Are you sure your browser doesn't do that? There's usually some code that checks for 'captive portals' - i.e. wifi providers that want you to login before giving you a real internet connection.
However, if that check fails, you'll only get a _notification_ "probably captive portal, you may want to login at yada yada" - instead of "Apple is down, no connectivity for you, nyah nyah".
What I mean is that my browser (Safari) doesn't dial home (Apple) to decide whether or not it can try serving me content (HackerNews). NB That doesn't mean it never connects to Apple without my knowledge (or elsewhere), but rather that it's not a point of failure.
Edit: I'm making a distinction between what my browser does vs the OS and wifi. In any case, your home TV doesn't really have to deal with captive portals.
How did everybody's wifi broke? I would have imagined that the only thing that would have happened was that, for wifis that required a login portal, you would have to launch your browser manually and let the portal hijack any pagerequest.
How did they manage to ensure that this didn't work if there wasn't such a portal or if you did it manually?
It's not safari that does it but the "OS" itself, and by that I mean the wireless networking tool. I would imagine that there's some code that runs upon successful connection to an AP and checks to see if you're in a captive portal or not.
The resulting UI looks like a plain window with no UI elements except a close button and a browser frame so you can auth with the captive portal system, and goes away once connectivity is "restored".
Something like that, most likely -- OS X also detects when a network captures and redirects requests until you log in/agree to terms/whatever, and pops a special window for you to do that in as soon as it connects to such a network.
At least with devices running iOS, if you let the charge
drop to zero, and it loses its cached network settings,
and then when you try to reconnect to your home wifi router,
it will look for a file called
library/test/success.html at www.apple.com
which contains one line: Success.
If that file is missing, you will not be allowed to connect
to your own home LAN, because Apple thinks you are behind a
"captive portal". I redirect *.apple.com to stop iAd, ntp
and other Apple crap even when I'm connected to the internet,
so unlike the OP, this is a problem even when www.apple.com
is not down for maintenance.
One solution is to redirect www.apple.com to your own httpd
serving a local copy of /library/test/success.html.
In short, you are wrong. Redirect apple.com comains to your
own httpd and read your logs.
There is lots of dialing home coming from iOS and indeed some
of it will affect your ability to read content.
