flying

Several weeks after flight attendants asked for American Airlines to block porn on it’s WiFi service, the carrier will now do so.

You can still bring porn on your hard drive or on DVD’s. Assuming you encode SD video using H.264 @ 3000 kbits/sec that’s roughly 1.5GB per hour. If you want to travel light, your iPod or iPhone is a good solution.

For non-pornographic entertainment, there’s a list of flight friendly movies including Alive, and Snakes On A Plane, check out my previous post. You could always just go to YouTube and search for “plane crash“.

Seems like there are a lot of holes here. A person who really wants to look at porn on a plane is going to do it anyway. This will however lower bandwidth costs a little and hopefully keep the service more profitable than Boeing’s Connexions service. That in my opinion, is their real reason for changing.

If American really wanted to stop the porn problem, they would ban personal ban watching media on a personal device during flight, and put cheap terminals on the backs of seats. Then your limited to their hardware and network. Completely isolated.

Flight Attendants have asked American to block porn via internet access offered on board the aircraft. Of course this is pretty laughable if you really think about it. Anyone who is willing to view porn on a full airplane likely has enough on their hard drive, and several DVD’s that will last the entire flight. A big advantage to the local material is no waiting for it to download, and more viewing time. This isn’t anything new.

Of course you can also try visiting a list of plane crash videos, sure to freak out someone on the plane, especially if you turn the volume up.

You can also settle for movies like Alive (1993), Air Force One (1997), Snakes On A Plane (2006), Executive Decision (1995), or if you really want to be daring, United 93 (2006). Airplane! (1980) is a favorite, though likely not very controversial.

Or you could use a VPN, easy enough to pipe data through your own home, and around their likely-DNS based filtering.

Airlines rules are intentionally written very vague so that they can make decisions at whim and remove or prosecute passengers. Even a political message on a shirt is enough. I recall a story with visible merchandise from a competing airline being enough as well.