http.nsrecord.net
A deliberately plain-HTTP page. Its only job is to be interceptable — so a captive portal will show you its sign-in screen.
You're reading this page, so it wasn't intercepted: no captive portal is in the way on this network — or you've already signed in.
Why this exists
Captive portals (hotel, airport, café Wi-Fi) work by intercepting your
web requests and redirecting them to a login page. But they can only do
that over plain HTTP. If you open an
https:// site while behind a portal, the portal can't
forge a valid TLS certificate, so your browser shows a security warning
and the login page never appears — leaving you stuck with "Wi-Fi
connected, no internet."
This page is served over http:// on purpose. Navigating to
it gives the portal a request it's allowed to hijack, which pops the
sign-in screen. It sends no-cache headers so every visit is a fresh hit
the portal can catch.
How to use it
- Connect to the Wi-Fi network.
-
If no login page appears, open
http://http.nsrecord.netin your browser — type it with thehttp://prefix so it isn't auto-upgraded to HTTPS. - The portal should redirect you to its sign-in page. Complete it, then reload this page — it'll load unchanged once you're online.
The URLs your OS already probes
Operating systems check for portals by fetching a known HTTP URL and watching for a redirect. These are the built-in ones — this page is a manual alternative when the automatic prompt doesn't fire:
| OS | Probe URL |
|---|---|
| Apple | http://captive.apple.com/hotspot-detect.html |
| Android | http://connectivitycheck.gstatic.com/generate_204 |
| Windows | http://www.msftconnecttest.com/connecttest.txt |