How did everybody's wifi broke? I would have imagined that the only thing that would have happened was that, for wifis that required a login portal, you would have to launch your browser manually and let the portal hijack any pagerequest.
How did they manage to ensure that this didn't work if there wasn't such a portal or if you did it manually?
It's not safari that does it but the "OS" itself, and by that I mean the wireless networking tool. I would imagine that there's some code that runs upon successful connection to an AP and checks to see if you're in a captive portal or not.
The resulting UI looks like a plain window with no UI elements except a close button and a browser frame so you can auth with the captive portal system, and goes away once connectivity is "restored".
How did they manage to ensure that this didn't work if there wasn't such a portal or if you did it manually?