Possible alternative to installing Boingo for jailbreakers

[ac251404]

I came across this during some googling yesterday. For anyone with a jailbroken phone and SSH access, you can edit the /etc/hosts file and the line:

0.0.0.0 http://www.apple.com

** For some reason the forum keeps adding "http://" to the front of the web address. Do not put the http:// part in your hosts file. just the www. hope thats clear

The way the auto-login works is that it tries to connect to apple.com when you join a wireless network, if it is redirected it opens the log-in page. This makes the phone believe it was not redirected and so doesnt launch the login and BlueSocket Auth worked like a charm. One caveat is that you will not be able to access apple.com from your iPhone, but that's no biggy for me. Just thought someone else might be interested in this because I never got it to work 100% of the time even with Boingo installed and run once. It was still very flaky. With this I have now connected twice with 0 problems, the way I was hoping this app would work.

Maybe this will somehow allow the author to find some solution to the current issue as well.

[Melloware]

Dude this is great info. There has to be some way from the Apple SDK that I can set this in BlueSocket Authenticator. Clearly the Boingo app can do it and it pisses me off that it is undocumented and Boingo is unwilling to share their trick.

Let me do some digging but this info is VERY helpful!

[Melloware]

Ahh according to this post Apple needs to add BlueSocket Authenticator to the list of apps that don't autologin.

http://forum.devicescape.com/index.php?topic=1117.0

I have submitted an Apple engineering request to get Bluesocket Authenticator assigned to the list of HotSpot apps that disable this functionality.

[Melloware]

Update from Apple:

I'm responding to your question about disabling Wi-Fi autologin (aka Captive Network Support, or CNS) on iPhone OS 3.0 and later. As you're probably aware, there is no good way to disable CNS on current versions of iPhone OS. iPhone OS disables CNS when certain well-known hotspot applications are installed, but this list of applications is hard-wired into the OS itself.

There are both long-term and short-term considerations here:

o short term -- In the short term iPhone OS engineering has agreed to add developers like yourself to the CNS exception list. You can request this by filing a bug.

Make sure you include the name of your product and its bundle identifier.

Please send me the bug number so that I can associate it with this incident.

Any such change is dependent on there being a release vehicle for the change. Apple has not publicly announced any iPhone releases beyond the currently available iPhone OS 3.1, so I can't offer any predictions as to how long it will take for your change to make it into a consumer release.

o long term -- In the long term (that is, post iPhone OS 3.x) we hope to offer a better-architected solution to this problem. However, right now I have nothing concrete that I can share with you on that front. I've made a note of your incident and plan to notify you when we start seeding our long-term solution.

[ac251404]

well that's something anyway. i figured apple wouldn't be thrilled with you blocking apple.com via the hosts file, but thought maybe there would be a way to add known hotspot URLs to it and possibly bypass the apple.com check. Any word on if they will add your app to the list and when we might see it? thanks for the great app by the way, i was slightly disappointed at first but with this change it works exactly as needed.

[Melloware]

well that's something anyway. i figured apple wouldn't be thrilled with you blocking apple.com via the hosts file, but thought maybe there would be a way to add known hotspot URLs to it and possibly bypass the apple.com check. Any word on if they will add your app to the list and when we might see it? thanks for the great app by the way, i was slightly disappointed at first but with this change it works exactly as needed.

Still no response to the Apple Radar bug i filed. Hopefully they will notify me when it is fixed and which OS patch it is going in and I will post here.