Re:NeverSSL – helping you get online
by tialaramex on Thursday August 01, 2019 @10:35AM
(#20584008)
There are better systems, for example RFC 7710 defines how DHCP and RA (the methods devices use to get themselves an address from a network) can tell a device about a captive portal, which is the thing that hijacks your access to the Internet and tries to show some sort of "login screen". There's a current IETF working group, capport, doing 7710bis and other work in this area.
But the existence of a better solution doesn't stop people doing something crummy that kinda-works for them. That's what you're seeing today, it's what you see in most places, most of the time. That's people.
Perhaps the folks running these networks lack the incentive to care about technical correctness? OTOH, one would think a better system would lead to a higher conversion rate (i.e. more people are actually able to pay you).
They seem to have an incentive mostly to say that they "have public wifi" but not take responsibility for delivering a working system.
Yeah, for "free wifi", the incentive is definitely to not connect you. You don't consume bandwidth, so the handful of people who do connect won't complain about shitty speeds.
For paid wifi, on the other hand, wouldn't they want to ensure you can connect? Most airlines charge for wifi. Yet I find myself typing "example.com" on almost every single flight.
There is incentive to connect you to the wifi, but no to the internet. Having you trapped behind a captive portal is perfect for this. You are connected to their wifi so they can more accurately track you through the store, but you are not using their internet bandwidth.
I'm kind of amazed no one has implemented a better system for this yet. Public WiFi is very common, and relying on intercepting HTTP requests to show users a login screen seems very hacky to me.
What if a device pinged the gateway IP on a certain port whenever it connected, and received a small payload with details on connectivity authorisation URL, etc. etc.? For backwards compatibility if that ping fails it could just assume the network is open. It would take years for all the public routers out there to be updated, but you kind of need to start somewhere.