> average people just don't care much about anything, especially quality.
That's incredibly arrogant, and more than a little naive. The problem is that you're only looking at the small part of the problem which you understand better than the average person. Think about it instead from the perspective of the ice cream shop owner: they're not making any money from your using the network.
You might look at the a Facebook captive portal and think it's a poor choice but your solution isn't optimized for the business needs: cheap, reliable, doesn't require much staff time to support or special skills.
This particular problem is really a tech industry market failure, as there's never been a serious attempt to build a federated authentication system because the general trend has been trying to force a closed system on the world with the goal of levying a tax later. The most successful attempt was OpenID which was fundamentally mis-designed – inexplicably using URLs instead of email addresses – and quickly derailed by the gratuitous complexity crowd. There's a chance we might see things change with Persona but … I'm going to go out on a limb and guess that this won't happen quickly and, even if it does, it's going to be hard to find many developers willing to turn down a Facebook-scale salary to work on a turn-key level captive portal system priced at what an ice-cream shop can afford to pay.
I upvoted you because your point is reasonable and rational, but let me explain what I meant by my comment.
I do not believe that the ice cream shop owner is doing anything wrong - he's optimizing his business to be maximally cost-effective to him. My complaint is about the current "reality", the system overall. We keep focusing on the average user, or on the most common denominator, cutting corners and making everything as cheaply as possible. This is not wrong. I understand the reasons why things are like that, but it doesn't change the fact that it makes me sad.
When you look at movies (or video games), you don't see typos, or subpar, broken, dumb tech. Because the worlds are animated by designers, everything is perfect and beautiful. Real life is not made by graphic designers, but I still wish there was a little more beauty in it. A bit less typos, a bit more caring about quality, long-term consequences and general look&feel. They say that perfect is the enemy of good. We live in a world of good enough. I just wish, on an emotional level, things were a bit closer to the "perfect" side.
(disclaimer: I grew up on Star Trek: TNG and later)
(disclaimer2: this comment is written after a few beers, so please forgive the lousy style)
They certainly are making money if I come and eat ice cream knowing they have free WiFi that I can use, and leave (without buying ice cream) if the WiFi doesn't work for me.
If enough people care about the problem and don't buy ice cream as a result, they will likely change their policy.
I don't think this will ever happen, most will buy ice cream and just leave or sign in with their Facebook profile, which is a win-win for the ice cream shop.
Likely this will just cause enterprising people to look for holes in the registration process, like tunneling traffic over port 53 (old), or any number of other methods, especially when you are talking about a unified login system that forces you to do something with FB.
> They certainly are making money if I come and eat ice cream knowing they have free WiFi that I can use, and leave (without buying ice cream) if the WiFi doesn't work for me.
The key thing is recognizing that the WiFi is closer to advertising rather than the product – the same situation might arise if they don't have enough chairs, the bathroom is out of order, etc. Just as you don't build out 2,000 seats just in case everyone wants to camp out, you don't want to invest more in the WiFi than the incremental percentage of sales lost.
That's incredibly arrogant, and more than a little naive. The problem is that you're only looking at the small part of the problem which you understand better than the average person. Think about it instead from the perspective of the ice cream shop owner: they're not making any money from your using the network.
You might look at the a Facebook captive portal and think it's a poor choice but your solution isn't optimized for the business needs: cheap, reliable, doesn't require much staff time to support or special skills.
This particular problem is really a tech industry market failure, as there's never been a serious attempt to build a federated authentication system because the general trend has been trying to force a closed system on the world with the goal of levying a tax later. The most successful attempt was OpenID which was fundamentally mis-designed – inexplicably using URLs instead of email addresses – and quickly derailed by the gratuitous complexity crowd. There's a chance we might see things change with Persona but … I'm going to go out on a limb and guess that this won't happen quickly and, even if it does, it's going to be hard to find many developers willing to turn down a Facebook-scale salary to work on a turn-key level captive portal system priced at what an ice-cream shop can afford to pay.