Gratis WiFi at Motels etc with nonstandard (& Mac incompatible) joining routines

The BBQ Pit
21

I’m going to take a wild guess here and say that it is probably a security setting on the Mac side at fault.

On the hotel side, what’s happening is that if it hasn’t seen your WiFi device’s MAC address before (or outside of the timeout), it will replace whatever page you go to with the sign-in page. As you’ve found, once you sign in on any browser, or any OS, you’ll have continued access from the same device (since it’s detecting your hardware, not OS configuration).

But replacing one page with another is a security concern. It could be a means of harvesting passwords, etc. (a type of phishing). Plus, modern browsers tend to automatically use HTTPS instead of HTTP when available. A substitute page probably won’t be HTTPS at all, and even if it was, it would have the wrong certificate.

Windows is probably either ignoring that security hole, or more likely, has some bypass to allow this particular situation to work, and the Mac isn’t doing that.

Some of these settings can be adjusted. For instance, you can try deleting some domain from the Chrome domain security policy page:
chrome://net-internals/#hsts

Then try visiting the HTTP version of that page. Probably doesn’t matter what you try. You may also just visit some domain you haven’t been to before so it doesn’t have any existing settings.

If that doesn’t do it… well, I dunno, but you may just futz around with the MacOS internet security settings. Maybe there’s a global option you can disable. I’m not familiar with MacOS and how it handles this stuff.

In short, as long as hotels use this type of sign-on redirection, there’s likely nothing they can do. It sure as heck isn’t the fault of the hotel staff. And it’s obviously not homegrown; every hotel or airport I’ve been at clearly uses one of the same few varieties of software, with the only difference being the look of the landing page. It’s the Mac that should be handling it better.

22

Nope. Reserved using chain’s own website, not any third party booking agent. Every other reservation on the trip was either precisely correct to the penny, or off about a buck, which is likely local charges (the base rates were the same), including the other rooms with the same chain. Only the one decided to try and screw me out of an extra $40 (base room rate: it was more with taxes etc). I have the printout that shows the inflated base rate. And “no one” could help. I had to go of course, I couldn’t wait hours for some “manager” to magically appear. I called during the day, but the “manager” always was busy. Funny, that. Finally contacted corporate. Took about a week of sterner and more angry emails, but they finally refunded the $40.

And wifi on my same Mac worked in every other hotel room, except that specific chain. They also had stinky hallways and one had an ice machine that didn’t work. As I noted, I used the wifi from McDonalds 200 yards across the parking lot, which was fine.

23

A bit off-topic (or maybe not): About a year ago I upgraded our cell phone plan to unlimited data. Since that time, I have twice had issues with hotel/motel wi-fi. But I easily put my phone in hotspot mode and use it as my wi-fi for my laptop.

Granted, both times I had great reception (thanks, Verizon), which certainly isn’t always the case.

24

That’s definitely not right.

25

I have never once had good WiFi at motels and the desk clerks have never once seemed to give a shit about it. I stayed at a so-called 4 star resort a couple of weeks ago and was never able to get their WiFi to work. I also have unlimited data, so can use my cell as a hotspot, but I shouldn’t have to do that. (Of course, the housekeepers couldn’t seem to understand that an empty toilet paper holder meant that we needed toilet paper…I guess my expectations are too high.)

26

Maybe it was four stars out of a hundred. Did you check the company that did the rating?

27

Unless you specifically turned it off, you are in fact running a firewall. Not sure what backups have to do with anything.

28

I’ve never had bad WiFi at a hotel or motel. Sometimes they haven’t had it, or only in the lobby (why???) , but I’ve never run across bad WiFI.

I get guests complaining to me that they can’t connect here in the lobby. Dunno why not. My kindle fire connects just fine.

Why the front desk staff didn’t care I have no idea, but what did management say when you complained to them?

29

From what I read with a quick look on Google, the macOS Firewall is turned off by default. This is not the case for Windows.

30

Backups is relevant because I was replying to kitap, defender of motels everywhere, who wrote

My reply was basically “No, don’t tell me I"m being ultra-cautious about security and that’s what’s keeping me from being able to use your WiFi”. Nope to the firewall, and I don’t worry about joining strange networks, I got a bootable backup so I think I’m bulletproof. Try another theory, this one won’t fly".

31

A Mac on default settings has no problem 95% of the time. So no, I have to say that in the 5% of cases it’s shoddy IT work to design a connection protocol that is not compatible with a Mac on default settings.

32

“We’ll talk to them about it.”

What did they say about the room not having toilet paper? “Just call the front desk and they will have some brought to your room right away.” When the part about “right away” actually being a couple of hours is brought up “We’ll talk to them about it”.

Yeah, very helpful indeed.

33

I stand corrected. Carry on.

34

Management is the issue, then. When they don’t care neither does the staff. I’d specifically blast management in the review. I mean sure, the front desk agents could just be horrible employees anyhow (the stories I could tell), but management should be falling over themselves to apologize.

35

Perhaps I should have said “cause”. I didn’t mean to imply that the Mac was somehow in the wrong here, just that it is likely to have an aggressive security setting that is causing the behavior difference. There are not many other things it can be if the same page works on Windows, and if it is an OS-wide problem.

As a general point, you can’t conclude where the fault truly lies simply from the percentages. Perhaps the Mac is missing some corner case that these pages hit. Perhaps the pages are misconfigured. In fact it could be that the Mac is in the wrong by letting any of these pages through, since they’re all lying about what they are.

36

It reminds me of the late 90s when many web sites made use of code that did not render (or did not render coherently) unless the browser was Internet Explorer, which notoriously ignored the standards and did its own thing.

I suspect there are some nonstandard things that browsers do under Windows or else some path strings that only reconcile properly from a Windows perspective, or some such thing, such that the way these “agree to terms” pages are designed to pop up are Windows-specific.

The MacOS environment’s most rigid security features have to do with the installation of code; there is no requirement within the (many, varied) browsers that connections follow certain rules that Windows browsers ignore, and there’s no OS-level constraint about what browsers in general must or cannot do.

37

I think this is a little different in that there is no real standard. Or rather, that the standard is that internet connections should never lie about what they are presenting (falsifying DNS records, substituting their own pages for others, etc.), but all portal pages violate this by their very nature, and they do so in slightly incompatible ways. When the OS tries to detect whether a page is a legitimate portal or a phishing attack, it has to make a guess and this guess may not be the same across OSes or versions of the same OS.

Put another way, this isn’t the Embrace-Extend-Extinguish behavior that Microsoft used to be famous for. Seems more like an ordinary collision of different behaviors that doesn’t always work out the way you want.

It looks like MacOS used to have more serious issues with these captive portals:

Maybe some of the suggestions there are still relevant.

38

I’m not completely sure about this, but I think in many of these solutions the portal page is just the standard webpage the access point displays when you navigate there directly. So one workaround might be to just go navigate to http://192.168.178.1 (in most cases), and the portal page pops up. (I know this worked on the train recently.) If it doesn’t, then maybe the IP is different; you can find that out via your network settings (don’t know how on a Mac, on a Windows device it’s just ‘ipconfig’ and then find the line that says something like ‘default gateway’). No idea if that works universally, but it’s a quick try.

39

All of these suggestions and work-arounds are no doubt helpful (and showcase waaaay more technical know-how than I possess), but they don’t really address the heart of the issue: hotels and motels advertising “free wi-fi” on their booking sites, but then making it very difficult, if not impossible, to actually connect to the wi-fi.

I know that 99 times out of 100 it’s not the fault of the staff at the hotel / motel, but it’s still frustrating to the traveler who may have booked that stay based, in part, on the belief they’d be able to access the internet / streaming services. By the time they actually get settled in, it’s usually too late or too much trouble to move to another hotel / motel.

Feels like a very “bait and switch” type of maneuver on the part of the hotel / motel. It’s like advertising a swimming pool in the promotional material, but when you arrive the pool only has two feet of water in it. Sure, TECHNICALLY there’s a pool, but in terms of usability, it’s terrible.

40

Years ago, at one place I’m familiar with, the guest WiFi wouldn’t redirect from a https homepage, but only from an http page. So we found an http page that would work (though that particular page won’t work today, as it’s changed).