I just use connectivitycheck.gstatic.com/generate_204. The URL is a bit long, but I have it bookmarked.
www.gstatic.com/generate_204 should work fine; that's what I use regularly.
NeverSSL
31–40 of 212 posts
Re: NeverSSL
#32Earlier quoted context omitted.
If I regularly used that as a known-good site that should be up with no SSL, I'd trust that an apple-maintained site (backed by akamai) would be up before "example.com". I'm sure there are plenty of others, but someone might remember that URL over another so I thought it would be helpful.
example.com is maintained by IANA. It's an official example address for documentation purposes. So on one hand, it will survive even if Apple disappears, on the other, they're likely not expecting any significant traffic.
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Re: NeverSSL
#33Earlier quoted context omitted.
If I regularly used that as a known-good site that should be up with no SSL, I'd trust that an apple-maintained site (backed by akamai) would be up before "example.com". I'm sure there are plenty of others, but someone might remember that URL over another so I thought it would be helpful.
To be fair, example.com is on an anycasted CDN too and is owned by IANA.
Didn't realize that about example.com. TIL!
Re: NeverSSL
#34This is handy. I was at an airport and was helping numerous people with android devices get through the wifi portals, and dealing with the same frustrating failure of the captive-portal redirect. Android is supposed to detect that there's a redirect and give you a notification that takes you to the login page, but it's very inconsistent.
I usually use Xkcd for that purpose, one of the few lightweight non-ssl sites I can think of offhand.
Only problem with neverssl is that it's a big jargon-laden for laymen, I mean the name.
Re: NeverSSL
#35http://http.rip is another site with this purpose. Pretty easy to remember too.
Re: NeverSSL
#36Not sure about Apple, but isn't this automatically handled by Android these days? Every time it connects to a network it pings http://google.com/generate_204 and if the response code isn't 204 then it should prompt you to open the browser to the redirected URL.
I don't know about newer versions, but I know on Android 5 it's generally a roll of the dice.
Re: NeverSSL
#37Ah something for the day xkcd[1] makes https mandatory. 1. http://xkcd.com
Yep. I used to hit Reddit, but they went to SSL by default. Since then, I've had to route people to xkcd who didn't know how to get around this issue.
So that's three of us. Funny how so many of us come to the same conclusion of using xkcd.
Re: NeverSSL
#38I really wish there was a standard way of handling captive wifi portals, macOS and GNOME try to detect these portals and show them but sometimes it is unreliable. It'd be really nice if there was a reserved DNS entry (like captive.portal or something) that operating systems could try to resolve and if it points to anything other than an expected value (loopback address, maybe?) it will bring up a window to sign into…
There is; both Router Advertisements and DHCP include options for captive portals[1]. In the case of DHCP for example, the DHCP server can send the URI of the portal, which the OS can display to the user. The mechanism in [1] is what OS X uses, I believe. [1]: https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc7710
This is a proposed spec, no one has implemented this. I was in the BoF for this session a few years ago.
Re: NeverSSL
#39Earlier quoted context omitted.
To be fair, example.com is on an anycasted CDN too and is owned by IANA.
Didn't realize that about example.com. TIL!
It's reserved for the purpose of documentation/illustrations (especially RFCs themselves) without fear of changes/invalid domains/directing mass traffic. It's also useful for establishing an idiom for those RFC examples.
Re: NeverSSL
#40[deleted]