schmactive schmortals: singapore airlines edition

I bring good news and bad news.

The good news is that in the Air New Zealand departure lounge in Auckland, the wifi is open, and there’s no captive portal to kill time on.  It just works.  As well, you can buy things in the airport shops and they don’t ask to scan your boarding pass.  You can skip these little annoyances, and things are not just okay, but better.  So stop copying everyone else, and dare to be less annoying.


The bad news is that the wifi onboard a Singapore Airlines A380 uses a captive portal, even if you’re upstairs at the front.  And I’m back to trying to force the OS to launch the browser on the captive portal’s URL, as per [1].  Except now I’m armed with new knowledge: you can use the real domain “neverssl.com” to contrive a plain-text http request, so that this can be intercepted by the layer-busting hotspot / router, and redirected to their.. schmactive schmortal.  Ta-da!  Geeks rule the world, if by ruling, we mean: being extremely retarded in.  If the plane worked like this, it would have disintegrated on the taxiway, but somehow geektards can get away with it, for the time being.


[1] <https://wibblement.blogspot.com/2026/08/device-registration-for-wifi-on.html>

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