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Comment by superuser2 | Hacker News Reader

On the contrary, dealing with captive portals is quite annoying, especially since they just generate browser warnings with HTTPS. You have to go out of your way to open a plain-HTTP website so that it can be intercepted properly, just so you can click "I accept" again. Additionally, these things have short memories - if you're at a coffee shop you frequent, you might be clicking through the captive portal for the 150th time.

Apple deals with this somewhat by opening a Webkit view of apple.com (unsecured) and displaying it the user if it's not in fact apple.com. But an even further level of automation would be great.

Let's be honest, no one reads these things anyway. If you're one of the handful of people in the world who would decide not to use a WiFi network because you didn't like its TOS, then you're 1) probably not running Windows anyway and 2) could turn this feature off.

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Yeah but, you're basically agreeing to assume risk. You still get a choice - you choose to ignore the TOS and click through.

Time and again courts have upheld click-through TOS and EULAs. Ignorance is rarely an excuse. So if something clicks through a captive portal for you, the defense of "I didn't know..." isn't going to hold much water.

The only defense might be that Microsoft accepted the terms and they should accept responsibility for any violations on their behalf. But good luck getting them to voluntarily indemnify you.

There's a pretty big difference between "it was too long and I didn't read it so I just clicked Agree at the bottom" and "I had no idea the thing was even there because Microsoft's software hid it from me."

If there was no reasonable way for you to even know the terms were there at all, I don't think any court is going to consider them to be binding. That's why these places show them to you when you try to use their network, instead of just hiding them in the freezer.

Accessing a computer network that is secured by requiring authentication by bypassing authentication via technical means might be a computer crime.

It's quite possible that using the Microsoft software to bypass a captive portal without agreeing to the terms will land you in jail for a felony.

Is Microsoft going to indemnify you against being the trial case of that legal theory?

>It's quite possible that using the Microsoft software to bypass a captive portal without agreeing to the terms will land you in jail for a felony.

How do you define "quite possible"? I'd estimate that this is exceedingly unlikely to happen.

> Time and again courts have upheld click-through TOS and EULAs

In the US perhaps. Most other places have consumer protection laws that require a much higher standard for contracts to be legally binding.

There is a long standing technical solution, though it's not widely implemented, WPA-enterprise. With WPA-enterprise I have my own personal key and I am automatically logged in. In the UK, "The Cloud" service offers this, which is many coffee shops and similar public places.

There is overhead. WPA2 Enterprise does not have a signup mechanism; you'd neee to run that on a separate SSID. Now you have to get people to join the appropriate SSID for what they want. Also unless you have a corporate managed device with the company CA installed, you have to click through scary certificate warnings.

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