Despite town labeling its WiFi as “Wicked Free,” there are literally fairly a number of restrictions — so don’t count on to have the ability to get your cryptomining, “adult material” or “weapons/bombs” info.
The “Wicked Free WiFi” is the general public wi-fi web entry in Boston City Hall — a spot whose staff didn’t have answering machines till the Walsh administration — and the encircling Government Center space, in order that’s how staff and guests to the often-maligned brutalist lump downtown use wi-fi web.
While the standard of the publicly supplied and passwordless service varies by the place in or across the thick concrete construction you might be, the city-imposed restrict on what you’ll be able to view stays.
The metropolis mentioned there’s no particular listing of URLs which might be banned. Rather, town chooses “categories” of website which might be banned, and a third-party vendor then makes use of these to filter out websites in bulk. For a very G-rated instance, town bans “Sports,” which is a class beneath the category of “Productivity Loss,” so something the filter has marked as sports activities can’t make it by means of, resembling NBA.com or ESPN.com.
A city-provided spreadsheet fortunately shines some lights on the often-bizarre particulars.
In addition to “Productivity Loss,” broad class lessons embody: “Advanced Security Risk,” “Privacy Risk,” “Legal Liability,” “General Surfing,” “Business Use” and “Bandwidth Loss.”
The first of these, the safety dangers, embody many commonsense bans together with spyware and adware or malware, spam, “suspicious content” and “malicious content.” Sadly for the Bitcoin followers in City Hall, it additionally consists of “Cryptomining and Blockchain,” a class it defines as “Sites that allow cryptocurrency mining network traffic and scripts.”
Where issues get bizarre is among the many “General Surfing,” “Productivity Loss” and, notably, “Legal Liability” lessons.
Among the latter of these are the place the “superclasses” of “Adult Material,” “Drugs,” “Gambling” and — ominously — the “Illegal or Questionable” come residence to roost. As one would possibly count on, there’s a class merely referred to as “Pornography,” which is outlined as “Sites related to soft- and/or hard-core pornography, regardless of medium.” So no “Sex.com,” for instance.
There’s additionally the class of “Sexuality” which seems, counterintuitively, to focus on tattoos. And then there’s the class of “Social Networking Adult” — courting websites, for which town provides up the instance of “ashleymadison.com,” a courting website for individuals seeking to have affairs.
Also beneath “Adult Material” is “Adult Sex Education,” “K-12 Sex Education,” “Nudity” (“Sites that provide either artistic or non-artistic nude images”), “Lingerie/Bikini” and “Adult Themes,” which is described as a catch-all consisting of “for example, penile enlargement, erectile dysfunction, adult entertainment, and so on.”
More unhealthy information for the denizens of City Hall: “Marijuana” and “Other Drugs” are each banned beneath “Drugs.”
Under “Illegal or Questionable” are fairly a number of issues that actually aren’t the previous, together with proxy websites that assist individuals get round website blockers like this one, plus “Mature Humor” and “Profanity.” The instance choices from town on that final class embody the extremely named babyfight.com and blowwboston.com, the latter of which doesn’t at the moment exist and the previous of which is only a weblog.
Under the “Questionable” class are “Sites that are generally related to illegal activities but do not fall under a more specific category,” for which town offers the examples churchofsatan.org and satanicchurch.com, neither of that are unlawful.
Other classes beneath “Legal Liability” embody “Militancy/Hate and Extremism,” “Tasteless,” “Violence” and “Weapons/Bombs.” Under tasteless, one instance is “gore2gasm.com”, one other eye-catchingly named website that at the very least at the moment doesn’t exist.
Source: www.bostonherald.com”