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Comment by steventhedev | Hacker News Reader

How does this play out with wifi networks that resolve dns requests for say, "google.com" with their "click to accept the terms of your municipal free wifi" page?

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I use a mac and the same issue is there; all I do is override the DNS on the wireless connection to use 8.8.8.8. In systemd-land, I'd expect that to be in /etc/systemd/wireless.network:

    [Match]
    Name=wlan0

    [Network]
    DNS=8.8.8.8

(other settings omitted). However, DNS hijacking isn't necessary for a captive portal - they can reroute port 80 traffic and respond with 511 per https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc6585#section-6, (quite common now as the interaction is better for non-browser phone apps) or advertise the login page via DHCP as in https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc7710.

not necessary, and yet very common. And setting your DNS server to 8.8.8.8 doesn't help when they reply with their internal gateway for all DNS requests.

FYI - android fires a request to http://clients3.google.com/generate_204, I'm fairly confident windows/ios/mac/ubuntu all do something similar.

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