How can I prevent a popup browser window from appearing when I'm on wifi networks?

Question

In particular, plenty of cafes/institutions/whatever popup a window to let you login/pay for internet. This window pops up as soon as I'm connected to the network. Inevitably, if I just go to a website in my browser itself, the same screen will come up, and for some reason in the past I've had trouble just using the popped-up login. In particular, when I login, even when I get a success message, I don't seem to be logged in.

I'm not interested in debugging the login problem, but I would like to prevent the popup windows from appearing. How can I? I'm on a Mac running Lion.

Answer 1

Hopefully I've understood this right - if by popups, you mean the Portal login pages that appear on public WiFi hotspots that require a registered account in order to physically access the Internet, then no, you can't. They are there to control who gains access to the Internet using individually registered accounts rather then having a WEP/WPA protected network (this would be grief for larger WiFi networks, ensuring everyone has the correct password, a distribution and re-distribution nightmare if it's changed).

Those portals themselves also tend to work off 'trusted' MAC addresses so that once you have logged in, you aren't asked again and again to re authenticate.