Things you can’t do in Denver on the web
Side note: I signed in to the Denver airport's free wifi (which I'm delighted is free); tried Googling to find out which of the two official-looking free wifi networks is the right one, found an article indicating that Denver's wifi is filtered.
The article says that Boingboing is blocked, but I can get to it fine, so I thought things might've changed in the past few months and the network was no longer filtered. But no; when I try to view Mary Anne's journal, I get a page saying:
Notification
Request Blocked by URL Filter Database
Your request to URL "http://www.mamohanraj.com/journal/" has been blocked by the URL Filter Database. The URL is listed under categories (Sexual Materials), which are not allowed by your administrator at this time. The following reputation level was assigned to it: Neutral.
If you feel this action is inaccurate or inappropriate, please visit TrustedSource.org and submit a request to have the site's categorization updated.
I've submitted a request to have her journal recategorized as a blog, but who knows whether that'll have any effect.
I ended up using ssh to connect to my Pair shell account, and using lynx on the command line to view M's latest blog entries. I have circumvented the filter and read about stuff I wasn't supposed to be able to read! Like Charlie Stross, and a writing grant! Good thing the Denver airport is protecting impressionable youngsters from such explicit material.
. . . I was particularly amused by the bit of the abovelinked article where an airport rep is worried about "children walk[ing] by a screen showing pornography"--it makes me want to display some smut from my hard drive on my screen, just to demonstrate that blocking porn websites doesn't actually prevent travelers from accidentally seeing smut on other people's computer screens.
