NNSquad - Network Neutrality Squad
[ NNSquad ] Re: Germany preparing mandated ISP URL blocking
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In message <20090115165623.GA12251@vortex.com>, Lauren Weinstein
<lauren@vortex.com> writes
>A story is also circulating claiming that the same British porn
>censors who recently backed off over the decades-old "Virgin Killer"
>album cover photo, are now blocking large sections of The Internet
>Archive in an attempt to prevent access to imagery there. However,
>these reports appear to currently be rather sketchy.
The IWF have identified some child sexual abuse images on the Internet
Archive site (probably not surprising given that material is collected
on a massive scale by robots).
Since the IWF doesn't do "take down" for sites outside the UK, this
means that the URLs get added to their list (and stay there for some
time -- 28 days on average!).
Most major UK ISPs (and indeed in other countries too) use the list to
filter access to the websites involved, but they don't block the whole
site -- just the URLs that contain the child sexual abuse images. They
do this by using proxy caches (and all sorts of other technology, that
isn't relevant to this message).
Unfortunately, The Internet Archive had a bug in their page generation
system (they operate a fancy caching system) and this interacted badly
with perfectly proper requests coming from one of the proxy caches, in
such a way that they managed to serve up incorrect pages to that proxy
cache :( AND also to serve them up to people at other ISPs (and indeed
in other countries). This bug is what caused most of the reported
problems, and is probably the only reason that anyone noticed that
filtering was occurring!
The bug was corrected by 10pm GMT yesterday (Wednesday), so that "large
swathes" are no longer blocked -- however, until the material is
removed, I expect that the URLs will remain on the IWF list.
I have no reason to believe one way or the other whether the actual
images fall into the same sort of grey area as in the Wikipedia case...
... so at present, the significant linking factor is that all sorts of
systems (from Wikipedia anti-graffiti systems, to complex web caches)
seem to only work in the usual case :( and so any perturbation can cause
them to break :(
- --
Richard Clayton <richard.clayton@cl.cam.ac.uk>
tel: 01223 763570, mobile: 07887 794090
Computer Laboratory, University of Cambridge, CB3 0FD
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