Finnish internet censorship expanding: Wikipedia article censored
Looks like the Wikipedia article Virgin Killer has ended up on the “child porn blocklist” provided by the National Bureau of Investigation. Several customers of TeliaSonera have reported that they can’t access “http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virgin_Killer” (although “http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Virgin_Killer” still works). I suspect other ISPs doing transparent or non-transparent censorship using a proxy will soon start blocking the page as they update their blocklist.
Not very surprising. After all, they managed to put W3C on the child porn list earlier, claiming it happened because of a “mistake in Excel.” Some people who dug around the user webpage area of W3C.org suspected that it may’ve really been because there were some pictures of men kissing each other. The list has earlier received major criticism partly because it lists a lot of (non-child)pornography sites, and especially ones returned by Google when searching for “gay porn.”
This is most likely related to UK’s Internet Watch Foundation flagging the article as child porn [1][2].
Update 2008-12-07:
- Wikinews – British ISPs restrict access to Wikipedia amid child pornography allegations
- Slashdot – UK ISPs Are Censoring Wikipedia
- The Register – Brit ISPs censor Wikipedia over ‘child porn’ album cover
- ISPreview – Six UK ISPs Restrict Wikipedia Access Following Child Porn Blacklist
Update 2008-12-09: Just a quick clarification: TeliaSonera wasn’t blocking Wikipedia because of the NBI blocklist; they were “accidentally” using the Internet Watch Foundation’s blocklist.
