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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.
Is there anywhere left in the world where the government isn't equal parts hilarious and incompetent?
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
Where's your sense of style?
"Boston Bans Boing Boing Because of a Blog"
Slagborr
Sealand
The mayor was quoted as saying that a "'Boing Boing' is clearly some type of explosive device."
I say we commence remoonification.
CC Licensed Serialized Story and Podcast: Ingenioustries
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.
Mayor 'Mumbles' Menino. I do like the bit where he puts his seal of office, and name, on the blockpage... Not shy about his inanity is he?
How's that dig thing coming along mayor? Oh, let me guess, straight info on the dig will be blocked next for policy violation?
boingboing finds itself frequently banned. One reason is their frequent links to circumventing censorship. Another reason is that they sometimes post NSFW links.
The fact that the government is censoring adults is offensive. But then again, Boston has had a reputation of puritanism.
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
There's a really simple solution to this banning. Everyone in Boston should just use Distributed Boing Boing!
This guy's the limit!
www.boston.cn
What?
With enough money and proper coordination, a lawsuit might be the right idea. A sufficiently large legal LART could prevent municipal ISPs from implementing global filtering at all. In this case though, I doubt anyone's in the position to do that correctly.
-- The act of censorship is always worse than whatever is being censored. Always.
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.
What a beautiful illustration of the danger -- no, the reality -- of having free wireless internet access provided by the government or a business. They WILL censor, and after they become ubiquitous, the internet won't be able to route around them.
Wireless internet should be provided by mesh networks, with perhaps non-profit associations renting or buying fat pipe for backbone. Do it the bad way, and the gubmint or Rupert Murdock or Clear Channel start telling us who's not to have access this week.
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....
We should all head down to the harbor and dump crates of routers into the bay. It worked before.
come for the naked robots, stay for the zombies
I think Boing Boing needs to get a lawyer and get to suing.
If they're going to sue, they need to start with those jokers at Smartfilter.
They use it at my workplace, and it blocks things completely at random. BoingBoing posted some critical articals on Smartfilter and instantly got on their shit list -- Boing Boing is now permanently blocked as "nudity", a blatantly false category designed to get people in trouble for even trying to view it.
If you report the inaccuracy, they claim to fix it, only to ignore it and keep them blocked.
I wouldn't be surprised at all if Boston was just using Smartfilter and this is just a symptom of a much larger problem. Smartfilter is, IIRC, the official filter of choice for the US and Iranian governments for blocking naughty content from their masses -- ever since the Republicans managed to con their way into forcing all library machines into being filtered ("Think of the Children" covering the fact that Libraries are poor people's only way to get on the net) Smartfilter has been a bit of a fun toy to play with.
In the middle of the 2006 elections, for example, out of the blue Liberal blogs and Political Canidate websites in Swing States suddenly found themselves blocked as being "curse words" or "mature" or "forums" or other similarly flimsy excuses. Pretty sneaky -- get a censorship filter installed where poor people (who typically vote Democratic) are going to be forced to go through it, then just start randomly blocking political "dissidents" that you don't like. And since Smartfilter has a very, very strict policy (now, anyway) about not REMOVING, only RECATEGORIZING websites... well, yeah.
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