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Airlines Plan To Filter, Censor In-Flight Internet Access
Posted by
Zonk
on Tue Dec 25, 2007 09:37 AM
from the seek-help-if-you-just-can't-make-it-four-hours-without-pr0n dept.
from the seek-help-if-you-just-can't-make-it-four-hours-without-pr0n dept.
BlueMerle notes that the much-vaunted arrival of internet access in the friendly skies may come at the cost of heavy content filtering by the Airlines. Ars Technica's commentary is prompted by an Associated Press article which does its best to make checking your email seem sinister. "Seat 17D is yapping endlessly on an Internet phone call. Seat 16F is flaming Seat 16D with expletive-laden chats. Seat 16E is too busy surfing porn sites to care. Seat 17C just wants to sleep. Welcome to the promise of the Internet at 33,000 feet -- and the questions of etiquette, openness and free speech that airlines and service providers will have to grapple with as they bring Internet access to the skies in the coming months."
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OMG censorship!!! (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:OMG censorship!!! (Score:5, Insightful)
I don't mind people checking their e-mail, but if airlines wish to enforce civility while I'm paying $150+ for a 1.5 hour flight to DC with a bunch of philistines...I say more power to them.
Re:OMG censorship!!! (Score:5, Interesting)
The flipside of course is that everyone is on for free and the plane is slashdotted by anonymised porn.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:OMG censorship!!! (Score:5, Insightful)
The problem with that is that it is not up to you to determine when I should have a teaching moment with my kid.
Do you invite your kids into the room when you and the wife are gettin it on? Do you surf porn with your 6 year old? Have you explained the finer details of tubgirl to her?
Re:OMG censorship!!! (Score:4, Insightful)
Every moment for children tends to be a learning moment, but parents can decide the time, pace and subject for teaching.
As they say, your right to swing your arm ends just before my nose. Equally, your right to watch stuff on a plane ends when it starts to offend or disturb those flying with you.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Well, they shouldn't be looking at my screen then!
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
It's so easy to preach when you have no clue.
I do have a three year old son (btw, I'm European, so no prude). He does ask a lot of questions and we do our best to answer them. But there are thing difficult to
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
I would, however, suggest reading "How to Lie with Statistics." If I sent out an anonymous survey to all readers of "Popular Mechanics" asking about which types of makeup they prefer to use,
Re:OMG censorship!!! (Score:5, Insightful)
Do you believe in Odin? Zeus? Ra? Queztalcoatl? The Great Spirit?
No?
Based on the fact that you're a self-righteous prick, I'm going to go out on a limb and guess that you're Christian. Mankind has dreamed up ten thousand different gods. You don't believe in 9,999 of them. I don't believe in the same 9,999 you don't believe in, plus I also don't believe in the God of Abraham. Evidently not believing in 9,999 gods doesn't make you stupid, but not believing in 10,000 gods makes me stupid.
I'd like to believe that there's some logic or reason behind this, but there's no logic behind religious delusions. Sad that so much time and energy is spent defending fairy tales.
Re:OMG censorship!!! (Score:4, Insightful)
As may be. But who, would watch hard core porn in public, a coffeeshop, or such, now? I'm sure it does happen, but this is something that most of us do in privacy, or perhaps with friends. Someone who openly watches hard core porn on a plane should be stopped by the hostesses, the same as if he started masturbating in his seat.
Anyone likely to use their laptop to watch porn could much more easily load it up with a few GB of videos before they leave the ground, rather than see -- buffering -- at inconvenient moments, let alone probably paying a small fortune for the privilege.
So I'm not saying that watching porn is appropriate on a plane, but trying to filter it out of the net is not going to stop it, and we all know the silly side effects of overbroad filters.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
It's a private airplane (Score:5, Interesting)
Common courtesy. (Score:5, Interesting)
Having said that, since when does someone need internet access to view porn? I have porn on my macbook pro right now, but when I flew out yesterday and pulled it out for a bit of in-flight entertainment, I watched Monty Python and the Holy Grail.
Basic common courtesy kept people from watching porn while they travelled without internet access; the same thing will keep them from watching porn with internet access. Those few asshats who can't restrain themselves, well, they're asshats regardless of internet access.
I've also spent a fair bit of time travelling by train, which already come with free wi-fi. I've yet to see anyone browsing hotbabesxxx.com during the trip.
Thank you, SSH tunnels... (Score:3, Insightful)
Seriously, using airline-provided internet access doesn't magically take away the standard rules for the use of any public-access short-term ISP, whether libraries or coffee shops or just someone's open WAP - Encrypt everything!
Of course, in the current political climate, that would probably have the gestapo waiting to "ask" me a few questions on landing, but I refuse to give up best-practices out of fear of boogey-men.
How does the net access make this different? (Score:5, Interesting)
Already someone could watch porn, movies or games with extreme violence, or other adult (and possibly offensive) material on their laptop. For that matter, someone could just bring a Playboy magazine on the plane to pass the time. With the possible exception of people trying to use VOIP (I wonder if the latency would be low and consistent enough), I really don't see how this brings up many etiquette questions that aren't already present on a plane. This just sounds like a lame excuse for filtering to me.
Oh forget about pr0n (Score:3, Insightful)
I wonder what would happen if I'd open this [aljazeera.net] on an American airliner? Would people care? Probably, they'd all go nuts!
SSL VPN's (Score:3, Interesting)
Filtering Porn (oblig) (Score:5, Funny)
Rather than filter the content... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Is this really that big of a deal? (Score:4, Funny)
A fat man
Another fat man
A surprisingly fat man
An old woman who needed oxygen and smelled like cheese
Two fat men
A little brat (boy) who kept kicking the seat in front of him and throwing things across the aisle at his mother (on the other side of me) who in turn kept screaming at him for the whole flight
An exhausted mom and her toddler who banged on his musical sesame street toy and screamed the whole flight.
I would have given anything for porn!
Re:Is this really that big of a deal? (Score:5, Funny)
Oh please, sometimes I even go without it for a whole 8 hours or more. Damn that filtering proxy at work
Right. On a plane.
I guess there's always the off chance that the fat guy on the right is really a beautiful woman in disguise. Or that the lady with the screaming baby behind me is really available and is carrying someone else's kid. Or maybe the fat, loud yakking couple in front of me aren't really married, and I could pick the woman up. If I didn't have any taste, that is. (And I'm not even talking about the "fat" part, as about what she's yakking loudly about.)
But ok, let's say that I pulled the proverbial jackpot, my guardian angel used the miracle quota for a small nation and a century, or the karma accountants in the Heavens decide to give me a sorta tax return for what my ancestors suffered during the black plague and a few wars. So I'm seated next to a woman who's gorgeous, smart, horny, available, etc, etc, etc.
On a plane.
Have you been on one of those lately? The seating for a start has been clearly designed for halflings, and anyone over 3 ft tall will have to fold in unnatural ways just to fit their legs in there. I've been occasionally wishing for a modified Folding@home client just to figure out how I'm supposed to fold in there. Doubly so if the guy in front decides to lean his seat back on top of you, and/or hasn't understood under which seat his bag should go.
Then we're both after the airport experience, which is designed to inconvenience you the most, so you'll know you're safe up there. And I don't mean just the coming one hour early and standing in the line for the security circus. That's just the ante. You know, the foreplay for the real shafting experience. Then you've had to put up with loud and chaotic crowds, had to find your terminal (presumably named so because by the time you're there, death doesn't look that bad an alternative) with clues that would make old adventure games look tame, had a jolly good wait because your flight is delayed, then got packed on the plane and waited another 40 minutes because some retard forgot to load the luggage too. (I swear to the elder gods, it actually happened.)
Right. Do you figure at this point either of you is in a jolly and relaxed mood, conducive to making friends and maybe a little flirt?
Well, if you are, I suggest you hurry up, because soon you might get your in-flight meal. Which isn't exactly candle-lit dinner material, to put it mildly. On the last flight I've been on, for example, they gave us some... chopped up weeds, with one thin slic of tomato and one thinner slice of Mozarella. It was slightly larger than a 2 Euro coin, btw. It was called "Insalata Caprese", apparently because "capra" in Italian means goat and you'd have to be one to actually enjoy it or get any nourishment out of it. (Hint: herbivores can extract protein from leaves and stalks by letting it ferment in their compartmented stomachs. Humans can't.)
Again, forget any ideas you might have about what Insalata Caprese is _normally_ supposed to mean. The picture on Wikipedia tends to suggest something completely different than the airline version of it. I'd say that they had gone for the minimal meeting the definition (technically it had sliced tomatoes and mozarella, because they had one slice of each), but even that would be false. I don't remember it having any oil, for example.
I don't know about you, but if you're put in a romantic mood by it, and find a woman to match... well, then may I suggest a romantic honeymoon in an authentic Spanish Inquisition dungeon, complete with top-of-the-line torture chamber?
Laws of own country? (Score:4, Insightful)
ehh... No... Otherwise there would be oodles of people getting arrested for smoking pot legally in Holland. When abroad you are actually subject to the laws of that country, not your country of citizenship.
Yes there are situations where a country will act even if the act is not carried out on in the country of citizenship (eg child prostitution) but that is relatively rare.
A citizen is nothing more than the right to vote and not be persecuted by your own government. With respect to the law everybody in the country regardless if they are a citizen or not has to respect them.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)