You may have heard of the UK's "Internet Watch Foundation", a jolly UK ISP industry group that operates "Cleanfeed". This is a UK internet censorship system that blocks arbitrary sites at ISP level by returning fake errors (404 etc), much like China's great firewall. Their blocking database is secret; it's unobtainable unless you're an ISP and pay to subscribe to them, which requires signing a legally binding NDA. Major UK ISPs such as BT and NTL use Cleanfeed. As a private industry group they are essentially unaccountable.
They claim that their database is for blocking "child abuse websites" only : http://www.iwf.org.uk/media/news.archive-2004.39.htm However, it appears they have now blocked 4chan.org's "/b/ - Random" imageboard : http://img.4chan.org/b/imgboard.html It must be admitted that /b/ is psuedononymous, anarchic and populated mostly by stupid memes, trolling and deliberately tasteless / offensive content. In many ways /b/ is a giant deliberately stupid in-joke not meant to be taken seriously, aside from an occassional thread where people use /b/'s anonymity to ask questions about private matters they feel they cannot discuss elsewhere. In any case, /b/ is most definetely a legitimate and legal forum which has been running for years, is moderated, and is in full compliance with United States law since that's where it's hosted. (4chan itself is essentially a western clone of the Japanese 2ch.net / 2chan.net, amongst the most popular sites in Japan. 4chan is therefore very well known by anime fans etc.) It seems that the IWF have blocked /b/ on the basis that it is a child porn site. This is clearly not the case. Yes, *very occasionally* some moron posts CP on /b/ ... which typically lasts about 30 seconds before it's deleted and they're permabanned. 4chan is no different from any other public forum which allows image posting in this regard, it does not condone such activity and obviously if there was any evidence that it did the US authorities would shut it down instantly. At present the blocking, which is being done by URL, is not very well implemented and there are ways around it. Furthermore not all UK ISPs use Cleanfeed ... yet. However, I hope you will agree that it is very worrying that legitimate internet forums appear to be being censored in the UK secretly and pretty much unaccountably *right now*. I have to wonder how long it will be before our authoritarian government decides we should "standardise" on this "industry best-practice" for its own ends. Further references : http://dis.4chan.org/read.php/newpol/1150560346/1-40 http://dis.4chan.org/read.php/img/1149953763/1-40 http://www.4chan.org/banned.php <-- some BT users redirected here I suppose all this at least serves as inspiration to continue work on freenet :( Bob ___________________________________________________________ Try the all-new Yahoo! Mail. "The New Version is radically easier to use" The Wall Street Journal http://uk.docs.yahoo.com/nowyoucan.html _______________________________________________ chat mailing list chat@freenetproject.org Archived: http://news.gmane.org/gmane.network.freenet.general Unsubscribe at http://emu.freenetproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/chat Or mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
