So I’ve got an extra channel on my openwrt router/AP. Thinking it would be funny to serve up a public SSID named “Communism Will Win”
The bit would be that any http/s request would simply resolve to the communist manifesto or some other sort of agitprop. Can anyone help me understand what would be needed to pull this off?
Yeah, the more i think about it the more i realize the Internet is designed to prevent this sort if thing
I think the captive portal solution others have mentioned is the proper one.
And there is now an actual captive portal system that isn’t hacky: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Captive_portal#Captive_Portal_API already supported by iOS https://developer.apple.com/news/?id=q78sq5rv and presumably Android too.
And you can get an IP-address X509 certificate from LetsEncrypt https://letsencrypt.org/2025/07/01/issuing-our-first-ip-address-certificate
And if your router supports Enhanced Open, it can be a little more secure than a completely unencrypted connection to the wifi network itself.
Like segfault11 mentioned, if you could host a server locally instead of just going to/redirecting to https://marxists.org/ it would be even better (no traffic to the internet, works when the internet is down).
And you could disable routing any packets from the connected client over the internet, so people couldn’t use your open network for internet and get your IP banned or something.
Of course doing this would be a really involved project. But it would be super cool because it could be completely offline (other than the fact that the X509 certificate is only for 6 days) and useful for more than just silly stuff.
It could even be IPv6 only since it wouldn’t need to connect to the internet.