"Wikipedia has been added to a Internet Watch Foundation UK website blacklist, and your Internet service provider has decided to block part of your access. Unfortunately, this also makes it impossible for us to differentiate between different users, and block those abusing the site without blocking other innocent people as well."
We wanted to let our members know that we are aware of the situation and are currently looking into it.
The reason that the Wikipedia page in question was blocked appears to be that the Internet Watch Foundation considers that it would be illegal to view it under English law. We are yet to confirm this and we will let our members know why it was blocked as soon as we know.
This is the first time that a situation like this has occurred since Be signed up to the Internet Watch Foundation, a scheme that we signed up to with our member's best interests in mind. We are making sure that whatever happens next is for the benefit of our members and the reasons behind it are clearly communicated.
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12 comments:
To clarify, as I understand it:
1. One page has been blocked, apparently because an image contained therein has been deemed potentially illegal by the Internet Watch Foundation, and added to a blacklist that covers the majority of UK ISPs.
2. As a side-effect of the way this is done, users on affected ISPs appear indistinguishable to Wikipedia. This triggers Wikipedia's own abuse controls, blocking the users from making anonymous edits or creating new accounts. This applies to all pages at Wikipedia, not merely the blocked one.
In addition, it's not clear what requirements for accountability or transparency are imposed on the IWF. As far as I'm aware, implementing the IWF blacklist is a voluntary measure taken by UK ISPs, albeit under threat of it being imposed by government if it wasn't taken voluntarily.
More on the background to internet filtering in the UK here.
Hi Jonathan,
Thanks for clarifying the issue. We've been following the various news articles and are in contact with the IWF to determine what measures we can take to resolve the situation.
Best,
The Be Team.
If Be is interested in taking actions to eleviate the strain on their customers, they should watch the following list of (technical) issues that the wikipedia editors have gathered.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Administrators%27_noticeboard/2008 IWF action#Current_issues
Many thanks for pointing that list out.
We have passed it on to our technical team and will be following it with interest.
Thanks for the quick response. Regardless of whether the image should be blocked or not (and I don't think it should), I'm concerned the process isn't transparent.
Visiting the url gives me a 404 Page Not found message. This makes it appear that the content hasn't been censored, and instead that I or wikipedia have made a mistake. It would be much more appropriate to give a 403 Forbidden status, with a paragraph describing why the requested content isn't available.
I understand that this response comes from your equipment, not the IWF, and that other ISPs do provide more information when viewing blocked content.
I can see how blocking child porn is a good thing, but the fact is, there was no need to block the entire page about the music album in question - a simple block of the cover art image itself would have been fine by the IWF. However, even then it's useless to ban it, because a simple search of Google Images reveals it, and it's even on Amazon's product listing as an alternate image. Once again, censorship has been proven useless on the simple fact that it's now made even MORE people aware of the image, and that the IWF didn't even block the alternate URL that Wikipedia offer to access pages.
If you ask me, the IWF need to seriously consider these things before taking action - especially the fact that they're doing it through a handful of IP addresses, making it harder for Wikipedia to track abuse.
I have serious concerns with the blocking of "potentially illegal" content by an organization that is neither transparent nor accountable. I would prefer a government blacklist over this, at least there would be an appeals process.
"Visiting the url gives me a 404 Page Not found message. This makes it appear that the content hasn't been censored, and instead that I or wikipedia have made a mistake. It would be much more appropriate to give a 403 Forbidden status, with a paragraph describing why the requested content isn't available."
The paragraph is important. Both 404 and 403 imply client errors, which is not the case here.
I recommend the forum thread, it's near 40 pages long now and includes some very smart people pointing out the myriad of faults with this. Not least Be denying they did such early this year and directions on how to not only see the image on wikipedia anyway but no less than about 50 sites with it on for various reasons that are of course not censored.
The IWF has backed down on the censorship of the wikipedia page.
Now can we clear this silly proxy please?
I was promised a further official announcement "soon" in an email. Is this actually going to materialise?
Since this kind of filtering will doubtless cause problems with some legitimate sites again in the future, is it possible for individual Be customers to opt-out of tinkering with their connection?
Still no official announcement, no response to my raised tickets after the promise of it. No mention of filtering in the T&Cs. "clearly communicated" my arse.
*sigh*
Such a pity that you otherwise offer a pretty good service.
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