Captive Portal Assistant

So I installed Pantheon as a test to see if it was a better window manager than Unity (it wasn’t). I thought I un-installed it. I ended up going with Cinnamon on top of my existing Ubuntu 14.04 install.

But then, I kept getting.. issues.

This page would pop up on boot. But only once wifi connected. I was having problems with IPv6, I’d restart my wifi connection, and this page would open. I’d be using 3g, lose connection, re-establish it, and this page would open.

I trawled my system, and found where this functionality was injected on my system: /etc/NetworkManager/dispatcher.d/90captive_portal_test. It claims to “[a]ssists users in connective to Captive Portals such as those found on public access points in train stations, coffee shops, universities, etc.”

All I did was installed Pantheon. It depends on elementary-desktop, which, I assume, installed this agent. It did not remove itself when I uninstalled Pantheon.

It might be an ‘assistant’, but it behaves like a 90’s ad-ware “YOU DOWNLOADED ME, NOW BUY ME”. I understand that elementary-os asks for purchase. That’s fine, open source software needs to be funded somehow. But this is a little bit on the creepy side for me.

Below is a copy of the code I found in my /etc/ folder that I believe to be the culprit. I have attached it here for educational purposes.

/etc/NetworkManager/dispatcher.d $ cat 90captive_portal_test 

#!/bin/sh -e
# Script to dispatch NetworkManager events
#
# Runs captive-login helper on walled garden networks.
# See NetworkManager(8) for further documentation of the dispatcher events.

PATH=/usr/local/sbin:/usr/local/bin:/usr/sbin:/usr/bin:/sbin:/bin

if [ -x "/usr/bin/logger" ]; then
    logger="/usr/bin/logger -s -t CapNetAssist"
else
    logger=":"
fi

wait_for_process() {
    PNAME=$1
    while [ -z "$(/usr/bin/pgrep $PNAME)" ]; do
	sleep 3;
    done
}

#launch the browser, but on boot we need to wait that nm-applet starts
start_browser() {
    local user="$1"
    wait_for_process nm-applet
    $logger "Running browser as '$user' to login in captive portal"
    su "$user" -s /bin/sh -c "captive-login 2>/dev/null || sensible-browser start.elementaryos.org 2>/dev/null"
}

# Run the right scripts
case "$2" in
    up|vpn-up)
    $logger "DetectCaptivePortal script triggered"

    # assume the DISPLAY where to show the browser
    if [ -z $DISPLAY ];then
	export DISPLAY=':0'
    fi

    $logger "Display set"

    #get the usernames
    users=$(who | grep "$DISPLAY" | awk '{print $1}')

    for u in $users; do
	start_browser $u || :
    done
    ;;
    *)
    # In a down phase
    exit 0
    ;;
esac