Denver plays nanny with Wi-Fi: The Denver airport will give you free Wi-Fi, but they filter it to avoid, they say, unintentionally offending "angry parents whose children walked by a screen showing pornography." In other words, people with laptops act stupidly in public, and we have to protect you from those people (and nudity). The reporter on this piece notes that Sports Illustrated's swimsuit issue ("bare-breasted" this month; had to go check that was true), Penthouse, and Hustler are all on display and for sale at the airport newsstands. A person foolish enough to view Web pages containing adult content unsuitable for tiny eyes might also purchase a magazine, or view stored content on their own computer or on a DVD. This story brings together two huge pop culture icons: David Byrne and BoingBoing. The former discovered the filtering while passing through the airport and trying to read BoingBoing; the latter has waged a campaign against stupid filtering since being entirely blocked due to a limited number of images and topics. BoingBoing has a page on defeating what they call censorware.
Touch My Network: Did she say what I think she said at 4 minutes, 6 seconds into this video? Yes. She did. And she got it right, even. (She must have a fiber-optic link.)
UK sees increase in Internet use on East Coast Main Line: The new operator, National Express, made the on-board, Wi-Fi-delivered Internet service free to all classes in December; they saw a jump from 30,000 to 100,000 users per month. Formerly, couch riders paid £4.95 per hour, while first class paid nothing. The line carries 17.4m passengers per year, which makes me think that usage number measures "sessions" rather than, as the article states, "people." (The 17.4m figure is trips, not people, meaning tens of thousands of people ride the line each day.)