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IWF and Wikipedia: The collateral damage.
You've probably already read about the way the IWF is working with several major UK ISPs to block access to a handful of Wikipedia pages. What you're not hearing about is the collateral damage that the incident has caused to several smaller ISPs.
It turns out that at least one of the ISPs in question has been broadcasting fake BGP routes for blocked sites, in order to force downstream ISPs to use their blocking proxy. There's one big hole in their plan - they didn't give any of the ISPs in question access to the proxy, so all users got was a blank HTML page for any Wikipedia content. Oh, and they didn't actually tell anyone that they were doing this. You should have seen the messages filling up the support forums.
It took my ISP 48 hours to figure out exactly what was going on and fix it.
Back in the early days of electronic civil liberties the cipherpunks had a saying "The Internet treats censorship as damage, and routes around it." Well, we're now routing around the damage this censoring proxy, just the way the Internet is meant to work
Which basically boils it down to: IWF FAIL.
I'm actually astounded by this action on their part. I was running an ISP when the IWF was founded, and the folk running it them would never have stooped this low, especially to block what is legitimate content and which is hosted outside the UK. This action is not proportionate, and certainly not what the IWF was set up to do.
It turns out that at least one of the ISPs in question has been broadcasting fake BGP routes for blocked sites, in order to force downstream ISPs to use their blocking proxy. There's one big hole in their plan - they didn't give any of the ISPs in question access to the proxy, so all users got was a blank HTML page for any Wikipedia content. Oh, and they didn't actually tell anyone that they were doing this. You should have seen the messages filling up the support forums.
It took my ISP 48 hours to figure out exactly what was going on and fix it.
Back in the early days of electronic civil liberties the cipherpunks had a saying "The Internet treats censorship as damage, and routes around it." Well, we're now routing around the damage this censoring proxy, just the way the Internet is meant to work
Which basically boils it down to: IWF FAIL.
I'm actually astounded by this action on their part. I was running an ISP when the IWF was founded, and the folk running it them would never have stooped this low, especially to block what is legitimate content and which is hosted outside the UK. This action is not proportionate, and certainly not what the IWF was set up to do.
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And another thing about Demon, I've just noticed that their invoice dated 1st December shows VAT at 15%, but strangely enough the net amount and the amount of VAT is exactly the same as it was when the rate was 17.5%! Time for a snarky email, I think...
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Yes. At least they said they were blocking the page, and why. That is more transparent than some of the other ISPs. I'm still disappointed that they blocked the page at all; usually they have been quite moderate and sensible about these kinds of things.
I've just noticed that their invoice dated 1st December shows VAT at 15%, but strangely enough the net amount and the amount of VAT is exactly the same as it was when the rate was 17.5%!
Huh! They'd better prepare themselves for a barrage of snarky e-mails! ;^)
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The thing that's confusing me is that I'm seeing no sigh of the blocking - either they've backed out (for which they should be applauded), or the setup isn't covering all their customers.
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