Sent through Newton-Wellesley hospital Wifi

[AHM]

I’m at Dana right now and had to shut off their WiFi to get through.

I'd be afraid they'd notice.

But far be it from me to question your commitment to our civil rights movement,
so carry on.

Seriously,it's kind of funny to hear how people panic if their ability to surf a gun website is blocked for a few hours. You guys some hobbies other than guns lol

Panera Bread was Dead To Me for many, many years
because they blocked Kim du Toit's gunblog.
And this was before I had a WiFi device, an LTC, or had bought any guns.
(His blog went away, and Panera's infrastructure was doubtless replaced completely at least once...).

 

[pinefd]

For a while, MGH was not blocking the site. I spent some time there this week/weekend and they are blocking it again.

I didn't realize that this was a "thing"! I was at MGH yesterday, however, and every gun related website I tried to log onto, whether it was a forum or business, failed to load. And every other non-gun related website (including forums and businesses) I tried, worked without a problem or hesitation. I should have tried porn just for the heck of it to see if that was blocked, but I thought about it too late.


Frank

 

[Squire]

Jeez, you guys are in the hospital a lot, take better care of yourselves!

 

[pinefd]

Jeez, you guys are in the hospital a lot, take better care of yourselves!

I was actually there (at MGH) for a good, non-health-related reason, for a change. I drove my niece there for an interview, since she's hoping to do her residency there.


Frank

 

[brain_8972]

Many commercial organizations subscribe to filtering services, in order to outsource their firewall rules (content filtering) tasks.
These outsource services have gross categories like "Pornography," "violence," "illicit drugs and alcohol" etc.
My own company subscribes to such a service, and gun stuff is caught up in some category or other, which is often enabled by default.

This is an occasional topic here... being unable to get to NES while in hotels, hospitals, etc.
This is usually not because some organization has an agenda, it's usually a case of "out of the box" defaults on the firewalls.

While I haven't worked for any org mentioned here, I have done plenty of content filtering implementations, and this is correct. All of those categories are usually something that would be considered "less than desirable" or simply a time waster on a corporate network, and the same categories are available for any zone, either private/internal or public in the case of Public WiFi. So likely the reason for this stuff getting blocked was they either wanted it blocked internally and the person setting it up applied the same policy to the public network, or they just either left the defaults on or enabled everything as a precaution so the client didn't come back bitching to them because someone was streaming porn in a waiting room.