Yeah, I wish he'd been clearer about that. I'll take a stab at deciphering it though: You've just connected your laptop's wifi to a hotspot (i.e. associated wi

Yeah, I wish he'd been clearer about that. I'll take a stab at deciphering it though: You've just connected your laptop's wifi to a hotspot (i.e. associated with the access point) but haven't yet logged in/paid. Connection attempts will now either re-route to the hotspot operator's login page or just fail, depending on how the hotspot is set up. Now, suppose, for whatever reason, gmail is still open in your browser from a previous session or whatever. It will keep trying to connect to the server via https, which fails as there's no route to it, and (according to the article) fall back to http. (which will also fail, but can be intercepted) I don't see how this will work unless you've still got the gmail client-side scripts executing from your browser's cache. Simply navigating to https://gmail.com/ https://gmail.com/ will fail, and the retry/redirect won't ever happen. Disclaimer: I don't know the inner workings of gmail; I've never looked into how gmail works at all. Edit: spelling