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Comment Re:Press coverage (Score 1) 668

FYI I took a call from a reporter filing a story on this with the Guardian early this morning. The issue here isn't just that the image was blocked but that the text was too. Indeed, if only the image had been blocked it is likely the massive collateral damage the ISPs blocking has caused would not have developed.
Censorship

UK ISPs Are Censoring Wikipedia 668

Concerned Wikipedian writes "Starting December 4th, Wikipedia administrators noticed a surge of edits from certain IP addresses. These IPs turned out to be the proxies for the content filters of at least 6 major UK ISPs. After some research by Wikipedians, it appears that the image of the 1970s LP cover art of the Scorpions' 'Virgin Killer' album has been blocked because it was judged to be 'child pornography,' and all other attempts to access Wikimedia foundation sites from these ISPs are being proxied to only a few IP addresses. This is causing many problems for Wikipedia administrators, because much of the UK vandalism now comes from a single IP, which, when blocked, affects potentially hundreds of thousands of anonymous users who intend no harm and are utterly confused as to why they are no longer able to edit. The image was flagged by the the Internet Watch Foundation, which is funded by the EU and the UK government, and has the support of many ISPs and online institutions in the UK. The filter is fairly easy to circumvent simply by viewing the article in some other languages, or by logging in on the secure version of Wikipedia."
Businesses

Battle Over Minimum Pricing Heating Up 272

The Wall Street Journal is covering developments in the gathering battle between manufacturers and retailers / discounters, especially online ones, over minimum prices. Earlier this year the Supreme Court upheld the right of manufacturers to enforce price floors for their products. Since then, manufacturers have increasingly been employing service companies like NetEnforcers to snitch on discounters who offer goods below "minimum advertised prices" (or MAPs), and to send DMCA takedown notices to the likes of eBay and Craigslist for below-minimum offers. Separately, the Journal reports that a coalition of discounters and retailers is using eBay as a stalking-horse in a campaign to get consumers, and then politicians, fired up enough to pass legislation outlawing MAPs.

Comment collateral damage (Score 1) 1

The IWF state on their website how they prevent collateral damage, yet here is a case where the blocking of one page has affected the ability of anyone to anonymously edit all the 2.6 million pages on the english-language Wikipedia. Oops. This has reached the media (well, The Register) and I was phoned about it this morning by a reporter about to file to The Guardian. As I see it it isn't so much the image being blocked as all the text about the album. A Demon Internet user received the message that the page was blocked explicitly because of the Internet Watch Foundation block list. More on this: http://www.alisonw.com/2008/12/07/albums-and-abuse
Education

Submission + - Wikipedia for Schools DVD released (soschildrensvillages.org.uk) 1

David Gerard writes: "SOS Children's Villages has released the 2008/9 Wikipedia Selection for Schools — 5500 checked and reviewed articles matching the English National Curriculum, produced by SOS for use in their own schools in developing countries. The 2007 edition was a huge success, with distributions to schools in four countries, use by the Hole in the Wall education project, thousands of downloads and disks and around 6000 unique IPs a day visiting the online version — the most successful end-user distribution version of Wikipedia to date."

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