IWF and Wikipedia: The collateral damage.

[sbisson]

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.

Comments

[maetang.livejournal.com]

Yes. I don't like it either, and I'm thinking that maybe I need to find an ISP other than Demon, as Demon is one of the ISPs blocking Wikipedia content.

[vampwillow]

As I understand it, the IWF are standing by their decision to block the image on english Wikipedia - and also standing by their decision *not* to block exactly the same image on Amazon.com or Google.

Talk about illogical ...

[surliminal.livejournal.com]

can i quote this post please?

[ramtops.livejournal.com]

Which ISP was faking it?

This whole thing is a disgrace, and the IWF have stepped *way* outside their brief. If brief is the right word of course, because I'm not sure who appointed them Censors of the Internet.

[ciphergoth.livejournal.com]

Hooray for Zen Internet - I can see this page no problem.

Those of you still on Demon - why? It's not been the company you signed up with for years. ISPs like Zen and Nildram are their spiritual successors.

[tanais.livejournal.com]

I don't get it
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virgin_Killer

returns the fake "object not found"

However if you go via php

http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Virgin_Killer

works just fine

If that is the scope of the IWF then that's just lazy to the point of incompetence.