Flight attendants want filters

US flight attendants really don't want to become the porn police of the sky. Leaders of the US's flight attendants' union (representing some 19,000 airline workers) including American Airlines flight attendants, asked AA "to consider adding filters to its in-flight Wi-Fi access to prevent passengers from viewing porn and other inappropriate Web sites while in-flight," CNET reports. Several airlines are testing wireless access right now. CNET adds: "The truth is that it hasn't been a major problem on flights thus far. In fact, American Airline's spokesman Tim Smith told Bloomberg that the 'vast majority' of customers already use good judgment in what's appropriate to look at while flying versus what's not."

'Cloud filtering'

It does seem to give new meaning to the term "big brother." Zscaler cloud filtering is a filtering service for companies (maybe in future school networks, ISPs, whatever?) that intercepts all traffic coming in from or going out to the Web and "scrubs it" for content (and presumably communication) that violates company policy or is a security risk, the New York Times reports. What sounds more big-brother-ish than usual about it is that, first, it gives network managers "extremely granular controls over how their networks can be used. Detailed restrictions can be set over what kind of sites employees can visit and when they can visit them." For example, social networking could be blocked for one group of users and not another. Second, it monitors the "overall habits" of users on the network, so that subscribers can compare the habits on their networks to those of other corporate Zscaler subscribers.