Hotel WiFi does not work - captive portal not showing

Sometimes the captive portal does not show and you can not use the free internet. Here is the solution how to access the captive portal for every free, hotel or public WiFi.

Hotel WiFi does not work - captive portal not showing
Let's Encrypt Logo

Every time I am trying to use a hotel or public WiFi I have a problem using it.

Monkey trying to get the notbook working
Source: GIPHY

Then I start to analyze why the WiFi does not work until I remember:

You need to open the WiFi Login page/captive portal first!

Problem: The WiFi log-in page or captive portal does not show up automatically

Hotel and public WiFi routers often hijack the first DNS request you send and forward you to a captive portal. There you can log in or just acknowledge their terms of services, etc.

But this only works with websites that use HTTP. HTTPS does prevent DNS hijacking from routers. You will not get redirected to the captive portal.

Thanks to Let's Encrypt the era of HTTP websites is almost gone. Let's Encrypt alone is used by more than 270 million websites. This is a good thing, but now almost everything is using HTTPS. So how do we get access to the captive portal?

Solution - neverSSL

Just use http://neverssl.com

NeverSSL - Connecting ...

The only page which will never use HTTPS and therefore will always allow redirects to the WiFi captive portal where you blindly accepts the terms and conditions to sacrifice your child for some free WiFi ? ?

Bookmark this and thank me later.

Now you just need to remember nerverssl.com, but that is not a problem I can solve with a blog post ?


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