Has anyone ever heard of anyone making or would anyone be interested in collaborating on making a library for connecting through captive portals on public wifi hotspots? With the increasing interest in IoT and such, I've started to become more aware of how many wifi connection points exist in any metro area but also have become aware that most private ones are now secured and most open ones use captive portals of some sort.
I have also noticed that some captive portals are more common than others. For example, in my area many people's homes are connected with xfinity through comcast and many of the devices people rent from comcast will attach a bandwidth limited open portal on them that anyone with a valid comcast id can use from any wifi device. Of course, the catch is that it won't allow you to do anything on the internet until you submit a form with the user-id and password that implies an acceptance of the usage terms.
Similarly, many chain stores, restaurants and hotels have similar open hotspots with similar single-page captive portals that are rather universal regardless which particular franchise you happen to be visiting or near.
Examining many of these forms finds them to not be very complicated, and as such it might be possible to program code that upon detecting one of these hotspots, could connect to it and authenticate using credentials stored somewhere in the device or the device code.
Of course, to make it useful, it would have to include at least a reasonable share of common hotspots as well as code to detect them and navigate their portals. This would similarly require collecting information on the steps involved. It may even be possible to create an abstract engine that could use scripting or variable parameters to talk to many of them from a simple configuration string that could be added to or modified to handle updates in the forms involved or to add new common types entirely.
I think it would be at least worth looking into but my c++ programming skills are still somewhat new-ish and I would only be able to collect information on chains in my own area. If anyone else might be interested in helping out on such a thing or is aware of someone already doing it, please let me know.
SW