UK ISPs censoring Wikipedia | Hacker News Reader

UK ISPs censoring Wikipedia

bugzilla.wikimedia.org

60 pointsig112 comments

Make sure to scroll right down to the bottom. For most of the page it feels like it's just some transparent proxying - which sucks but is fair enough.. but at the bottom an actual example of censorship is shown - specifically for http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virgin_Killer (probably because someone complained about the non-pornographic but contentious image on that page)

Is there a more coherent definition of "pornographic" in UK law than there is in US law, or is it approximately the same "I know it when I see it" as we have?

In the UK the term "indecent" is used instead of pornographic.

The Protection of Children Act 1978 ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protection_of_Children_Act_1978 ) says:

  The Act defines an indecent photograph broadly without defining the term "indecent"

It is possible for pornography to be considered indecent and not indecent in multiple cases - just because of the opinion of the judge and/or jury (where relevant).

On a personal level, I would consider "pornographic" to be something that's intended or designed to arouse sexually (in either a normal or perverted individual). Regarding the Virgin Killer cover, it appears to be a simple nude - no worse than paintings or sculptures of cherubs, though certainly contentious in our panic-driven culture.

not much different than communication law in the United States really

HTTP Proxies are evil, and stupid. Good thing there are thousands of ISPs to choose from in the UK.

Shame https://www.wikipedia.org doesn't work.

No, but https://secure.wikimedia.org/ does.

The Internet Watch Foundation (IWF) has openly admitted adding a URL from the Wikipedia domain to their blacklist [http://www.iwf.org.uk/media/news.249.htm]. From the IWF news release:

"The specific URL (individual webpage) was then added to the list provided to ISPs and other companies in the online sector to protect their customers from inadvertent exposure to a potentially illegal indecent image of a child."

Sounds like censorship to me, especially since the linked Wikimedia bug report lists instances of fake 404 pages being served in response to requests for http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virgin_Killer.

The BBC have picked up this story:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/7770456.stm

It seems like nothing is actually getting censored. Wikipedia was flagged as a possible source of child porn, probably because of the Virgin Killer's LP.

I would suspect the proxy the ISPs are routing the site through is to monitor the use and log the IPs of the individuals using it. That's pretty funny for wikipedia given the scale of use and it's search rankings.

I wonder what % of the UK broadband connections have been tracked now.

------ Comment #16 From Gurch 2008-12-06 17:08:01 UTC -------

The transparent proxies have been put in place in order to allow the ISPs to selectively censor Wikipedia pages.

Currently the pages [[Virgin Killer]] and [[Image:Virgin Killer.jpg]] are censored for myself and users of the other UK ISPs mentioned. The technical details vary; in my case, I get a fake 404 page.

It's great that you have people that watch over you in case you would consume the 'wrong' information... Now let's hope their definition of 'wrong' matches yours.

Is there anybody in the UK challenging this stuff ?

http://www.openrightsgroup.org/

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