The other side of the moon

So after WebPerfDays today, a bunch of us ended up at a Pizza place in Mountain View. Naturally the first thing we all did was search for wifi in the area and try to get on to a network from our mobile devices.

Now Mountain View has Google Wifi, and it appears as if they now require you to sign in with your Gmail account, and that's where the problem comes in... for me at least. I have two factor auth turned on for my google accounts, which means that after I type in my username and password, I get to a second screen to enter my second authentication token. This token comes from an app on my iOS device... the same device I was trying to log in with.

I switched to the app to get the token number, but as soon as I did that, iOS decided that I didn't actually want to sign in to the wireless network, and disassociated itself from the Access Point (AP).

Once I'd got the number, I switched back to the settings app and it initiated login again, which means I had to enter my username and password again, and by the time I'd reached the token screen, the token had expired.

This is what the token screen looks like:

It was rather annoying.

It then hit me that I could copy the token to the clipboard, and then paste it into the token text field, which should shave a few seconds off and maybe let me through.

That worked, but it was still annoying.

We started talking about how this interface could be improved. There are a few reasons why this is a problem, and I think they're mostly Apple's fault.

When you connect to a wireless network, iOS attempts to connect to www.apple.com. If it gets redirected somewhere else, it assumes that it's being asked to authenticate, and displays whatever page it gets redirected to in a browser like window.

The problem is that if you do anything other than interact with the content in this window, iOS treats it exactly the same as hitting the "Cancel" button (top right of the screenshot), terminates the login and dissociates from the AP.

This means that you cannot switch to the Authenticator App (second app at the bottom of the screenshot) to get your token.

Can Apple fix this?

Yes, just don't cancel sign in unless I explicitly click cancel

Can Google fix this?

Maybe, if they could provide a link or something that would open the Authenticator app right from that page and let me pull the number out of it (I don't know enough about iOS to know if this is possible).

Do any Apple/Google engineers want to take this up?

If you're a frequent flier, or are flying first or business class out of Mumbai, then you'll get access to the Clipper Lounge. They provide free wifi, but it doesn't really work as advertised.

You first connect to the wifi network, and open your browser, which gets redirected to a login page. You click on Complimentary Internet access, and get to a form that asks for your personal details, and phone number, claiming that they will send you an access code via SMS.

Do NOT enter your real phone number here. For starters, no SMS gets sent. Secondly, you'll start getting SMS spam. Use any 10 digit phone number. Enter 91 for the country code.

Now, once you do this, you'll get an intermediate page that will immediately redirect to a second page that shows you your username and password. The password on that page is wrong. Instead, what you want to do is hit escape as soon as you get the intermediate page. It's blue, and it has the database insert statement that looks like this:

insert into users 
(u_username, u_password, u_user_type,u_fullname,u_initial_quota,
 u_current_quota,u_persistant_quota,u_interim_interval,
 u_idle_timeout,u_expiration_date,u_nbr_concurrent_sessions,
 u_max_concurrent_sessions, u_nbr_starts, u_nbr_stops,
 fk_group_id,fk_profile_id
) values (
 'cc3zo7s', '2497161', '2', 'Morons',
 '86400', '86400', '1', '15', '600',
 '2010-05-13 22:51:28','0','1',
 '0','0','2','2'
);

In the above string, cc3zo7s is the username and 2497161 is the password that you need to use.

Note, that if you enter a phone number that already exists in the database (eg: one of the tech support numbers on the login page), you'll get this instead:

Duplicate entry '1271179237' for key 'PRIMARY'

Just try a different phone number. Oh, and what's with the semi-colon at the end of the SQL statement?

Lastly, don't bother sending them feedback. It doesn't go anywhere. And I don't mean that it goes into some mailbox that no one reads. I mean it goes nowhere. This is the page you get when you try to send feedback:



The interesting text in there is:

Warning: mail() [function.mail]: Failed to connect to mailserver at
 "ezcommindia.com" port 25, verify your "SMTP" and "smtp_port" setting in
 php.ini or use ini_set() in C:\xampp\htdocs\ezcomm\ifeedback.php
 on line 225

Yup, real classy. I think we can just start from the end of that message and stop when we get to C:\. It explains a lot.

This login manager isn't just broken, it goes right through broken and comes out on the other end.