I would find something like this to be helpful. As a frequent traveler often you don’t have any sort of cell service when you land. Being able to quickly hop on WiFi is often a godsend for quick communication and navigation to final destinations in foreign countries.

As an example, in Copenhagen airport there is free WiFi but you have to go to wifi.cphairport.com to access it and if you don’t see one of the signs around the airport you won’t figure it out. Some handy guide that has URL, ID of the WiFi and password is super helpful in situations like this.

> I would find something like this to be helpful

I would find a scheme where I am simply allowed to help myself to any goods or services I wish to consume, for free and without permission, helpful, too.

Sometimes the resason that you don't get redirected to the wifi network's captive portal is that your browser is trying to access a page using HTTPS. Trying to connect to a HTTP-only site (like http://neverssl.com/) can solve this.

Yeah. And this is a complete shitshow as everyone on earth pushes https as hard as possible. How do people who haven't heard of neverssl manage to connect to these captive portals? Sooner or later, the drive toward secure http is just going to kill off anything with a captive portal for most internet users.

Just use example.com

Typing 1.1.1.1 or any other IP address usually helps, it automatically redirects to the main login page. If you type a name, your DNS query fails.

Funny you picked that particular IP -- out of all four billion, 1.1.1.1 is the only one (that I know of) that uses HTTPS!

There are a lot of city and town public records. But once they are online and searchable and cross reference able with databases and APIs they become a new kind of public. There’s a lot of data showing this. So maybe it’s public, but not everything that is public needs to be in machine readable format on the internet.

I didn’t explain that well, but maybe you get the point. There’s a balance to be struck.