Boston Bans Boing Boing From City Wi-Fi 215
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."
The ISPs were right all along (Score:2, Insightful)
Never Dumb Enough (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:The ISPs were right all along (Score:5, Insightful)
At least the people of Boston have a chance to throw the bums out in the next election. If you're encountering censorship by a cable company given a legal monopoly to "serve" a certain region, you have virtually no recourse unless such a thing was specifically planned for and written into the contract. I know that my city has no control over my cable provider's rates, allowing them to jack prices through the roof [timoregan.com]. I don't know if there is similar deregulation in the case of censorship, but I wouldn't be surprised.
In the end it's best to have as many choices as possible. So far as I know, having municipal wireless does not preclude the existance of DSL and cable providers.
political speech is our most protected speech (Score:4, Insightful)
If the project is funded with public monies, this will be an excellent case to push hard and loudly in court.
Why we don't need terms of use. (Score:3, Insightful)
- Saying that you can't do something legal is wrong, because it is legal.
Re:Lawsuit Time (Score:2, Insightful)
speculation? (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
"banned combination phrase found" (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:The ISPs were right all along (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:political speech is our most protected speech (Score:5, Insightful)
Umm, I think the "Boston is banning Boing Boing because of the Mooninites" meme is just a joke (or at least I hope it is).
The more logical explanation is that the ISP who runs Boston free wi-fi is using on of the many filtering services known to block Boing Boing. [boingboing.net]
Re:Query (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Query (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:"banned combination phrase found" (Score:5, Insightful)
Don't get me wrong, it's good to make a ruckus until the problem is fixed, and if by some meteor strike it was intentional, I'll line up with the rest. But we have no indication this is any such incident - it will in all probability be fixed.
It must be a stressful job to write such filter code - make a mistake in one direction and you are exposing wee ones to pornography, make a mistake in the other direction and you've got blogs full of sheep on sites like slashdot complaining that you are "censoring" them.
Simple solution (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Query (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:political speech is our most protected speech (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:The ISPs were right all along (Score:5, Insightful)
It's not about boing-boing, it's about filtering on a public network. If the government is providing a public network, it must be open and unfiltered - because the existence of a free public network drives away alternative commercial providers - it may become the only network, or it may be the only network available to some users.
Re:political speech is our most protected speech (Score:3, Insightful)
I agree that the government doesn't have to facilitate political speech, but if they go out of their way to block some, they'd better have a very evenhanded approach, spreading the love to opposed, friendly, and indifferent speech alike.
bigger problem (Score:2, Insightful)
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.
Big Brother Back In Action..... (Score:2, Insightful)
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.
Re:The ISPs were right all along (Score:5, Insightful)
In this case, it is a government controlled service, and thus clearly falls under free speech rights. Someone needs to bring the constitutionality of this under question in court.
Re:political speech is our most protected speech (Score:3, Insightful)
No, the government is not required to set up wi-fi, or have libraries with free public internet access. But if the government DOES do those things, they cannot discriminate against people based on their beliefs or associations, nor restrict access to (legal) material based on the content of the material.
Re:The ISPs were right all along (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Never Dumb Enough (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:censorship (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:"banned combination phrase found" (Score:3, Insightful)
No, there is absolutely NO DOUBT here. The network is explicitly intercepting and blocking the webpage, and it is explicitly substituting a custom blocking page with the Mayor's name and government seal, and directly stating the fact that the page is being banned.
It must be a stressful job to write such filter code - make a mistake in one direction and you are exposing wee ones to pornography, make a mistake in the other direction and you've got blogs full of sheep on sites like slashdot complaining that you are "censoring" them.
Oh, I'm sorry... at first I thought that you merely didn't know what was going on here. Now I see it is far more serious double problem here. (1) You have the very peculiar notion that somehow censorship magically mysteriously ceases to be censorship when it is censorship something that you want to censor, and (2) you have the very peculiar notion that the filters simply aren't "good enough" yet, and that is AT ALL POSSIBLE to go in and fix some simple mistake to make them work properly, as if it were AT ALL POSSIBLE tweak and twiddle the filters until you get it right. It just isn't technologically possible. Aside from the blatant case of filters routinely blocking things like breast cancer information websites, absolutely any particular content that triggers the blocking of a porn site could potentially get copied into a legitimate and valuable scientific sociological paper, and in the opposite direction it is trivially easy to write the most blatant twisted obscene kiddyporn story without using a single word that would trip any filter. Automatic filters are too dumb to correctly sort even the most absolutely legitimate content from the most blatantly perverted... and even if you managed to pull full blown Human-level Artificial Intelligence out of your magic hat... even then there is is an immense gray zone where the most intelligent and reasonable of people can and will disagree. An underwear/lingerie catalog? A breast cancer self exam website with a huge number of "titillating" images of nude breasts? Famous nude sculptures and paintings from Greece and important artists like Leonardo DaVinci? Family photos of a naked or half naked toddler in the backyard or bath? General nonsexual family photos from a nudist colony? And on and on.
The idea that the filters merely need to be tweaked to get it "right" is laughable. It is a task that requires full blown human capacity Artificial Intelligence to handle the most clear and absolute cases in either direction, and even with human level AI the gray areas are ridiculously messy.
But heay, undercensorship and overcensorship, who cares about all that crap.... just so long as we ARE censoring stuff that we want to censor... because somehow censorship is magically NOT censorship when you are censoring the "right" things that you want censored. And while we're at it, lets censor the things that I want censored. You can censor the stuff you want censored, and we won't call that censorship, just so long as *I* also get the right to censorship the things *I* want censored, and we won't call that censorship either. I have a feeling you'll be none too happy with my contribution to the ban list.
-
Re:The ISPs were right all along (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:The ISPs were right all along (Score:3, Insightful)
Bullshit. Free or not has nothing to do with it. If the government is providing some service, that service should contribute to the public good. Censorship is absolutely not a public good.
Re:government run (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
Re:Query (Score:2, Insightful)
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.
Re:The ISPs were right all along (Score:3, Insightful)
What you're missing is the fact that many people care more about a politician's effectiveness in advancing the positions that they advocate than they do about his personal habits and morality. Senator Kennedy may be an alcoholic, but he's a highly functional alcoholic. He remains in office because, on the one hand, Massachusetts voters like his positions and find him effective, and on the other hand, they don't care very much about his alcoholism. There's no reason to think that it is particularly difficult to get rid of politicians in Massachusetts if the voters want to.
Re:The ISPs were right all along (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:The ISPs were right all along (Score:5, Insightful)
What if those decisions are done by automated systems rather than humans - would you feel better because you knew that no actual person was reading your mail and listening to your phone calls?
You might still say "they're free to do it, and I'm free to take my business elsewhere", but what if everyone does it, and if you had no other choice but to agree to it if you want to be able to send letters or call people on the phone? You might say "I'm gonna encrypt my letters and scramble my phone calls", but what if your postal services company and telco decided that that was against their ToS? Would you still say "I'll just take my business elsewhere"? And again, what if everyone did it and you COULDN'T take your business elsewhere?
Your rights are only worth anything as long as they are actually protected, and that includes protection against non-government entities as well. And while you may argue that forbidding these kinds of things would impinge on the companies' freedom to conduct their business the way they want to, also do keep in mind that non-interference is an essential counterpart to freedom - your right to swing your fist ends where my face starts, and arguably, the same thing applies here.
As long as you just stand somewhere swinging your fist, it may make some sense to say that I simply shouldn't go near you in order to avoid being hit, but if you deduce from that that you're always free to swing your fist, then do consider a situation where I'm in a group of people who're all swinging their fists, with nowhere left to go. Is it my fault then that I get beaten up?
So, yeah, I agree that it does fall under free speech rights, but I also think that saying "if it were a private company, nothing would be wrong with it" is fallacious.
Re:The ISPs were right all along (Score:3, Insightful)
BS. Developing standards (TCP/IP, 110V) is completely different from providing services. And you know it.
"Insightful" my behind — find a better example, or admit, there aren't any.
Re:The ISPs were right all along (Score:3, Insightful)
Because of this, the citizens of boston cannot vote to ban content due to the first amendment. The constitution protects the people of a democratic society from themselves, so to speak.
However, all I know about how the government works is from high school civics class, so please correct me if I am wrong here.