Here’s what you can’t do on the city’s public WiFi

Despite the city’s labeling of WiFi as “evil free,” there are actually quite a few limits. Therefore, don’t expect to get encryption, “adult”, or “weapon / bomb” information.

“Wicked Free WiFi” is public wireless Internet access in Boston City Hall (where employees didn’t have a responder until the Walsh administration) and the Government Center area around it. Brutalist Mass Downtown uses wireless internet.

The quality of publicly provided, passwordless service depends on the location inside or around the thick concrete structure, but city restrictions remain on what can be viewed.

The city said there was no specific list of banned URLs. Rather, the city selects a “category” of prohibited sites and third-party vendors use them to collectively exclude sites. Especially in the G-rated example, the city bans “sports” that fall into the “loss of productivity” class, so anything marked as sports on the filter, such as NBA.com or ESPN, will pass. you can’t. .com.

Spreadsheets provided by the city, thankfully, often shed some light on strange details.

In addition to “loss of productivity”, a wide range of classes include “high security risk”, “privacy risk”, “legal liability”, “general surfing”, “business use”, and “bandwidth”. Includes “width loss”.

Initial security risks include many common bans such as spyware, malware, spam, “suspicious content” and “malicious content”. Sadly for Bitcoin fans in the city hall, it also includes “cryptocurrency mining and blockchain”. This is a category defined as “Sites that allow cryptocurrency mining network traffic and scripts”.

Things go wrong in the classes of “general surfing”, “loss of productivity”, especially “legal liability”.

In the latter, there are places where “adult materials,” “drugs,” “gambling,” and, ominously, “illegal or suspicious” “superclasses” return to the roost. As you can imagine, there is a category called “pornography”. It is defined as “a site related to softcore and / or hardcore porn, regardless of media.” For example, there is no “Sex.com”.

There is also a category of “sexuality” that appears counterintuitively, centered on tattoos. And then there is the category of “Social Networking Adults”. This is a dating site that provides an example of the dating site “ashleymadison.com” for people who are looking for an affair in the city.

Also, under “Adult Material”, “Adult Sex Education”, “K-12 Sex Education”, “Nude” (“Sites that provide artistic or non-artistic nude images”), “Lingerie / Bikini” , “Adult theme”. Is described as a catch-all consisting of “for example, penile enlargement, erectile dysfunction, entertainment for adults, etc.”

Even worse news for city hall residents: “marijuana” and “other drugs” are both banned under “narcotics”.

Under “illegal or suspicious”, there are certainly quite a few that are not the former. For example, in addition to proxy sites that help avoid such site blockers, there are “mature humor” and “blasphemous expressions.” Examples of offers from the city in that last category include the incredible names babyfight.com and blowwboston.com. The latter doesn’t exist now, the former is just a blog.

In the “suspicious” category, there are “sites that are generally related to illegal activity, but not in the more specific category”, and the city is neither illegal, churchofsatan.org and satanicchurch.com. Shows an example of.

Other categories of “legal liability” include “radicals / hatred and radicalism”, “tasteless”, “violence”, and “weapons / bombs”. One example under tasteless is “gore2gasm.com”. This is another site with an eye-catching name that doesn’t exist at least now.