US airlines inspired by the Rajapakse regime

ICTs in general 1 Minute

American Airlines and Delta, two airlines in the US, have decided in an epiphany akin to that which the Rajapakse regime experienced in Sri Lanka, to ban pornography over their in-flight WiFi services.

Of course, the Rajapakse regime goes further and bans ‘hosting’ porn on mobiles to boot. Perhaps Delta and AA will realise this too in the fullness of time.

As Ars Technica notes,

In-flight WiFi, on its own, though, doesn’t quite open up a Pandora’s Box of sin—travelers have always been able to bring video porn onto planes ever since the advent of the laptop and portable DVD player. Before that, the plethora of “men’s magazines” being offered at airport kiosks have made (and still make) it possible. We guess all those swaths of travelers who need to get their porn fix in the air will have to go back to preloading it on their laptops before they board.

Also, I wonder how AA, Delta and the Rajapakse regime will deal with someone interested in reading up on the Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF) by typing that acronym into Google…

Published by Sanjana

An Ashoka, Rotary World Peace and TED Fellow, I have since 2002 used, studied and advocated Information and Communications Technologies (ICTs) to strengthen peace, human rights & democratic governance. I founded in 2006 and till June 2020 edited the award-winning Groundviews, Sri Lanka's first civic media website. From 2002-2020 I was a Senior Researcher at the Centre for Policy Alternatives. I pioneered both the use of social media for activism and online citizen journalism/civic media in Sri Lanka, including setting up South Asia's first Twitter and Facebook accounts for civic media, in 2007. Having started digital security training for human rights activists in 2010, I continue to advise civil society on digital hygiene, mass and personal surveillance, privacy and secure communications to date. I also curate a comprehensive digital archive of material linked to peace and conflict in Sri Lanka, since 2002. I specialise in, advise and train on social media communications strategy, countering-violence extremism online, web-based activism, online advocacy and grounded, context-based, platform-specific social media research. My work experience over two-decades spans five continents. Through the ICT4Peace Foundation and since 2006, I help strengthen information management during crises and work on countering violent extremism online. For over a decade, this included leading the Foundation's work on these lines with the United Nations and other multi-lateral organisations involved in peacebuilding, peacekeeping, and humanitarian affairs. Since 2008, I have worked in South Asia, South East Asia, North Africa, Europe and the Balkans to capture, disseminate and archive inconvenient truths in austere, violent contexts. I completed doctoral studies at the University of Otago, New Zealand, looking at the symbiotic relationship between offline unrest and online instigation of hate and harm in Sri Lanka and, in the aftermath of the Christchurch massacre in 2019, facilitated by leading research based on New Zealand's first ever Data for Good grant by Twitter.

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One thought on “US airlines inspired by the Rajapakse regime”

  1. What you’d probably need are separate porn sections I think (can call it some fancy name. what did Chrome call their porn mode?) Or give privacy filters. The latter maybe useful in any case. I don’t really want to open my facebook in public either..

    Loved the MILF ref.

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