I just use example.com

Interesting. What the prescription here - to simply use http://neverssl.com in order to see if you need to re-authenticate to the captive portal? Is that correct?

That's my interpretation of what http://neverssl.com says. (Did you click-through to read it?)

And http://info.cern.ch/hypertext/WWW/TheProject.html still retains it non-encryptedness

http://http.rip is what I use