5 ms·

I moved the non-profit's website I maintain over to HTTPs. My own personal site has both. Though frankly that site is static. Oddly I find it useful to have

I moved the non-profit's website I maintain over to HTTPs. My own personal site has both. Though frankly that site is static. Oddly I find it useful to have that http site when trying to use some hotel wifi where you need to connect through a splash page. The https don't redirect.. I'm actually surprised this is an issue at this point.

shakna 8y ago
Most Captive Portals MITM the connection, rather than set up a secure connection for their customers. Which is terrible. But, the IANA have ensured that their example domains (example.com, etc) will continue to resolve correctly for the forseeable future.
unqueued 8y ago
Captive portals are a messy hack, and haven't really changed much in the last 15 years.
- peterwwillis 8y ago
  Apparently neither have browsers. I get the same support requests all the time. "How do I know if my internet's broken???" Proceed to walk someone through 50 technical steps, when a button on a browser that the user could push would tell me everything I needed to know in one shot to fix their problem.
  - AstralStorm 8y ago
    Yes, because a browser can diagnose all connection issues. /s Come on, even the Microsoft wizard (with much higher permissions) gets it wrong more often than correct.
goblin89 8y ago
> I find it useful to have that http site when trying to use some hotel wifi where you need to connect through a splash page I’m in that situation frequently as well. While desktop Firefox deals with captive Wi-Fi portals, on mobile trying to open a personal site of mine over HTTP and letting the request get redirected seems to be the only way I can manage to unlock access to Wi-Fi in some airports. Even though that site gets little to no traffic except for myself or occasional crawler, the situation bothers me. The reason HTTPS breaks poorly implemented captive portals is directly related to why we’d want HTTPS in the first place. Unreliable or absent HTTPS means a user visiting your site is susceptible to request & response manipulation and injections of undesirable content, from trackers to malware, by an ISP or another intermediary.
- lostmsu 8y ago
  You can just use pages, that big corps are using for that. E.g. I use msftconnect.com/redirect

shakna 8y ago

Most Captive Portals MITM the connection, rather than set up a secure connection for their customers. Which is terrible. But, the IANA have ensured that their example domains (example.com, etc) will continue to resolve correctly for the forseeable future.

unqueued 8y ago

Captive portals are a messy hack, and haven't really changed much in the last 15 years.

peterwwillis 8y ago
Apparently neither have browsers. I get the same support requests all the time. "How do I know if my internet's broken???" Proceed to walk someone through 50 technical steps, when a button on a browser that the user could push would tell me everything I needed to know in one shot to fix their problem.
- AstralStorm 8y ago
  Yes, because a browser can diagnose all connection issues. /s Come on, even the Microsoft wizard (with much higher permissions) gets it wrong more often than correct.

goblin89 8y ago

> I find it useful to have that http site when trying to use some hotel wifi where you need to connect through a splash page I’m in that situation frequently as well. While desktop Firefox deals with captive Wi-Fi portals, on mobile trying to open a personal site of mine over HTTP and letting the request get redirected seems to be the only way I can manage to unlock access to Wi-Fi in some airports. Even though that site gets little to no traffic except for myself or occasional crawler, the situation bothers me. The reason HTTPS breaks poorly implemented captive portals is directly related to why we’d want HTTPS in the first place. Unreliable or absent HTTPS means a user visiting your site is susceptible to request & response manipulation and injections of undesirable content, from trackers to malware, by an ISP or another intermediary.

lostmsu 8y ago
You can just use pages, that big corps are using for that. E.g. I use msftconnect.com/redirect