Re: [Foundation-l] and what if...
On Fri, Dec 12, 2008 at 6:33 AM, Tomasz Ganicz polime...@gmail.com wrote: Well, the story with IWF have shown that the current system of blocking vandals by their IP has to be changed ASAP. In fact it is causing a lot of problems even without action of IWF and other similar wachdogs. There are more and more ISPs which uses single IP for all their customers. Do you rember the story of blocking Quatar? Actually, vast majority of ISPs use dynamic IP numbers, which also causes serious problems with effective blocking vandals.My current ISP is using dynamic IP. In my office there are around 200 people using single IP. I guess all OTRS volunteers and checkusers knows the issue very well. The IP blocking is terribly old fashioned - it has been implemented at the time where most of the IP's represented single PC's. Actually very few IP numbers are personal. Do you have a suggestion? Not everyone uses XFF, certainly not ISPs with dynamic IPs, how would you suggest we block anonymous users? -- DCollins/ST47 Administrator, en.wikipedia.org Channel Operator, irc.freenode.net/#wikipedia Maintainer, Perlwikipedia module ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] and what if...
2008/12/12 Florence Devouard anthe...@yahoo.com: We all perfectly know that if this particular image was borderline, there are images or texts that are illegal in certain countries. I am not even speaking of China here, but good old westernish countries. In some countries, it may be sexually-oriented picts. In others, it may be violence. In others yet, some texts we host are forbidden. I am not going to cite any examples publicly ;-) Well in fact the picture blocked by IWF was not illegal. I think we should complain that such the organisation like IWF should follow the freedom of speach rules of their countries, which means that they cannot legally block the content which has not been found illegal. We should also join and actively participate in campaings attempting to control IWF and similar organisations. This is not only Wikimedia issue - but generally an issue of freedom of speach, which might affect not only us but also many others. Now, seriously, what is more important right now ? That citizens can not read one article ? Or that all the citizens of a country can not edit all articles any more ? Well, the story with IWF have shown that the current system of blocking vandals by their IP has to be changed ASAP. In fact it is causing a lot of problems even without action of IWF and other similar wachdogs. There are more and more ISPs which uses single IP for all their customers. Do you rember the story of blocking Quatar? Actually, vast majority of ISPs use dynamic IP numbers, which also causes serious problems with effective blocking vandals.My current ISP is using dynamic IP. In my office there are around 200 people using single IP. I guess all OTRS volunteers and checkusers knows the issue very well. The IP blocking is terribly old fashioned - it has been implemented at the time where most of the IP's represented single PC's. Actually very few IP numbers are personal. However, editing can only be done on our site, so the impact of blocking in editing is quite dramatic. Yes.. but it is at least in 50% our own fault - by using mechanism of IP blocking. And... beyond UK, what do we know about the censorship-systems the countries are setting into place ? I understood that Australia was setting up the same system than UK, but that France was rather thinking of other system. Should not we get to know and understand better what governments are planning ? Should we try to lobby them to adopt certains choices or not ? Should we help them adopt wise practices ? Yes.. for sure we had to monitor the situation and give a laud voice demanding formal control of the bodies similar to IWF and support local groups which are demanding the same. -- Tomek Polimerek Ganicz http://pl.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Polimerek http://www.ganicz.pl/poli/ http://www.ptchem.lodz.pl/en/TomaszGanicz.html ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] and what if...
On Fri, Dec 12, 2008 at 6:26 AM, Thomas Dalton thomas.dal...@gmail.com wrote: The censorship issue isn't really an issue - if an image (or content or whatever) is genuinely illegal in a given country then of course that country has every right to block it. If countries block legal images (as in this case), or block more than just the infringing image (again, as in this case) then we can appeal by whatever means are appropriate (the court of public opinion works pretty well as an appeals court if there isn't a more formal method). We can also campaign to have laws changed if we want to, but that's a decision to be taken with great care - getting into political lobbying is a big deal and maybe not something we want to get involved with (if we do, it should be something done by the local chapter, I expect). I agree, I would be very opposed to the Foundation using its resources to openly plan for censorship in a technological way. Obviously it doesn't hurt to plan from a PR and legal point of view. I would not want a new group to think, while they are deciding to censor, that Wikimedia has made this easy, and has ensured that their censorship will effect the least amount of people and result in the least political backlash. I understand that some countries may decide to censor content. That is regrettable. I don't however want any of the money I donate to the Foundation to go to making these blocks easier for the people implementing them, or less prone to error. It is very likely that each censorship implementation will be different, researching each one, and deciding how to cause the least impact preemptively I don't think is a good use of resources for the technical team. Not a response to your email, but the reaction in general strikes me as very inconsistent. With China they have been censored, they try and use TOR, and we block them, and say for years that there is regrettably nothing we can do about this situation. UK gets blocked for a day and we are talking about changing our IP based block systems? I know the technical details of the block are a little different, but not *that* different. Maybe the people that are saying this though have always opposed this system, and this is just more reason in their minds. I hope that's the case. :) Judson http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Cohesion ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] and what if...
Not a response to your email, but the reaction in general strikes me as very inconsistent. With China they have been censored, they try and use TOR, and we block them, and say for years that there is regrettably nothing we can do about this situation. UK gets blocked for a day and we are talking about changing our IP based block systems? I know the technical details of the block are a little different, but not *that* different. Maybe the people that are saying this though have always opposed this system, and this is just more reason in their minds. I hope that's the case. :) There is a big difference between an intentional block of the whole site and a block of one page with unintended consequences affecting the whole site. ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] and what if...
On Fri, Dec 12, 2008 at 9:01 AM, Judson Dunn cohes...@sleepyhead.org wrote: Not a response to your email, but the reaction in general strikes me as very inconsistent. With China they have been censored, they try and use TOR, and we block them, and say for years that there is regrettably nothing we can do about this situation. UK gets blocked for a day and we are talking about changing our IP based block systems? I know the technical details of the block are a little different, but not *that* different. Maybe the people that are saying this though have always opposed this system, and this is just more reason in their minds. I hope that's the case. :) I agree that there is a certain incongruity here, but the UK is not a focused source of spam and vandalism in the same way that anonymized TOR nodes are. It's very unfortunate that the majority of Chinese citizens are blocked from editing Wikipedia, but opening up a few back channels for them to use at the expense of increasing our flow of spam and vandalism is really not a great solution to any problems. --Andrew Whitworth ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] and what if...
On Fri, Dec 12, 2008 at 6:43 AM, Thomas Dalton thomas.dal...@gmail.com wrote: Indeed, I don't see any alternative way to block anonymous users. Even forcing people to register wouldn't help since, without IP addresses, we can't block account creation by people creating new accounts every time one gets block. What we need to do is put pressure on ISPs to use XFF whenever they are using proxies. The fact that people couldn't edit during the block has nothing to do with censorship, it's just a technical issue that can and must be fixed by ISPs. This is probably off-topic for this list, but IP blocking is actually inefective in exactly the same way as it would be just blocking accounts. When you block a dynamic IP a vandal can reboot and he/she usually get new dynamic IP from his/her ISP. So you have to block another IP number. If the vandal is very determined, you have to finally block entire IP range, cutting off at least several hundreds other people, and even if you do this vandal can still go to internet caffe nearby which uses IP's from another ISP, so if you spot him/her you have to block IP of the caffe. In some extreme cases you finally end-up blocking IP ranges of all major ISP's from the area where vandal operates... Honestly saying I have no ready to use receipe how to replace IP blocking. But IWF case have just shown that in the future it has to be replaced by something smarter or we end up in blocking all major ISP's customers all over the world. I see no evidence that anything smarter exists. The only thing we know about anonymous users are their IP addresses, so that's all we can use to block them. It is theoretically impossible to do anything else, as far as I can see. Long-time ago, I suggested adding a short-duration cookie whenever a block was triggered that would allow the software to detect the most obvious IP jumping vandals (asumming they used the same browser on the same machine each time). It doesn't get at the bulk of Tomek's criticism, but it does fall in the other-things-we-could-do category. -Robert Rohde ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] and what if...
Long-time ago, I suggested adding a short-duration cookie whenever a block was triggered that would allow the software to detect the most obvious IP jumping vandals (asumming they used the same browser on the same machine each time). It doesn't get at the bulk of Tomek's criticism, but it does fall in the other-things-we-could-do category. Deleting cookies is far easier than changing IP addresses. ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] and what if...
On Fri, Dec 12, 2008 at 7:50 AM, Thomas Dalton thomas.dal...@gmail.com wrote: Long-time ago, I suggested adding a short-duration cookie whenever a block was triggered that would allow the software to detect the most obvious IP jumping vandals (asumming they used the same browser on the same machine each time). It doesn't get at the bulk of Tomek's criticism, but it does fall in the other-things-we-could-do category. Deleting cookies is far easier than changing IP addresses. I generally operate on the assumption that 90% of vandals of dumb. Yes, one can clear cookies, but one has to figure it out and think to do that, which I would assume most wouldn't. -Robert Rohde ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] and what if...
On Fri, Dec 12, 2008 at 10:50 AM, Thomas Dalton thomas.dal...@gmail.com wrote: Long-time ago, I suggested adding a short-duration cookie whenever a block was triggered that would allow the software to detect the most obvious IP jumping vandals (asumming they used the same browser on the same machine each time). It doesn't get at the bulk of Tomek's criticism, but it does fall in the other-things-we-could-do category. Deleting cookies is far easier than changing IP addresses. I think we're all overestimating the problem here. If a vandal is absolutely determined and has enough technical savvy, no measures that we take are going to keep them out indefinitely. We can take reasonable measures to combat the most common types of vandalism, but we need to realize that no measures we take will be perfect and the more we do to try to combat individual determined vandals the more collateral damage we are going to sustain. If vandals aim to disrupt the project, then sweeping range blocks on IPs is victory for them. No solution is perfect, and the best we can do is to eliminate the most common cases in a reasonable way. --Andrew Whitworth ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] and what if...
2008/12/12 David Moran fordmadoxfr...@gmail.com: I absolutely agree with Judson that we should be devoting exactly zero of our material and mental resources to thinking of ways to assist in the work of censors. The problems presented in this example are almost entirely those of a national legislature comfortable with allowing private bodies to modify free speech for 95% of their citizens. FMF They are not entirely comfortable with it. That is rather the problem. The IWF exists because in 1996 Chief inspector Stephen French made it clear that if ISPs didn't do something about certain usenet groups he would do something about those ISPs. What we saw in action appears to be a derivative of the cleanfeed system developed by BT a couple of years back at least partly because the government was making noises about getting involved. The government would probably go for a rather stricter filtering system but is prepared to accept the IWF because it saves money and means that negative PR is not directly pointed at the government. Problem is that I'm not aware of anyone on the IWF committee who can really be termed a free speech advocate. -- geni ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] and what if...
On Fri, Dec 12, 2008 at 6:33 AM, Tomasz Ganicz polime...@gmail.com wrote: 2008/12/12 Florence Devouard anthe...@yahoo.com: We all perfectly know that if this particular image was borderline, there are images or texts that are illegal in certain countries. I am not even speaking of China here, but good old westernish countries. In some countries, it may be sexually-oriented picts. In others, it may be violence. In others yet, some texts we host are forbidden. I am not going to cite any examples publicly ;-) Well in fact the picture blocked by IWF was not illegal. That's quite unclear. I'd say the image *is* illegal, but that it's far too widespread for the law to be enforced. I think we should complain that such the organisation like IWF should follow the freedom of speach rules of their countries, which means that they cannot legally block the content which has not been found illegal. If that was the rule they might as well not exist. The vast majority of child pornography hasn't been subject to a legal ruling. In fact, under the scenario you describe the sexual abuse of minors would only *increase*, because new child porn would be created whenever old child porn was found illegal. ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] and what if...
2008/12/12 Anthony wikim...@inbox.org: On Fri, Dec 12, 2008 at 5:52 AM, Florence Devouard anthe...@yahoo.comwrote: If tomorrow, a really illegal-in-UK image is reported to the IWF, they will block it for real. And they will block again editing. They didn't block editing. You did. Technically, yes, but they made it impossible for us to do anything else. On Fri, Dec 12, 2008 at 6:44 AM, Dan Collins en.wp.s...@gmail.com wrote: Do you have a suggestion? Not everyone uses XFF, certainly not ISPs with dynamic IPs, how would you suggest we block anonymous users? If you want to block anonymous users, block anonymous users. If you want to allow anonymous users to edit, then understand that you can't block anyone. If someone is anonymous, then you don't know who they are, so you don't know whether or not they're blocked. That's nonsense. In the vast majority of cases there is a one-to-one correspondence between IP addresses and users (at least over the short term) and blocking by IP address works very well. ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] and what if...
2008/12/12 Anthony wikim...@inbox.org: The IWF said that contextual issues are important in the decision of whether or not they will keep the webpage on their list. They specifically reiterated that they still consider the image to be potentially illegal. The head of the IWF is potentially a fabulous drag queen. - d. ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] and what if...
Mike Godwin wrote: Anthony writes: I'm sure they're in the process of changing their review system to take these issues into account. At the same time, requiring *all* images to be found illegal before taking action, would not be a good idea. In this particular instance, however, it is worth noting that the image in question has been widely available, both on the Internet and offline, and in fact remains widely available. The fact that a particular image has been presumptively legal for more than three decades necessarily informs any responsible consideration of the decision to block it today. If one is familiar with the history of child-pornography prosecutions (as I happen to be), it's clear that these controversial album covers (not just the Virgin Killer cover, but that of Blind Faith and others) are not the material the child- porn statutes were designed to discourage and suppress. Moreover, since the album covers themselves are worthy of encyclopedic discussion, it seems important to add a context requirement to any judgment of illegality. Indeed, the Internet Watch Foundation itself acknowledges the importance of context in its public statement about the affair: However, the IWF Board has today (9 December 2008) considered these findings and the contextual issues involved in this specific case and, in light of the length of time the image has existed and its wide availability, the decision has been taken to remove this webpage from our list. If the IWF thinks contextual issues are important, who are we to say otherwise? --Mike Whilst I would agree with that, context does not appear to have contributed to their original decision. One wonders how many similar cases there have been in the last twelve years of their existence. I instinctively dislike prior restraint, although this is not such a case, but I am even more opposed to restraint long after the cat is out of the bag, as it were. All in all, I perceive this as having done the IWF no favours, which, sadly, dilutes the good work that they may do- although, of course, being totally unaccountable, we have only their word for that. ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] and what if...
The IWF said that contextual issues are important in the decision of whether or not they will keep the webpage on their list. They specifically reiterated that they still consider the image to be potentially illegal. You expected them to actually admit to having made a mistake? Why would they do that? There would be nothing to gain by it and they would just lose face. ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
