I spend a non-trivial amount of time travelling in my work. One thing that is fairly irritating is the proliferation of all the disparate internet access authentication and authorization interfaces. You know the ones — sign in here, accept the terms and conditions. Make an account, log in, press OK and then your internet connection starts ‘working’. (For some value of working.)

These variously knock you off the net after a random amount of time, mess up VPN connections, VoIP and many other applications that you’d reasonable like to use. Don’t even get me started on SMTP proxies that cannot / will not support TLS.

I particularly like the user-interface experience that I had today.
I was using the net, more or less continuously for about an hour. Not unusual and no problems. Suddenly, one of my HTTP GET operations (web page loading) was intercepted and I was forced to sign in again to keep using the internet.

Upon successful sign-in, I received the error message you see at the top of the article.

For those of you that have trouble reading the capture it says:

There was a problem granting you Internet access.

• Our records indicate that you are already authorized for full internet access.

To say nothing of the Subversion checkout I was performing, which also failed since the transport was WebDAV.

Grr.