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Rampant Speculation: Is United Blocking Jaunted?

January 24, 2008 at 11:12 AM | by pbb | 7 Comments

Update: Jaunted member The Gopher, who looks eerily like a middle aged Ron Jeremy, works for United and reports from within (see comments).

So there you have it, United employees are free to fly the friendly skies of Jaunted, according to Ron Jeremy.

Could United really be keeping its employees from logging onto Jaunted?

Something you may or may not know about websites: Many of them know where you're coming from. (In web-speak that's a referer, with one "r.") We saw an interesting referer address recently, and when we checked it out, found the above message.

So we went digging a bit further, and, yep, it's hosted on an official United server. We'd love to think that the airline wouldn't want to keep its employees in the dark about travel industry news, but we've heard about aggressive content filtering before. So is United taking a page from its hub airport Denver International? Looks like it!

Have your own travel-related web censorship tale? Take a screenshot and let us know.

Related Stories:
· Denver Airport, Hotels Censoring the Web [Jaunted]
· United coverage [Jaunted]

7 Comments

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Return to » Rampant Speculation: Is United Blocking Jaunted?

  1. jenleo

    Jaunted Member

    cool find!

    This is really interesting. I haven't heard of anything like it except in the poker world.

    Can't wait to see if other travel employees are experiencing this.

    Thanks,
    Jen

    January 24, 2008 at 12:16 PM
    #Permalink

  1. markj

    Jaunted

    Here is how we found this...

    I found this in our refer logs a couple times this morning:

    http://209.87.123.31:15871/cgi-bin/moreBlockInfo.cgi?ws-encdata=d3MlMkRzZXNzaW9uPTU3MjgzMjkxMCZ3cyUy RHVzZXJpcD0xMCUyRTEyMiUyRTE3MyUyRTE0OSZ3cyUyRGNhdD0xMTImd3MlMkRyZWFzb249MTA1NA==

    We looked up the IP on who is and sure enough:

    http://ws.arin.net/whois/

    OrgName:    United Airlines
    OrgID:      UNITED-3
    Address:    1375 E. Woodfield Rd.
    Address:    Suite 300
    City:       Schaumburg
    StateProv:  IL
    PostalCode: 60173
    Country:    US

    NetRange:   209.87.112.0 - 209.87.127.255
    CIDR:       209.87.112.0/20
    NetName:    ULS-1BLK
    NetHandle:  NET-209-87-112-0-1
    Parent:     NET-209-0-0-0-0
    NetType:    Direct Assignment
    NameServer: DNS01.ULS-PROD.COM
    NameServer: DNS02.ULS-PROD.COM
    Comment:    
    RegDate:    2002-07-29
    Updated:    2006-06-19

    OrgTechHandle: JLA98-ARIN
    OrgTechName:   Anderson, Julie L.
    OrgTechPhone:  +1-847-969-8150
    OrgTechEmail:  hostinfo@ualloyalty.com

    The session is now timed out. So you can't see the graphic on the page we saw earlier.  My guess, it could have easily been an intranet that blocks not only Jaunted, but all outside sites.  However, United could, like some hotel networks do, decide which sites to "ban" their employees from seeing.  Hard to imagine United would ban the entire web from their employees.

    January 24, 2008 at 12:19 PM
    #Permalink

  1. egw

    Jaunted Editor

    hilarious

    Blocking websites is so 1997. Any United employee who wanted to keep up with Jaunted could just subscribe to the RSS feed in something like Google Reader.

    And geez, United, I've spared countless hours in delays at O'Hare, you could give your employees 15 minutes of web diversion.

    January 24, 2008 at 1:39 PM
    #Permalink

  1. Elliottc

    Jaunted Member

    censorship?

    I'm deeply concerned that this is being done on a much larger scale by travel companies who don't want their employees reading information that may be critical of that challenge their corporate worldview. I'd be interested if there are any United employees (or for that matter, any other employees of travel companies) who can't access Jaunted or similar sites. Full disclosure: I happen to publish one of those other sites. Anyone care to chime in?
    January 24, 2008 at 2:58 PM
    #Permalink

  1. pbb

    Jaunted Member

    We'd love to hear about it too...

    We'll keep you anonymous if you want to tell us about this kind of censorship. Send as many details as you can--screen captures are key--to tips@jaunted.com. Or, as always, you can post a comment here!
    January 24, 2008 at 3:45 PM
    Parent #Permalink

  1. bigyaz

    Jaunted Member

    Or...

    ...they may just be keeping their employees from wasting their time at work (as valuable as I'm sure you think your site is).

    Also keep in mind that filtering software (legitimately used by thousands of corporations to block porn and offensive sites) is not an exact science. So they may not be explicitly "censoring" this site -- although that probably makes you feel more important.

    January 24, 2008 at 6:44 PM
    #Permalink

  1. The Gopher

    Jaunted Member

    I work for United

    I accessed Jaunted.com both thru Google Reader and directly to the website today, from work. Sometimes the
    filter will catch websites with things like "blog" in the URL.
    January 24, 2008 at 6:48 PM
    #Permalink

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