Rampant Speculation: Is United Blocking Jaunted? || Jaunted

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Rampant Speculation: Is United Blocking Jaunted?

1/24/2008 at 11:12 AM
Tags: United, Censoring the Web (all tags)

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 - Add Yours by pbb

Add YoursComments

Comments on Rampant Speculation: Is United Blocking Jaunted?

jenleo
Jaunted Member

cool find! (none / 0)

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

by jenleo on 1/24/2008 at 12:16 PM

markj
Jaunted

Here is how we found this... (none / 0)

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.

by markj on 1/24/2008 at 12:19 PM

egw
Jaunted Member

hilarious (none / 0)

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.

by egw on 1/24/2008 at 1:39 PM

Elliottc
Jaunted Member

censorship? (none / 0)

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?

by Elliottc on 1/24/2008 at 2:58 PM

pbb
Jaunted Editor

We'd love to hear about it too... (none / 0)

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!

by pbb on 1/24/2008 at 3:45 PM

[ Parent ]

bigyaz
Jaunted Member

Or... (none / 0)

...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.

by bigyaz on 1/24/2008 at 6:44 PM

The Gopher
Jaunted Member

I work for United (none / 0)

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.

by The Gopher on 1/24/2008 at 6:48 PM

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