[LINK] BBC: 'IWF backs down on Wiki censorship'

[rene]

On Thu, 11 Dec 2008 11:58:29 +1100, Roger Clarke wrote:

> IWF backs down on Wiki censorship
> Page last updated at 20:04 GMT, Tuesday, 9 December 2008
> http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/7774102.stm
[...]
> The IWF admitted that its attempts to prevent people seeing the image
> had been counter productive.
>
> "IWF's overriding objective is to minimise the availability of indecent
> images of children on the internet, however, on this occasion our
> efforts have had the opposite effect. We regret the unintended
> consequences for Wikipedia and its users."
>
> [What they really regret is the unintended consequences for IWF ...]

Exactly. 

It's probably worth noting that Sen. Conroy has recently been sending 
letters to critics/opponents of Labor's 'plan' saying that:

"ACMA has also negotiated agreement with the UK Internet Watch Foundation 
(IWF) facilitating access to the IWF's list of child abuse image URLs."

Hence if Australian ISPs had implemented systems like those used by some 
ISPs in the UK, Australian users of Wikipedia would have experienced the 
same problem (unless ACMA had checked every URL on the IWF blacklist to see 
if it's 'prohibited content' under AU censorship regime - which I don't 
believe the image in question is, based on recent Classification Board 
decisions about Henson images - PG and G). 

Also, there's reports in various discussion fora saying that people started 
sending complaints to the IWF about the same image on Amazon, in Google 
images, Google cache, etc. etc. To be consistent, IWF would have to put all 
those on its blacklist too. One can only speculate about how many other 
things would have been broken by ISPs' filtering systems.


Irene