p2pnet news view Freedom | P2P:- Britain’s IWF (Internet Watch Foundation) says it’s the UK hotline for reporting illegal content specifically, “”Child sexual abuse content hosted worldwide and criminally obscene and incitement to racial hatred content hosted in the UK”".

And it’s added Wikipedia to its blacklist.

The album cover for Virgin Killer, from German heavy metal band Scorpions, set the explosion off.

It shows a young girl, naked and in aa highly suggestive pose.

Posts Richard Dawkins »»»

Six British ISPs are filtering access to Wikipedia after the site was added to an Internet Watch Foundation child-pornography blacklist, according to Wikipedia administrators.

As of Sunday morning UK time, certain British web surfers were unable to view at least one Wikipedia article tagged with ostensible child porn. And, in a roundabout way, the filtering has resulted in Wikipedia admins banning large swaths of the United Kingdom from editing the “free encyclopedia anyone can edit.”

On Friday, Wikipedia administrators noticed that Virgin Media, Be Unlimited/O2/Telefonica, EasyNet/UK Online, PlusNet, Demon, and Opal were routing Wikipedia traffic through a small number of transparent proxy servers as a way of blocking access to the encyclopedia’s article on Virgin Killer, a mid-1970s record album from German heavy band Scorpions.

“On 5 December 2008, the UK-based Internet Watch Foundation blacklisted the article Virgin Killer and a related image as potentially illegal in the United Kingdom,” says the Wikipedia admin site, going on:

“Several large Internet Service Providers (ISPs) that cooperate with the IWF subsequently blocked them from being viewed, affecting an estimated 95% of residential Internet users in the UK.[1]

“Due to the way the block was created (via transparent proxies), users from the affected ISPs now share a small number of IP addresses. This means that a user committing vandalism cannot be distinguished from all the other people on the same ISP. Unfortunately, the effect of this is that all users from the affected ISPs are temporarily blocked from editing Wikipedia, unless logged in. Simply viewing the site is not affected, aside from the blocked article and image and a possible slowdown when accessing the site.”

In its long post, the Wikipedia discussion includes these items under ‘Ethical’ »»»

• ISP issue: Users of several ISPs are receiving fake 404 or 403 errors when visiting the article. The first rule of thumb for tolerated censorship should be that people are made aware of when they are being censored.
• IWF issue: Albums bearing the image are currently on sale in the UK and have been for many years. The image is readily available on the internet for everyone. This clearly did not factor into the decision of the IWF. They say they act only on the individual reports they receive. This case shows how shortsighted such an approach can be.
• IWF issue: The IWF blocked the text of the article that includes the image. This is an encyclopedia text that discusses amongst other things, the controversy surrounding this image, which puts the image into context in an academic way and educates the readers.
• IWF issue: The image is likely not child pornography. No one has ever been sued over the image as far as is known, with it being for sale for over 30 years. The FBI has even investigated this album cover in spring 2008 and flatly declined to take action on it.
• IWF issue: The IWF blocked access to a page on one of the world’s most-visited websites without informing its owners. We understand that their policy is not to contact any of the hosts they block, but common sense should have told them that blocking such a website might have some unforeseen consequences.
• IWF issue: It is well-documented that actions such as the IWF’s frequently have the opposite effect to that intended, something known as the Streisand effect. The visitor statistics of the Virgin Killer article show that even with the block in effect, the page received 200 times as much traffic as usual in one day.
• Scorpions issue: Most Wikipedia editors think that the image, to put it mildly, is not really making their individual “Top 10 of tasteful images”.
• Wikipedia community: Though the official stance is that we do not censor unless something is illegal in the US, the community itself does often censor itself, when its editors think the image is over the top, or simply not required in the context of an article. Some editors feel that the image has no place here. Though the image has been discussed at length even before the UK censoring, so far there is no consensus among the community to remove the image.
• Wikipedia community: Questions have been raised as to why Wikipedia is putting so much effort into this censorship case, compared to Chinese, Iran and Syrian censorship cases. The reason is that our influence in the UK is much greater. If we cannot deal with these kinds of problems in the UK, then we will definitely not succeed in China.

Says Dawkins:

“Whether it removes the naked prepubescent or not, the Foundation will receive an uncensored Web 2.0 tongue lashing. Wikipedia isn’t a user-generated utopia. It’s a cultish self-contradiction that can’t help but undermine its own ideals.”

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Net access blocked by government restrictions? Use Psiphon from the Citizen Lab at the University of Toronto. Go here for details.

This entry was posted on Monday, December 8th, 2008 at 12:46 pm and is filed under Freedom, P2P. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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