IWF Backs Down On Wiki Censorship 226
jonbryce writes "The Internet Watch Foundation, guardians of the Great Firewall of Britain, have stopped censoring Wikipedia for hosting what they considered to be a child porn image. They had previously threatened to block Amazon for hosting the same image." Here is the IWF's statement, which credits the Streisand Effect for opening their eyes: "...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. Any further reported instances of this image which are hosted abroad, will not be added to the list. ... IWF's overriding objective is to minimize the availability of indecent images of children on the internet, however, on this occasion our efforts have had the opposite effect."
Re:You'd think... (Score:5, Informative)
Agreed. And that new law about S&M porn is pure moralistic censorship with a thin, fabricated "think of the women/children!" justification.
Going after legitimate businesses like kink.com and insex.com is counterproductive to what SHOULD be the real concern: pornography that features nonconsensual acts.
Those kinky porn models enjoy what they do and get paid well [kink.com] for it. In fact, if you check out the 6th preview video for all of the segments featured on www.free-hardcore.com, you'll notice that pretty much every model that does a shoot says they'd like to do it again. Which is probably pretty shocking to all of those censor-happy prudes in government, considering the subject matter and the fact that they themselves are probably not interested in such sex acts. Otherwise they'd have to realize how stupidly ridiculous all of this is.
Re:mob rule (Score:4, Informative)
According to their statement, they have decided to never take any future action against the same image if it is hosted outside the UK, but if they find it hosted in the UK, it will be "assessed in line with IWF procedures", which means they will threaten the web site with prosecution.
Which of course means that those of us in the UK we will have to be content with seeing it on Wikipedia, Amazon and so on, or with buying it in record shops, or with reading books containing the picture, and so on, and so on.
Re:not a "child porn" image (Score:3, Informative)
You're in the UK, I presume? It could be because Wikipedia was in turn blocking a lot of the UK -- someone more technical minded than me can explain that part of it. Guess it'll take a bit for them to remove that block, too.
Re:not a "child porn" image (Score:4, Informative)
It wasn't Wikipedia blocking people from the UK specifically.
It was Wikipedias' limits on edits from anonymous users from a single IP. A side effect of the filtering was that all traffic from the ISPs being filtered by the IWF was that all of the requests came from the IWF IP, so it looked like everyone in the UK was sharing a few/single IP address.
Hmmm (Score:3, Informative)
IWF is organization set up by ISPs. I believe their remit is to flag and block anything possibly illegal, allowing the legal/illegal argument to then be made (and any action taken). Their REAL purpose is to keep governments off the backs of ISPs - we're regulating ourselves, so you can leave us alone.
Now.
New bit of law just rolling out (Jan '09) outlaws 'extreme porn' in the UK. Complete and utter knee-jerk, poorly thought out crap we've come to expect from my government - for example, a clear definition of 'extreme' might have been thought be some to be a pre-requisite to such a law. We've now got some wooly f'in mess where a sizable chunk of the internet could be considered 'extreme'.
So who's going to be involved in this stupid law - IWF. Poor fuckers, don't envy them at all. Anyway.. if you were in the IWF's position of having to prevent people downloading 'extreme' material with the following options:
1) Arrest everybody who looks at anything vaquely offensive.
2) Allow everybody to look at everything and get government regulation applied (How's that going Australia?).
Just sort of suggesting that our collectively national focus even being very slightly brought to this issue, can do nothing but improve the current situation.
Re:Whoo! (Score:2, Informative)
Notice "naked" is not on the list. Nevertheless, the first result is this link [lakeland.edu]
A quite famous picture (won the Pulitzer Prize) is on that page. With a naked girl-child in it. Of course, you would probably tear off your clothes and run screaming/naked too, if you had a really close encounter with napalm. I'm pretty sure I recall complaints about the original publication of that picture. Probably by relatives of the same idiots who objected to that album cover.
Re:Whoo! (Score:5, Informative)
The IWF never admitted to doing anything wrong. They merely realized that the knowledge and publicity of this event harmed their main goal and purpose of censorship, and in fact had the opposite effect of making this image more widely known and seen.
This example is one good reason to (at least) make the blacklist completely public and transparent. When a government (or in this case pseudo-government) and highly public agency want to hide things then corruption will inevitably follow. Transparency will always be better than sneakiness. If a public agency that effects the public does nothing wrong then they should have nothing to hide.
Wikipedia confuses me. (Score:4, Informative)
Wikipedia says they do not censor. Yet they'll remove videos of male masturbation from -- the page on masturbation. They'll even remove images of people having sex and replace them with ridiculous drawings or drawings. They don't do that for other pages. Go to the page on a lion and they'll show you a big image, in colour, of a lion. No one says: "Well, a big image showing all the parts of the lion, and in colour, is just not necessary. Everyone knows what a lion is: A detailed image is not necessary to get the point across." But go to the Talk pages for fellatio or ejaculation and you'll see this exact argument used there. I would say they do censor. I think it's duplicitous of them to say that their official policy is "Wikipedia is not censored." And of course they censor child pornography from their pages, because it is illegal in Florida, where their main servers are.
Re:Be honest! (Score:4, Informative)
Do you have a link to the article where it has that Playboy fact? It sounds like trolling.
Here's the link: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eva_Ionesco [wikipedia.org]
It took me less than a minute to do a search for that.
Expect further censorship (Score:3, Informative)
Try doing a Google Search for this sequence [ viet nam war news picture girl running screaming ] Notice "naked" is not on the list. Nevertheless, the first result is this link http://www.lakeland.edu/studentservices/news.asp?article=4354 [lakeland.edu] A quite famous picture (won the Pulitzer Prize) is on that page. With a naked girl-child in it. Of course, you would probably tear off your clothes and run screaming/naked too, if you had a really close encounter with napalm. I'm pretty sure I recall complaints about the original publication of that picture. Probably by relatives of the same idiots who objected to that album cover.
The girl's name is Phuc. How long do you expect to be able to search for such an obscene word? Obviously, such a search could only be seeking evil images, and the nannies must prevent it...