14 DAY TRIAL // The Denver International Airport has set its Wi-Fi service to block out sites that have potentially racy imagery. The decision was taken because the management considers that it's better to deal with infrequent complaints about access, than handle angry parents whose children might be exposed to pornographic content, according to airport spokesman Chuck Cannon.
"Welcome back to the cold war, ladies and gentlemen, please buckle your seatbelts," the announcement should sound like when landing in Denver. Censoring is something usually associated with totalitarian regimes, and critics of the management board mostly refer to those in Sudan and Kuwait, known to be very suppressive. Truth be told, I wouldn't be shy of nominating Iran to the list, after the recent announcement that it will block all Internet access over the period of the general elections coming next week.
Among other sites blocked, socialite Perez Hilton's celebrity gossip site is at the head of the list, as is the Vanity Fair magazine's web site, or hipster-geek favorite boingboing.net. It's really ludicrous to stop travelers from accessing the Sports Illustrated swimsuit photos, when the printed edition is laying on the stands, alongside Hustler and Penthouse, but that must be only the voice of reason talking, nothing they should take into consideration.
Boingboing.net editor Xeni Jardin says that: "This gets to the heart of what the Internet is all about, and whose responsibility it is. [?] It seems particularly unfortunate that something as symbolic as the city's airport, a gateway to culture, commerce and the flow of ideas, would be blocked in such a fundamental way."
Surprisingly, only two complaints have been received so far, despite the fact that more than 4,000 Wi-Fi connections are recorded daily at the airport, with numbers showing that the filtering software blocks less than 1 percent of the 1.7 million web pages requests each day, according to Cannon.