Subscribe by EmailWikipedia Censored Over Supposed Child Pornography
December 8, 2008 by Casey | 7 commentsBy Casey Lynn
Contributing Writer, [GAS]
British fans of the 1970s band The Scorpions (probably best known for the song “Rock You Like a Hurricane”) might be surprised to find that the Wikipedia page about the group has vanished. The page has been blocked by British ISPs due to an image of an album cover–one that has been controversial since its release in 1976–that depicts a nude underage girl.
A non-profit Internet watch group that works with law enforcement to remove child pornography websites recently added the page to its blacklist. About 95% of British ISPs use the blacklist. This is the first time, however, that they have blocked a page on such a visible website as Wikipedia.
Unfortunately, blocking the page caused ISPs to route Wikipedia through a proxy server. Wikipedia suddenly couldn’t distinguish UK users from each other by IP address, and so they were all unable to edit articles.
The incident has already brought protesters out in force, including a “Boycott Internet Censors” Facebook page, calling for a boycott of the ISPs that use the blacklist. Of course, if that’s really 95% of them, that could be a difficult task.
Moreover, Wikimedia has come out against the censorship, noting in a press release: “The IWF didn’t just block the image; it blocked access to the article itself, which discusses the image in a neutral, encyclopedic fashion. The IWF says its goal is to protect UK citizens, but I can’t see how this action helps to achieve that – and meanwhile, it deprives UK internet users of the ability to access information which should be freely available to everyone.”
Of course, as with most situations like this, the watchdog group has only managed to exacerbate the problem that they were trying to fix. All of the publicity has only led to dozens of articles republishing the image (like this Wikinews story) and many more people seeing it (I for one probably never would have laid eyes on it otherwise). And you can still view it on sites like Amazon, where the album is for sale.
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who had the album cover with the teen girl holding an aeroplane? Bet that gets banned too; wait, can’t ban art…
I really wish I hadnt seen that image. Made me throw up in my mouth. Im not for censorship, never will be but when I see a picture like that, it just really makes me wish I could take back that last 30 seconds of my life.
That’s why we haven’t included it in the post :)
From the other news bytes I had heard about this, they were describing the picture as a 18 year old girl on the cover and still calling it child porn. I never suspected it to be more like 13!?!?! (must scrub browser clean…)
Does anyone know how this works on a technical level? Are they passing ALL web access through a transparent proxy, (should be easy to work out at whatismyip.com but I am not in the UK) or does it first go through some filter that only passes certain domains through a transparent proxy, which then checks the whole url?
I thought the blogs would be discussing some more technical details, surely it is affecting more sites than just wikipedia.
So far I haven’t found any more technical information, but if you see any, let me know! I’d be interested to know as well.
I wish they’d spend more time on real criminals!