Denver International Airport is the biggest airport in the world to offer free Wi-Fi. Problem is, now a Denver newspaper reports that the connection is being censored. The airport is blocking certain blogs like BoingBoing.net, perezhilton.com and other “potentially racy sites.” The airport’s position is that they would rather deal with complaints about censorship, than complaints about people viewing objectionable content on their laptops. What now? Why not censor radio broadcasts while you’re at it?

The Seattle Times quite correctly points out that Denver International Airport stores sell hard-core porn magazines, but they block the Sports Illustrated swimsuit site online. Word is they have also blocked the Vanity Fair magazine web site.

According to the ISP Planet blog, this is the same kind of censorship technology used by the governments of Kuwait, Oman and Sudan. Apparently, the filtering product being used is SmartFilter from Secure Computing.

What do you think? Is what they are doing OK? Is it responsible or irresponsible? I say let people monitor themselves and stay the hell out of my life. Stop making decisions for me, while at the same time coddling the rest of these overly-sensitive Politically Correct sheep.

[Computerworld] VIA [The Raw Feed]