Writing a script to bypass college login page

Question

My college has a stupid login page where you need to load a whole bunch of garbage that many don't need (Norton Anti-Virus, Antispyware software, etc.). We have to get them to run to get on the Internet on campus. Although, if you are running Linux or at least installing your user agent on linux, the requirements are gone. We could easily use Firefox with the useragent switch to get around this, but it would be nice to create a script that automates this.

How is this possible?

I suppose this can be written in python and can capture a web page using curl defining a user agent? How can I send data to servers?

thank