Censorship with your free Wi-Fi?
SANTA BARBARA, CALIF. -- Denver International is the biggest airport in the world to offer free Wi-Fi. But now a Denver newspaper reports that the connection is censored. The airport actually blocks blogs like BoingBoing.net, perezhilton.com and other "potentially racy sites."
Airport officials say they'd rather deal with complaints about censorship than complaints about people viewing objectionable content on their laptops.
The Seattle Times points out that Denver International Airport stores sell hard-core pornographic magazines, but that the Sports Illustrated swimsuit site online is blocked.
The Vanity Fair magazine web site is also reportedly blocked by the Denver censorship program.
The ISP Planet blog says the airport is using the same kind of censorship technology employed by the governments of Kuwait, Oman and Sudan. The filtering product in use, according to -- wait for it -- the "Talking Heads" singer David Byrne, is SmartFilter from Secure Computing.
If an airport provides free Wi-Fi, does that mean it's OK for them to censor your connection? Is it OK for airports to provide Wi-Fi -- free or not free -- and NOT censor it?
What's your opinion?
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