At one of the places I tend to stay while on vacation, I always look forward to the initial wifi setup (with dread). As you point out the issue is ssl connections. All my typical urls are https: now a days - and they produce a phony certificate that they want me to accept to log into their redirected page. What a nice man-in-the-middle security attack. I had fun talking with their customer support, who either didn't have a clue, or were well trained to make the customer think there was no issue. Finally I asked for a url that gave me access to their login page. They went off for a while and came back with an incredibly long http url. What idiots! I had already decided the best solution was to start off by browsing to any short http url - e.g. foo.com. They redirect it to their login page and everyone's happy. (for some reason unknown to me shorter urls like a.com weren't as reliable, but typing foo.com is sufficently short and easy. It should get any of the wifi login servers redirect login page. steve Russell Senior wrote: >>>>>> "Chuck" == Chuck Hast <wch...@gmail.com> writes: > Chuck> Folks, I am not sure if it is me or just that the mechanisim used > Chuck> to redirect a browser on WiFi when being Queried for a login or > Chuck> some sort of acceptance of usage. > > The typical captive portal redirect you are talking about can't deal > with an SSL connection. That's because your browser will not be able to > authenticate the redirect page as the one it asked for. Many sites > default to HTTPS now: google, facebook, twitter, etc. > > The solution to this is to make sure to go to a non-SSL page. The > National Weather Service or calagator are favorites of mine, but it > doesn't matter, as long as it's not HTTPS URL. That should usually do > the trick. > >
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