Comments on: UK censorship of Virgin Killer sleeve and page on Wikipedia

By: UK: Wikimedia fights back « FACT - Freedom Against Censorship Thailand

UK: Wikimedia fights back « FACT - Freedom Against Censorship Thailand — Mon, 08 Dec 2008 13:52:16 +0000

[...] UK censorship of Virgin Killer sleeve and page on Wikipedia David Gerard: December 7, [...]

By: Torsten

Torsten — Mon, 08 Dec 2008 09:03:06 +0000

Congrats. Very eloquent, you made good points.

By: Axel Boldt

Axel Boldt — Mon, 08 Dec 2008 04:54:37 +0000

You might want to ask them what appeals process they have in place and whom they are accountable to. Further it would be interesting to know who is running the mis-configured transparent proxies, IWF or the ISPs.

By: Joshua Zelinsky

Joshua Zelinsky — Mon, 08 Dec 2008 02:20:59 +0000

There’s been some attempts to find if the image was ever declared to be unacceptable in any jurisdiction. This has been a long running issue on the article’s talk page. No one has found any examples.

Note also as I discussed on my own blog entry about this one of the most disturbing aspects keeps getting overlooked: most of the people in Great Britain trying to access the page are getting 404 errors or blank html pages. There’s nothing telling them they are being censored. Who knows how many small websites are being censored in a similar fashion that no one notices. If not for the size and structure(in particular the need to deal with vandalism) of Wikipedia we likely would never have noticed this.

By: Andy Mabbett

Andy Mabbett — Sun, 07 Dec 2008 23:35:07 +0000

This has overtones of the 1998 University of Central England/ Robert Mapplethorpe farago:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Mapplethorpe#UCE_Controversy

and in the same week that an opposition front bencher is arrested, and UK police’s retention of DNA & fingerprints declared illegal in Europe.

By: Torsten

Torsten — Sun, 07 Dec 2008 21:55:22 +0000

I have two gquestions for them:

Is it usual not to cantact the site administrators?

When will IWF block Amazon or the official site of The Scorpions?

By: unpublished

unpublished — Sun, 07 Dec 2008 21:05:45 +0000

I hope you go on the offensive during the show.

The issue here, isn’t really child pornography, but the fact that this great firewall even exists, and that no one knows about it. My worry is that this firewall will extend to “extreme pornography”, sites which “support terrorism” and incite religious hatred.

How do you define those? Are IWF going to be expanding their remit? Articles regarding the “extreme porn” laws on The Register suggest so.