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Comment by mrbluecoat | Hacker News Reader

Do HN readers not know what a Captive Portal is? Confused why this is front page news..

They probably know what it is but are just not familiar with the term.

I find the OS' captive portal detection to sometimes be flaky, so I often just directly visit www.neverssl.com to reliably trigger the captive portal redirect.

also http://captive.apple.com and sometimes I'll do http://lobste.rs.

I used to use neverssl, but it's very different for .org and .com and I kept forgetting which was which.

This post reminded me to make a siri shortcut that just opens safari to http://captive.apple.com to trigger the captive portal.

The basic workflow at Gateway side is inspecting all HTTP port 80 traffic (with iptables or others), If the URL is about internet detection, reply a 301 redirect to the captive portal URL.

But the URL is too complex among different vendor:

https://captivebehavior.wballiance.com/

I don't know why, even I tracked the URLs, sometimes it still fails (OS refuse connecting to the URL?).

DHCP option 114 (RFC8908) can advertise the URL to client directly, but it is not widely supported:

https://developer.apple.com/news/?id=q78sq5rv

I just like reading random Wikipedia articles. You could farm HN karma off me by posting random ones each day.

Here's a favorite: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battleshort

Had to do that to my furnace with a paper clip one winter when a sensor went out and I couldn't replace it for a couple days

I bet RFC 8910 is not well known.

https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc8910

The world of software is absolutely enormous. Don't make assumptions about what the "everybody knows" subset is.

I've interacted with these as an end user dozens of times, but in 20 years I never heard the term "captive portal". I tend to use the Apple URL to trigger them, and I never understood why the word "captive" was in that URL. Now I know!

And I still don't really know how they work (I guess I should read this article...).

I think it was 5+ years after first having an ipod touch (i.e. connecting to wifi while out and about) before I encountered the term, and never heard it widely used outside of text on the internet. Doesn't feel like it was commonly used, a la, "Complete your connection to our wifi via the Captive Portal after doing XYZ!"

Was wondering the same, most (even non-tech) people come across captive portals all the time.

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