Nearly every hotel nowadays offers free wi-fi, but a surprising number of them use unsecured wireless networks. Most commonly, the unsecured networks use a captive portal to access the wi-fi network, where a splash screen pops-up in a web browser window before you are granted further access to the network. Often there’s some marginal login requirement, like entering your room number, or email address. Captive portals are different from entering a wi-fi password to join the wireless network, which is necessary when joining a secured network.

But once connected,…