of the few airports I have not passed through in my career. Like many airports,
it offers free Wi-Fi for travelers, but it also decides which sites are
suitable for you to read.
Want to browse the sites for Vanity Fair,
Secret or Perez Hilton? Gonna have to wait until you land somewhere else or
leave the airport because DIA has deemed them “provocative,” and thus, double-plus ungood.
I’ve got a few adjectives to describe Hilton but “provocative” is not one of them.
It first came up when David Byrne, founder of the band
Talking Heads, found himself blocked from accessing Boing Boing, one of the
earliest blog and aggregator sites on the Web where he is a contributing blogger. boingboing.net editor Xeni
Jardin noted that DIA uses SmartFilter, the same kinds of software filters
employed by the less-than-democratic regimes of
and
An airport spokesman told the Denver Post that the service
went gratis last November and sees about 4,000 connections a day, with less
than one percent of 1.7 million Web page requests a day. Airport officials
added they rather deal with complaints about blocked sites than an angry parent
whose child accidentally saw porn.
So, where’s Free Press and the rest of the Comcast harassment
squad?