Brit porn filter censors 13 years of net history A further update to this story an be found here Four weeks after birthing a nationwide Wikipedia edit ban, Britain's child porn blacklist has led at least one ISP to muzzle the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine - an 85 billion page web history dating back to 1996. According to multiple customers of Demon Internet - now owned …
It's the fact that the block is not transparent. The ISPs should just redirected to a page that says
"The URL you have tried to access is deemed illegal or otherwise inappropriate. If you feel this is incorrect, please contact 0878-LIKEWECARE"
You can bet that the Wayback Machine contains lots of dodgy stuff and someone complained, so the censor brought out the iron fist and smacked it down. All these morons are doing is getting people's back up and going to make it harder to police the net.
Although I am not quite if (or how) the net needs policed. Well, apart from SPAMmers. Death is too good for them.
Yeah I'm a HomeOffice customer as well, and have become increasingly pissed off with Demon's pricing - I pay 21 squid a month for an '8Mb' (read 2.5Mb sync) connection.
Its fucking embarrassing in the pub when my mates pay like £5 or £10 a month for far better connections!!
Demon are pulling my pants down and laughing at my dick!!!
Well at least until the contract finishes end of Feb - thank jebus
Hikaricore, the reason we don't riot over stuff like this is that these issues are not worth rioting over.
In fact, I'm not aware of any physical country where riots occur over minor transient DRM issues. Where do you live? WoW?
Last riot in the UK was Saturday, over Israel's bombing of Gaza.
Zen, AAISP, UKFSN, any Entanet reseller, O2/Be (who'da thunk?) and possibly Zetnet. Even some of these are castrated by bandwidth caps and a lot of smaller ISPs who had a good rep in the past (Nildram used to be good) are owned by Tiscali, Italian for crap. Expect to pay £35+ PM for any reasonable service, more if you want a static IP or block thereof.
By the way, Cade, could you please change "Brit telecom" to "Brit telco," which is what I think you mean? Some may think that Thus are another tentacle (testicle?) of Phorm's bitch BT, which they are most assuredly not.
On the subject of riots, there was one. One of us threw the keyboard out the window last month, which is about as close as we come to civil disobedience these days. Nobody noticed, but it were a riot t' us.
Unsmiley: I am very unhappy with the dire state and poor choice offered by UK ISPs and wish to express both my discontent and dismay at the vast levels of cluelessness in the AOLers that now run them.
... let the arses at the IWF make MORE of these mistakes, it's the only way to let the average Joe user know whats going on!
It's not even as though it does any good in stopping real peados accessing CP (anyone heard of newsgroups? not blocked. SSL? not blocked. BitTorrent? FTP? VPN/SSH to a server in Russia/Sweden/USA/Anywhere else?), all it does is stop law abiding citizens from "accidentally" accessing "potentially illegal" content.
Go on, censor more, piss more people off, and trigger a revolt!
What annoys me most about this is not that they block content but the fact that they hide that they have blocked content by claiming that it is not found. They should responed with '450' and admit that they are censoring your search. Hiding their actions behind 'page not found' is a tacit admission that their actions are wrong.
This is proper censorship is it not? I wasn't aware we'd reached this stage yet.
I know the register has only recently started covering this kind of thing, but it seems to be happening more and more often (I'm sure I'd have heard from elsewhere if something of this scale had happened before). So what's changed? Has the IWF just come under new management?
I'm with KeConnect Internet and it's not blocked, but I am really astonished that something like Archive.org can be blocked and not be widely reported.
What gets me the most is that they hide the fact they are doing it. If they came up with a page like web{non}sense saying "Blocked: kiddie pr0n - Click here to if you think this is wrongly labelled" that would at least solve some the problem*. The fact that they just give a 404 or whatever happens is wrong.
*Of course does nothing for the fact that consenting adults should be able to do anything that does not harm others, and the heavy handed and ham fisted way in which sites whole sites get lablled in the first place.
We need to declare 'fair game' and start doing everything in our power to subvert web censorship world wide. Sys admins responsible for implementing filtering systems in ISPs need to make sure they leave gaping flaws, lie, cheat and do whatever it takes to ensure web censorship is never effective.
Consultants hired by the government need to avoid talking about circumvention methods such as tunnels, vpns, proxies etc. Just leave it out of your reports, Joe MP doesn't need to know about such things.
Governments around the world are starting to implement these ridiculous filtering initiatives around the world and unless we act now we might wake up tomorrow and find there's no place to VPN to.
There's something wrong with that Wikipedia story. Even transparent proxies should pass though the client IP address. And Mediawiki and the wikipedia code should be checking HTTP_X_FORWARDED_FOR and HTTP_CLIENT_IP not just REMOTE_ADDR
So either the wikipedia code is stupid or the IWF proxies are not playing fair.
I've been using Nildram for my internet for years, and they were great. Since they were bought by Pipex, then Tiscalli, they've limited bittorrent and usenet in the evenings from the 800KB/s I'd normally get to 10KB/s. Apparently this is 'reasonable' traffic management...
I'm off to Be - I hope they're better. They're cheaper and faster, so I have my doubts! So, avoid Nildram at all costs - used to be the best, now one of the worst.
Hopefully.
I never knew something for viewing old versions of websites was an "Anonymizing Utility".
Viewing from work, not likely anything related to IWF, but it's confirmed my view that filtering is idiotic.
"Smartfilter Bess Edition" in this case.
> You cannot access the following Web address:
> http://web.archive.org/web/*/http://www.google.com
>
> The site you requested is blocked under the following categories: Anonymizing Utilities
Who are the people behind this organisation, do they actually know anything about the Internet or the sites they ban, do they actually investigate the Sites and URLs before they decide what to ban? Likewise do the ISPs bother to do impact analysis, or even check the URLs and Sites themselves?
"What we really need is a definitive list of the ISPs that use this list"
What we really need is transparency, i.e. we need to be able to see what's on the list, so that we can know if the censorship is reasonable. At the moment, the IWF is completely unaccountable to the public.
(The Wayback Machine is accessible on Orange.)
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