Brit ISPs censor Wikipedia over 'child porn' album cover

Ah, the futility...

So, for the want of a little caution, the censors have triggered a mass search on Google which will return the image they tried to withhold. I'm old enough to remember the album when it was released in Spain, where I lived at the time. I was more inclined towards Deep Purple...

Anyway, funny how no-one remarks on the album title itself: "Virgin Killers"...

'nuff said.

Mullah control can't be far off

A J Stiles: "You are quite correct. New laws cannot be applied to any action that was performed before the law was passed. This general principle is second only to treating all people as innocent unless proved guilty, and is enshrined in Article 7 of the European Convention on Human Rights -- "No Punishment Without Law"."

Not true in the US at least via Megan's law, so it's not gonna last real long over here either, innit:

http://www.counterpunch.org/gardner11182008.html

But we are digressing...

Where are we going from here...!

@James Hughes

"I also find myself wondering about the saddos in the papers who've been found with "images at the bottom of the scale". Presumably they've haven't got any pictures of abused children at all, just pictures of children alongside some rather disturbing thought processes?"

Possibly they're not saddos, and don't even have 'disturbing thought processes'. Possibly they're normal people who have been raided by mistake, and the family photos have been taken to prove that they are paedophiles, because the alternative would have been the police having to say sorry.

Possibly some of the 35 people who committed suicide as a result of Operation Ore were some of those normal people, before the police got hold of them....

In other news, over the last few days in Australia:

-Someone has been arrested for taking a picture of the harbour in Sydney while there were children paddling

-Someone has had his child sex conviction confirmed for being caught with a joke sex cartoon of the Simpsons on his computer

-Someone has been raided and arrested because he recommended viewing a youtube video of another man swinging his baby around the room. No sex, just swinging, but that counts as abuse down under, apparently....

Romeo and Juliet

We must ban this sick and deprived play immediately. It is obvious to even the most casual reader that Juliet is only 13 years old and as such should never be the attention of the perverted and licentious, he spends the early part of the play joking about sex, Romeo.

Why oh Why ...

I'm sorry I must have been channeling the Daily Mail. I'll get my coat.

@"Don't complain to your ISP" AC

We absolutely should complain to our ISPs, I didn't sign up for having my connection censored by some self appointed bunch of puritan halfwits, and if the government tried to make an official body or mandatory filtering out of this we would at least have some debate.

This, this ugly facet of PC Britain, this is under the covers, underhand, secret and as a result not subject to even our weak semblance of democracy.

Why do the workarounds work?

The following don't work (obviously I'm one of those ISPs):

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virgin_Killer (obviously)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virgin%5fKiller (from an earlier post)

Other suggested links do work:

http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Virgin_Killer (truncated from an earlier post)

https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Virgin_killer

Can anyone tell me how these latter links work?

Answering one of my pwn questions...

@ me 10 mins ago:

"Affected readers and editors of Wikipedia can readily view the page via the secure server at this link (https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Virgin_killer). Editing is currently restricted to administrators."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Virgin_Killer

Wasn't that really nice of Wiki to leave everyone with a backup link !

(Yeah, the typo in the title was genuine, but I left it in because I thought it was appropriate in this case)

Coral cache

I'm on Demon. Why they let you see small but clear version of the jpg on Wikipedia but block the larger one doesn't seem logical.

You can make out the picture on the Wiki page quite clearly but if you try to get to it at the larger size it comes up with the Demon Block page.

It's fairly easy to circumvent if you stick the Coral Cache nyud.net suffix into the domain name.

http://en.wikipedia.org.nyud.net/wiki/Image:Virgin_Killer.jpg

This will get you the picture.

It is an Album cover and therefore a work of art but in these days of the Committee for the Promotion of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice (UK chapter) and the Religious Police it's not something you would want PC Mutawwa'in Plod to find on your computer despite the fact it's been on sale in record shops for the last 30 years.

I've cleaned out the cache before the black helicopters get here.

google!

I'm on BeUnlimited (?!) but handily google cached a copy of the page before it was censored, which you can still easily view. That's if you want to, I can't see why you would other than to say you beat the filters.

Proof the image itself ain't blocked...

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/3/33/Virgin_Killer.jpg

As all the other workarounds described here illustrate, where there's a will there's a way...

Actually laws can be retrospectively applied

Actually it can be and is,

I'm virtually certain there was a case involving a photographer who took nude glamour shots of a 16 year old (perfectly legal when the photos were taken)

Then the law was altered and the minimum age raised to 18 and he was retrospectively charged with possession of and making indecent images of a child and put on the sex offenders register, jailed and ordered to attend a sex offenders rehabilitation program upon release.

The "judge" decided that the defence of "it was perfectly legal to take those pictures at the time" wasn't a valid defence and that the photographer was something along the lines of a "wicked man and a disgusting pervert"

Sadly I cant find a link, perhaps the ministry of truth have airbrushed it off the web? (or maybe I'm just to shattered to spot it )

Virgin blocking wikipedia virgin_killer image

Whilst Virgin are blocking the page that contains the questionable image of the Scorpions album, they are not blocking the image. A Google images search can find many references to the image and you can see the image itsefl from the wiki servers:

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/3/33/Virgin_Killer.jpg

Thus proving the censorship is not for the image but the content of the wiki page.

If you decide that an unelected body is going to be allowed to censor material at least do it properly. More people have now seen the (feely available) image than would have had the busy-bodies not interfered.

Big brother is out there just 24 years late.

Have just reported the truly shocking images on...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nevermind

To the internet thought police via their handy homepage.

Save us from record covers you can buy in the shops!

Or a better plan would be save us all from the STUPID FUCKTARDS that censor 30 year old, publicly available content, on wikipedia.

Where the hell are we? China??

Rusty Shackleford says'

I think they should ban that Bible. Have you seen the amount of slayings and begattings? If it came with pictures it would be a sure fire candidate for IWF action.

We must at costs be protected from exposure to reality.

Won't anyone think of the children!

Error 404 - I can't *Be there

Article 11 (b) of the Declaration of Human Rights states, "No one shall be held guilty of any penal offence on account of any act or omission which did not constitute a penal offence, under national or international law, at the time when it was committed. Nor shall a heavier penalty be imposed than the one that was applicable at the time the penal offence was committed."

This album cover, and the free viewing of it, did not constitute a criminal (penal?) offence when it was released in 1976 (admittedly, without the obscuring glass crack we would be in an entirely different situation). Nudity is not an offence; children are not breaking the law by being nude (it is, some would argue, a naturally tenable condition given the speed with which kids like to discard clothing). But any publicity shot of any member of Girls Aloud has more latent sexual content than the front cover art work on the Scorpion's Virgin Killer album. In truth, all this censorship does is to deny the odd sick peado from viewing an otherwise harmless image which, by virtue of being more than 25 years old, is part of the public domain.

Are we to assume, as the "Spinal Tap" equivalent goes, that it would be okay if a naked pre-pubescent girl was throwing broken glass at Rudolf Schenker or Klaus Meine since then she is not seen as the 'victim'?

If you, like me, can't even view the censored page by the way, try the Scorpion's own home page ( but make it quick, before the suits with no brains shut that down too).

http://www.the-scorpions.com/english/discography/records/virgin_killer.asp

Where to go from here...?

"...If you, like me, can't even view the censored page by the way, try the Scorpion's own home page...."

There are myriads of ways of seeing this image.

What worries me more is that lots of other sites may have been censored, or taken completely off the net, and we never heard about this because they didn't impact the Wiki.

We need to take this much further. What we have is an unelected ex-police pressure group who have got themselves a nice little earner by preying on the 'won't somebody think of the children' control mentality of the present government.

Has any other country got a completely uncontrolled, responsible to no one, club of Daily Mail readers who tell everyone what to look at? I thought laws were the job of the government to pass, the executive to enforce, and the courts to determine when broken - each of these being a seperate independent entity.

We should be demanding proper accountable government from our MPs, not shadowy witch-hunts. Don't get onto the IWF - get onto their masters, this oppressive government...

I'm not blocked

As of a few minutes ago, Three (Hutchinson Telecom) are not blocking the image, nor either of the two articles which use it (Virgin Killer, IWF block of Wikipedia).

A bit strange, given that Orange (who reportedly are blocking these pages) were founded by Hutchison (and are said to still have an agreement of some kind with Three), but I'm glad to be on an uncensored ISP -- until the Thought Police get around to them, at any rate...

And what about Lennon's classic (and similarly-named) Two Virgins album -- how long before that gets banned? Will the Virgin ISP get banned because of its name?

Some words from the Wiki...

This comment on the Wiki discussion page seems worth giving a wider audience to:

"I think testing the IWF in court would be a very bad thing. I cannot believe the IWF would block a Wikipedia page and not expect an enormous shitstorm to brew up, thus one may presume that for publicity/PR/legal purposes they have deliberately gone after a major site on a bit of a 'fishing expedition' to test the response. Taking them to court would risk legitimising what is a very small-time organisation that has never gone after a Google, Amazon or Microsoft (despite the supposed 'offensive image' being all over Google images and Amazon) in a big way and could give them the push to go up to that higher level of interference and censorship (just look at the situation in Australia atm to see how far it can go). The best thing to do if you live in the UK is to contact your MP (http://www.theyworkforyou.com/) highlighting the problem of an unelected, unaccountable censorship body (and the press along the same lines), until the IWF becomes an embarrasment to the Government who ultimately holds it's leash. Jw2034 (talk) 17:12, 8 December 2008 (UTC)"

We really do need to get the MPs involved. The big problem is that the IWF is unelected and unaccountable. http://www.theyworkforyou.com/

The problem is the law

The law as written is just an example in a long list of badly written legislation from Labour in their ever ending quest to be seen to be "doing something." This has done a HUGE amount of damage to our legal system. I would like to see a re-debate of ALL laws passed under this Labour government with a view to writing them properly.

No-one would argue that child pornography is a bad thing but this image is not child pornography yet it comes under this law because it is not written properly. No-one would argue that children need protecting from exploitation but most would argue that this should not be at the expense of existing freedoms. Such freedoms are just as important. This is what makes writing good legislation difficult.