Mayor of Boston bans Boing Boing
Jake tried to access Boing Boing from Boston's free WiFi network and got this notice — topped by the seal of the Mayor of Boston no less! Banned in Boston — first they came for the Mooninites, then they came for the Boingers. — Want to defeat censorware?
Context & Ripple Effects
Boing Boing editor Jake found the site unreachable over Boston's free municipal WiFi, behind a block page stamped with the seal of the Mayor of Boston. The Infothought writeup published the same day argues the culprit isn't a deliberate city decree but Dan's Guardian, the open-source censorware package whose default category lists have apparently swept up one of the web's best-known group blogs.
First-order effects
- Anyone using Boston's taxpayer-funded WiFi hotspot loses access to Boing Boing, while the mayor's seal on the block page makes an automated filter decision read as official municipal policy.
- Boing Boing converts the outage into content, invoking the city's earlier Mooninites episode — confirmed here as the reference point the site itself draws — and steering readers toward its standing coverage of defeating censorware.
Second-order effects
- If Infothought's Dan's Guardian attribution holds, pressure shifts from City Hall to whichever vendor or integrator configured Boston's filter, forcing the city to either whitelist the site or publicly defend a block it may not have chosen.
- The 'Banned in Boston' framing hands the blocked outlet free publicity — a filter false positive becomes a national anecdote about municipal internet governance, at no cost to the blocked party.
Third-order effects
- As cities wire public spaces with free WiFi, off-the-shelf censorware quietly turns commercial filter lists into local speech policy, with elected officials' seals lending unreviewed defaults the authority of law.
- The episode previews the recurring accountability gap of network-level blocking: whoever operates the pipe inherits blame for what the filter excludes, whether the exclusion was intentional or not.
The trend: Municipal broadband deployments are importing commercial censorware defaults as de facto local speech policy, making filter vendors silent co-regulators of public internet access.