[afarrell]

> you don't even have to open a web browser.

It would be nice if that worked consistently, but having just spent 2 weeks in airports and ho[s]tels in the UK & Ireland, it doesn't yet.

[sjwright]

On the rare instances where it has failed me, I have diagnosed the problem to be the router allowing (or faking, not sure) a success response from http://captive.apple.com/hotspot-detect.html

If anyone has coded a captive portal to behave differently when it sees captive.apple.com they should be ashamed. All they're doing is making life difficult for everyone unnecessarily.