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
Delete the cache from your browser(s)!
This issue was very difficult to sort out, and the thread was right on topic. My friend had the problem on Firefox and IE7 on Vista. I thought that unusual. Finding an Apple thread really peaked my interest. And yes... he had just passed through Atlanta today!
Many thanks.
Posted by: Bazile, Jr. | November 6, 2008 9:48 PM