I learned an important lesson yesterday at the Atlanta airport. If you are using the paid wifi in the terminal and you open up a desktop-based RSS reader like NetNewsWire, the network assumes your flurry of RSS-grabbing activity is a suspicious event. About 10 seconds after opening my RSS reader I was presented this message in my browser:
Yep, I was blacklisted. The 'system' assumed that my machine was infected with a worm or virus. In the end I was able to experience around a minute of my paid wifi service.
Visitor Comments
I thought you were going to say that they suspected you of terrorism for your RSS-grabbing activity. I was going to close my laptop lid forever in the name of patriotism to support the troops.
Posted by: excruciatingly Betsy | February 14, 2007 9:47 AM
Anomalous? I must say I'm impressed with the Atlanta airport's vocabulary.
Posted by: Rex Hammock | February 14, 2007 3:35 PM
Golly, but... I can understand. It makes sense. I don't know how big your blogroll is, but I can imagine that large multiples of network connection attempt can look like the behavior of a certain kinds of attacks.
Posted by: Fritz | February 15, 2007 6:12 PM
This happened to me in my local library yesterday.
However, I wasn't using anything like an RSS feed, I was just browsing MySpace.
Also, the problem persisted when I was on other wireless networks, such as my home network.
Pretty crappy.
Posted by: Jack | August 30, 2007 2:21 PM
Can you tell me how you fixed the problem? I to was at the Atlanta airport and the same thing happened to me. I am now home and when I open up Firefox it gives me the same message. I tried uninstalling Firefox and reinstalling it but that did not help. I also uninstalled Boingo to see if that would get rid of it and it has not. I emailed them but of course have not heard from them.
Thanks
Posted by: Laurel | June 5, 2008 10:34 AM