I had a few hours to kill at the airport a few years ago before my flight was ready for boarding, so I turned on my laptop and connected to the airport’s wireless network. Like most pay services, they way you sign up is to fire up a web browser and go to any web site. Regardless of what site you go to, you are redirected to the “Here’s how to buy a day’s worth of wireless networking” site.<\/p>\n
So far so good. <\/p>\n
At the sign-up page, they asked for the usual information and also had a reminder that signing up for the service implies that you have read and accepted their terms of service. There was a link to their terms of service. <\/p>\n
Except that when you clicked the link, you were redirected to the sign-up page since you haven’t signed up yet. <\/p>\n
In order to sign up, you have to accept the terms of service that you can’t see until you sign up. <\/p>\n
I didn’t sign up. <\/p>\n
Apparently I’m not the only person<\/a> who’s run into this Catch-22<\/a>. <\/p>\n Pre-emptive snarky comment<\/b>: “Microsoft’s license agreement for a bloated, inefficient and unreliable operating system is evil, anti-competitive, and offensive.” When the legal department asks me to write a product license agreement, I’ll keep your feedback in mind. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I had a few hours to kill at the airport a few years ago before my flight was ready for boarding, so I turned on my laptop and connected to the airport’s wireless network. Like most pay services, they way you sign up is to fire up a web browser and go to any web […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1069,"featured_media":111744,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[26],"class_list":["post-20883","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-oldnewthing","tag-other"],"acf":[],"blog_post_summary":" I had a few hours to kill at the airport a few years ago before my flight was ready for boarding, so I turned on my laptop and connected to the airport’s wireless network. Like most pay services, they way you sign up is to fire up a web browser and go to any web […]<\/p>\n","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20883","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1069"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=20883"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20883\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/111744"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=20883"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=20883"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=20883"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}