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Boston Bans Boing Boing From City Wi-Fi
DrFlounder writes "The city of Boston has apparently blocked access to Boing Boing on the municipal Wi-Fi. This is possibly due to the popular blog's known Mooninite sympathies." Update: 4/22 13:11 GMT by KD : Seth Finkelstein did some research and posted an explanation of the blockage to his blog. "'Arbitrary and capricious' seems the relevant characterization."
Municipal WiFi is bad after all.
Sheesh, just when you think that Boston's government might have learned its lesson from this whole debacle, now they're doing something even dumber and more reprehensible by censoring? What a disgrace.
Those who anthropomorphize science and/or nature already believe in an intelligent designer.
If they are blocking BoingBoing over the Mooninite issue, then they are censoring political speech critical of the regime.
If the project is funded with public monies, this will be an excellent case to push hard and loudly in court.
- Saying that you can't do something illegal is useless, because it is already illegal.
- Saying that you can't do something legal is wrong, because it is legal.
Just what will they gain by a lawsuit? what % of their readers use Boston municipal WiFi? Sure censorship in any form sucks - but a lawsuit is not the way to go here.
But really, what are the censoring for? I'm more worried about actual censorship than I am about a bunch of Adult Swim fans not being able to mutually mastubate over their pictures of Mumbles Menino.
Yep. from the graphic accompanying TFA. That's it.
What was the phrase? Don't know.
Why was it blocked? Don't know.
Was the Mayor of Boston involved. Highly unlikely.
Was any authority or elected official involved? Highly unlikely.
Really folks, there is utterly no information here except that some filter somewhere blocked one page on Boingboing's website.
Hardly the First Amendment case that's being suggested and debated.
Three Squirrels
The part where that's actually true.
I'm no fan of guerilla marketing, and would've been happy to see them charged with, say, littering. But no; it was treated as a bomb threat. That's just stupid.
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Is there anywhere left in the world where the government isn't equal parts hilarious and incompetent?
Yes. In some places the government is terrifiying and immoral. Now if the guy goes to prison, particluarly a max security prison(bomb making terrorist), then our government will have taken another step in the direction of terrifying. Getting beated and shanked because you designed an advertisement for a cartoon isn't hilarious, it's awful.
We are all just people.
There's a really simple solution to this banning. Everyone in Boston should just use Distributed Boing Boing!
This guy's the limit!
Was there once such a place?
Yeah, this is funny and all, but proponents of municiple wifi take note -
if the taxpayers are paying for the bandwidth, they have a reasonable
expectation to control what goes over the wire(less) *they* own. Maybe the
Boston case is just a mistake, or a quirk of the local political machine, but
in many less tolerant places, the voting public themselves will choose to
censor the network. If free muni wifi really works, alternatives will be
driven out (no economies of scale), and residents will have no choice
to get around local censorship "for their own good" or "to protect the
community". I'd rather pay somebody for unrestricted access than get
half an internet for free.
Is this the kind of Government censorship that we are going to get when cities start installing WiFi? There should be a law that if public WiFi is going to be installed, nobody should be able to block any part of it.
Why should we be letting some bureaucrat telling us that our tax dollars are going to be spent giving the community free WiFi, and then telling us that our tax dollars are going to be spent restricting us from content accessible through a network that our tax dollars paid for in the first place?
If you really think about it, city officials decide how our taxes are spent within the city, not us. So, if they are going to regulate what is accessible through WiFi, why the hell should we be forced to pay for it ourselves? I mean, why should we be paying for something with compulsory tax dollars, and then have some worthless bureaucrat appoint themselves "Official City Parent" and tell us what we can and cannot access thought a publicly funded system?
If someone is going to regulate and censor public WiFi, then I don't want my tax dollars to pay for it. If people want to regulate and censor it, then they alone should bear the entire cost, and let us free thinkers fend for ourselves. Period.
I already have two parents, and that's more than I can take.
Knowing Google's lust for data collection, the Soviet Union is still alive and well inside the psyche of Sergey Brin....
I think it's kind of funny and sad that the sect that had the most progressive attitudes at the time gets the worst rap. Seriously. Puritans, compared to their conteporaries, were progressive. I've read a couple articles about this, the Church in Europe frowned on any non-reproductive copulation and they frowned on alcohol. Puritans enjoyed alcohol in moderation and sex, just within marriage. Even the bit about how they handled "witches", while unfortunate, it was very, very short lived (a small handful of cases), parts of Europe were still burning "witches" centuries later, and had been practiced in Europe to the tune of estimated hundreds of thousands of times.
That's not true.
In fact, the most informative, honest and relevant news in the US was when the government(ewww booogymaaan) paid the broadcaster to carry the news.
Only when that stopped did the news becomes slanted in favor of ratings and to support the owners views.
Most government wi-fis are wide open.
This is probably the result of one person, who happens to be in the govrenment, being an ass. Which they will get slapped down for.
The government functions do to the hard working Americans who want the same basic things as you do.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
It was an advertising campaign. That means the target was people that don't already watch the show. So it was a really stupid campaign to begin with: the devices in question would only be recognizable by people who already knew about the show.
Further, they deliberately chose provocative locations for their "mooninite invasion." Locations for which they did not seek permits, or otherwise notify the relevant authorities until well after the fact.
I'd say that Boston's reaction was the one they were looking for, as that was the one that got them a publicity multiplier of being on national news for several days, during which time the were able to expand the number of people who knew about the show.
Doing time for a cartoon advertisement isn't funny. Neither is scaring a bunch of people with mock terrorist activity all over a major metropolitan area for a cartoon advertisement funny.
What they did probably does call for jail time (though the advertising company should bear the brunt of it). The relatively harmless intentions of the actual stooges goes a way towards mitigating that, perhaps we can accept a community service penalty in this case however.
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