I've always used http://www.msftconnecttest.com/ which I guess is Microsoft's.
NeverSSL
141–150 of 206 posts
Re: NeverSSL
#142http://neverssl.com/changes > I also want to keep neverssl.com ad free, but as it's now costing me about $2,000 a year to host it, […] Wait, how could hosting a static website cost $2k/year?!
I have been using http://perdu.com/ for 20 years for that purpose. Simple, probably a 386 computer plugged in somewhere. Never changed. It is just a joke, the domain means "lost" in French and says "Lost on the internet? Don't panic! We are here to help you: * Hasn't changed in 20 years, has no javascript, no tracker. Exist since before websites had ads everywhere, and know it would be laughable to put ads on it.
Beware, sometimes the browser will make you think it fetched the page, but it's cached..
Don't panic, there is perdu.org (no cache directives)
Re: NeverSSL
#143If you’re using a mainstream OS that automatically detects standard captive portals, the main reason why you’ll need this is for “tiered” captive portals like the ones offered on some airplanes. Those tiered captive portals have unique requirements that conflict with OS behavior: A) By default, they want to offer some limited Internet access, such as accessing a sponsored site (often a shopping site like Amazon) or s…
https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc7710 tries to solve this at network level..
Unless I’m missing something, RFC7710 doesn’t offer anything to address this “tiered” captive portal scenario; it just provides a less vendor-dependent protocol for the captive portal checks that are already being performed by the OS.
Re: NeverSSL
#144well, https://neverssl.com
Re: NeverSSL
#145http://neverssl.com/changes > I also want to keep neverssl.com ad free, but as it's now costing me about $2,000 a year to host it, […] Wait, how could hosting a static website cost $2k/year?!
AWS costs add up over time. $166 per month is not bad, especially if it's a high volume traffic site.
I don’t understand. What’s the pricing costs? Bandwidth? Instance hours? S3? A database?!?
This website can literally be hosted on a free tier at almost any major cloud provider.
Re: NeverSSL
#146I've been using http://ftp.debian.org and http://archive.ubuntu.com for the same purpose. APT mirrors provide GPG signatures for packages, so they don't usually use HTTPS.
There's no guarantee that they won't move over to HTTPS in the future though, so it's nice to know that NeverSSL exists.
Re: NeverSSL
#147[deleted]
Re: NeverSSL
#148If you’re using a mainstream OS that automatically detects standard captive portals, the main reason why you’ll need this is for “tiered” captive portals like the ones offered on some airplanes. Those tiered captive portals have unique requirements that conflict with OS behavior: A) By default, they want to offer some limited Internet access, such as accessing a sponsored site (often a shopping site like Amazon) or s…
Thanks for this comment, because it explained something I've had passing curiosity about but never bothered to fully investigate or understand. I've been using NeverSSL for ages, but only in one specific scenario, which is in-flight WiFi. I travel a lot so it manages to stay in my top sites, but every other public WiFi network works fine without that workaround.
Considering how brittle this solution is, I wonder what airlines are going to do next?
Re: NeverSSL
#149Earlier quoted context omitted.
Can't do any useful caching for a purposefully cache-busting website
it's not cache-busting, it's captive-portal busting. there's no reason it couldn't be cached on some service that charges less for bandwidth than AWS does.
Although yours is a valid reason, but I’ve had a colleague of mine who isn’t savvy enough to use this when they need to connect, but they told me they stopped using it because it would show them the page even though they haven’t connected yet because their browser cached the page somehow. I’ve adjusted by using a private/guest browsing mode to open this page but the cache busting cuts it easier for people who have no knowledge of caching.
Re: NeverSSL
#150I used http://www.dia.mil for years, and expected that if anyone could be relied on to computer as wrong as possible it would be the US government; but that now 301s to the HTTPS version.
That’s a surprising expectation given that they funded and created the Internet.