Hack - unable to load free Wifi login page

If you were in my position traveling all the time and had to connect to free Wifi in Airports, Hotels and Cafe's - there is one frustrating experience in all of those free Wifi.


Problem Statement


* You connect to the Free Wifi by choosing the Wifi name.
* You open the browser and you go to google.com or try to get to the free wifi login page. (most of the establishment will not allow you to browse anonymously)
* You get an error and cannot open the Free Wifi login page.

Solution


Most of the websites including Google has a cache/expiry specified in their HTML construct. This is called TTL - Time to Live.   This tells your phone or laptop browser to fetch a cached copy of the website for x days/time. 

However, few sites like News sites have a '0' expiry for their cache as they want visitors to always load fresh content. Here is the hack that may help you.

a) After you connect to the free Wifi on your wireless setting.
b) Open the browser, and go to a news website for example http://go.cnn.com/

This forces your local device to direct traffic to the site instead of pulling a cached copy.  This in turn always directs the proxy to login to the Wifi login page.

Hope this helps.

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