I experienced this a couple of months ago while trying to spoof a hotel room's captive portal. I was attempting to get a Chromecast to work, which isn't designed to operate with wifi connections behind captive portals. Very frustrating and no feedback from the OS that the commands I was running weren't actually doing what it said it was doing. This was on a latest gen MacBook Pro 15" running latest version at the time of MacOS.

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We were in an extended stay for about six months while we were waiting for our house to be built and had the same issue with our Apple TV and our WiFi printer.

I purchased an older version of this...

https://www.amazon.com/TP-Link-Wireless-Portable-Travel-Rout...

It lets you connect to either a standard Ethernet port like any router and it lets you connect to two WiFi networks and use one for the internet connection and the other to create an internal network.

You basically connect any device with a browser to the internal network to get through the captive portal and all of your other devices will then work that are connected to it.

I picked up one of those in China about four years ago. At the time I was finding hotels would offer free ethernet internet connections but either no Wi-Fi or expensive Wi-Fi. This was cheap, easy, and fits easily in a bag. Recommend.

I've done the exact same thing in order to get an AppleTV (that doesn't have a web browser) onto a hotel's wifi.

1/2 OT: The Apple Watch does not work with captive portals either. And since 4G does not work abroad, I can use my Apple Watch without my iPhone nearby only in my home country.

> And since 4G does not work abroad

What do you mean? I can roam 4g just fine.

The mobile radio in the Apple Watch, at least according to Apple, does not work when you are outside of the region where the Watch was purchased. 4G works fine on the iPhone handset but the Watch won't independently connect to a local mobile network sans the iPhone.

(For example: I bought my Watch in the U.S. While on vacation to Ireland, my iPhone connected to Vodafone IE without a problem. But my Watch showed "no cellular service" if it was out of range of my iPhone and a wifi network.)

Is the watch's 4G free (no user plan required)? If so, that's probably why; they don't want to eat the unpredictable international costs. Free cellular on e-readers and other devices tends to work like this.

Not free, but seriously reduced. On AT&T it's $10/month.

It's not provided by Apple, but rather your mobile carrier. They may or may not provide it for free. In the UK, it can cost as much as your current plan does just to enable your watch to share your plan.

Where can you roam, and what country/region are you from?

I asked my Norwegian carrier about this, and they said yes, but linked the page where Apple says roaming is not supported...

I find this to be a quite interesting choice, since Apple Watch ships with WebKit and enough chrome to make it a kinda-usable browser.

I had the same problem after an update _ I found that on my 2017 mpb system they’ve either reverted the change or allow you to change the last few values of your address.

It won't help your chromecast, but the Roku streaming sticks work fine on Hotel wifi. You connect the roku to it, then connect your phone to the Roku's direct wifi and go through the portal on your phone. It's worked in every hotel I've been in perfectly.

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