Start.mycroft.ai support for gated guest wifi

On a mark II, I am attempting to connect to “guest” style wifi, i.e., no password, but after you have associated, you are kind of “sandboxed” until you click on some kind of “Accept” button on a web page that you are routed to automatically (usually attached to a liability and good-behavior policy). Or at least that is the typical user experience if you are using a conventional web-browser-enabled mobile device or laptop.
I have noticed that start.mycroft.ai leaves the “Connect” button disabled if no value is entered into the password box, and even if that worked, I’m not sure if/how to perform the “accept” click for Mycroft so that it can get out of the sandbox and out to the internet.
Is this a supported scenario? And if not, would it be reasonable to request it?

Hey, definitely reasonable to request it.

It sounds like two related but distinct issues:

  1. Unable to connect to a network that has no password
  2. Unable to accept conditions of a captive portal allowing broader network access

Is that right?

Number 1 sounds like a relatively simple issue

The second could be a challenge as you say. However a benefit of the Mark II is that we have a browser available. So if we can detect that we are being redirected by a captive portal, then we can theoretically display that page and let you perform whatever steps are necessary on the touch screen.

Yes, Gez, your analysis seems correct to me. That is good to know about the browser, very cool, and it seems like a good approach to solve. What is the appropriate next step? Should I file an issue in GitHub?

It looks like the conventional term for this is “captive portal”.
There is even an RFC for it (or at least a variation/extension for it): rfc7710

Yeah that would be great - as it’s Mark II specific, adding it here would be best:

Thanks again for your help and guidance, Gez. I’ve filed a request through the link you provided:
Device setup via local start.mycroft.ai for internet connection should support captive-portal wifi · Issue #81 · MycroftAI/hardware-mycroft-mark-II · GitHub

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went through the github.mycroftai listing of skill and couldn’t detect the browser you referred to…any links/help??

I don’t think anything in the Marketplace uses it yet.

For a straight forward use case, check out:

Currently you can only open pages from the predefined list included in the Skill, but the limitation there is only on the Skill side. It uses a fully featured browser.