One job I did involved a large provider of public WiFi in the UK. As a result of this, I'm convinced that WiFi is pretty much like tech from the Warhammer 40k universe and simply will not work if the correct benedictions to the Machine God are not uttered in the right order.
I am reminded of old school parallel SCSI: three terminations are needed: one at each end of the bus, plus that of a black rooster at midnight with-in a circle of black candles.
Once you learn the habbit of navigating to neverssl.com as soon as you connect to a public WiFi network to force the captive portal/auth you'll usually not have any issues with it unless the WiFi network itself sucks.
I usually use notpurple.com for this (I used to use purple.com until the guy finally sold the domain to the mattress company), but I suppose there's no guarantee the notpurple person won't some day add ssl.
Haha. Great to see more websites using SSL encryption but it does make it harder to connect to public WiFi if the OS's captive portal detection doesn't trigger properly.
