Four weeks after birthing a nationwide Wikipedia edit ban, Britain’s child porn blacklist has led at least one ISP to muzzle the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine – an 85 billion page web history dating back to 1996.
via Brit porn filter censors 13 years of net history • The Register.
Australian newspaper The Age reports that both Telstra and Internode have declared they will not participate in the trials. iiNet said it wanted to take part to show that the filters do not work and Optus would only work with a scaled back plan.
via BBC NEWS | Technology | Net firms rebuff filtering plan.
Following representations from Wikipedia, IWF invoked its Appeals Procedure and has given careful consideration to the issues involved in this case. The procedure is now complete and has confirmed that the image in question is potentially in breach of the Protection of Children Act 1978. However, the IWF Board has today (9 December 2008) considered these findings and the contextual issues involved in this specific case and, in light of the length of time the image has existed and its wide availability, the decision has been taken to remove this webpage from our list.
IWF statement regarding Wikipedia webpage
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:
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.
AUSTRALIA’S mandatory net filter is being primed to block 10,000 websites as part of a blacklist of unspecified “unwanted content”.
Australian web filter to block 10,000 internet sites | Herald Sun
