A New Future for Icanhazip

I was using icanhazip to check if my Tor circuit was complete, and probably made 50-100 requests per week. The site was getting slow, and I thought it is just a random site that the author didn't really care too much.

I dropped my jaw when I read it was getting 30B req/day.

Thank you for running this site for so long, and thank you for keeping it up for free, and deciding to not monetize it.

I got a lot of mileage out of neverssl.com before somebody fixed the process to log into various "guest wifi" setups...ones that would intercept/redirect any http request.

I'm somewhat curious what fixed things, as I've not had to use neverssl.com for some time.

From what I can tell, most operating systems will now ping their own version of neverssl as you connect to a network to find out whether they need to show you a login prompt. It looks like they basically just check to see if they get the content they expect from a domain they own, and if not they serve you that page so you can see whatever it is your network injected. (You can usually see the OS domain in the address bar.)

Annoyingly, I've seen some networks that try to "fix" problems by letting that go through even when not logged in. I'm pretty sure it had been fixed last time I flew, but Qantas in-flight WiFi used to be one example I'd seen. You'd connect, and then nothing would happen and no SSL connections would work. You'd either need a non-HTTPs site to get the redirect, or go to 'wifi.qantas.com' to accept the terms and conditions before you could browse. I was trying to work out why my iPhone and Mac weren't popping up that page as soon as I connected, and bizarrely captive.apple.com came up with 'Success' instead of redirecting, which means they must have misguidedly put in an explicit rule to let that through, completely breaking the feature!