Re: [Wikimediauk-l] IWF does it again...
2009/1/16 Thomas Dalton thomas.dal...@gmail.com: 2009/1/16 Chris Down neuro.wikipe...@googlemail.com: There was a thread about this at AN/I a little while ago - I believe Mr. Godwin contacted them and they said they had no involvement. Are you sure of this? I know the register says it, but shouldn't we double check? That was ISPs blocking Wikipedia again, this is them blocking the Internet Archive. The former apparently had nothing to do with IWF, the latter does - IWF has apparently confirmed it. Yes. I have serious qualms about what the IWF does and how it does it, but I have no reason to believe they'd lie. When they don't want to say something, they say no comment. - d. ___ Wikimedia UK mailing list wikimediau...@wikimedia.org http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_UK http://mail.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimediauk-l
Re: [Wikimediauk-l] IWF does it again...
2009/1/15 Ian A. Holton poe...@gmail.com: Following complaints that its child-porn blacklist has led multiple British ISPs to censor innocuous content on the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine, the Internet Watch Foundation has confirmed the blacklist contains images housed by the 85-billion-page web history database. ( http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/01/14/iwf_details_archive_blacklisting/ ) It's not only use being bad then :) Note that apparently, some ISPs have now blocked (reportedly) access to the entire Internet Archive. Talk about collateral damage... I don't know whether the blame lies with the IWF (did they just add *.archive.org to the filter?) or with the individual ISPs that did not manage to filter out the specific pages supplied by the IWF -- but either one is messing up things pretty badly here. If you have friends in the PR business, you should send them a heads-up, I think someone will recruit new PR staff soon ;-) -- Michael Bimmler mbimm...@gmail.com ___ Wikimedia UK mailing list wikimediau...@wikimedia.org http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_UK http://mail.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimediauk-l
Re: [Wikimediauk-l] IWF does it again...
2009/1/15 Ian A. Holton poe...@gmail.com: Following complaints that its child-porn blacklist has led multiple British ISPs to censor innocuous content on the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine, the Internet Watch Foundation has confirmed the blacklist contains images housed by the 85-billion-page web history database. ( http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/01/14/iwf_details_archive_blacklisting/ ) It's not only use being bad then :) Obviously, blocking the whole site is unacceptable and is probably due to technical incompetence on the parts of either the IWF or ISPs (or both). However, it wouldn't surprise me if the Internet Archive contains child-porn - it's generated automatically, isn't it? If the internet contains child-porn, then so will an archive of it. I'm not really sure what the best course of action for the IA is, but they do need to do something to minimise the risk of illegal images being archived. ___ Wikimedia UK mailing list wikimediau...@wikimedia.org http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_UK http://mail.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimediauk-l
Re: [Wikimediauk-l] IWF does it again...
On Thu, 15 Jan 2009, Thomas Dalton wrote: [The Internet Archve] need to do something to minimise the risk of illegal images being archived. Illegal according to whose defintion? The definition that applies currently, or the defintion that applied at the time the page was archived? AIUI the archive is hosted in the US, so why should they care about whether material is illegal in the UK? If they did they would also have to care about whether material is illegal China, Afghanistan, Germany, Papua New Guinea, etc, etc, etc. The new UK law on extreme porn has made/will make illegal a huge number of images that were not illegal previously - removing such images from archived versions of pages is implying they were illegal at the time, which they were not. Equally, when the Taliban were in power in Afghanistan all images of people were illegal. Should then all images of people be removed from all internet pages in the archive that might be accessed from Afghanistan? Or perhaps just those webpages that were archived during that period in Afghanistan's history? Also, how would you propose finding all the images that are illegal by whatever definition you choose? Remember that no only do you have to check every sight archived (a susbstantial percentage of those on the internet) but also every version of every site - for a busy site you're talking up to 20 versions per year, maybe more. Even if censorship of the archive were desirable (personnally I think it is anything but) I just cannot see how it is achievable. Chris -- Chris McKenna cmcke...@sucs.org www.sucs.org/~cmckenna The essential things in life are seen not with the eyes, but with the heart Antoine de Saint Exupery ___ Wikimedia UK mailing list wikimediau...@wikimedia.org http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_UK http://mail.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimediauk-l
Re: [Wikimediauk-l] IWF does it again...
2009/1/15 Chris McKenna cmcke...@sucs.org: On Thu, 15 Jan 2009, Thomas Dalton wrote: [The Internet Archve] need to do something to minimise the risk of illegal images being archived. Illegal according to whose defintion? The definition that applies currently, or the defintion that applied at the time the page was archived? Currently. Everyone has to obey the law as it stands now. AIUI the archive is hosted in the US, so why should they care about whether material is illegal in the UK? If they did they would also have to care about whether material is illegal China, Afghanistan, Germany, Papua New Guinea, etc, etc, etc. Well, they need to follow US law, but I think the definitions of child pornography are pretty similar in most cases (there are going to be corner cases that differ, of course). The new UK law on extreme porn has made/will make illegal a huge number of images that were not illegal previously - removing such images from archived versions of pages is implying they were illegal at the time, which they were not. Why does it imply that? You can't host illegal content, it doesn't matter if it was legal when you started hosting it or not. Of course, that's a UK law, so isn't entirely relevant. Equally, when the Taliban were in power in Afghanistan all images of people were illegal. Should then all images of people be removed from all internet pages in the archive that might be accessed from Afghanistan? Or perhaps just those webpages that were archived during that period in Afghanistan's history? The Taliban aren't in power in Afghanistan (well, not all of it), so what relevance do their laws have to anything? Also, how would you propose finding all the images that are illegal by whatever definition you choose? Remember that no only do you have to check every sight archived (a susbstantial percentage of those on the internet) but also every version of every site - for a busy site you're talking up to 20 versions per year, maybe more. Even if censorship of the archive were desirable (personnally I think it is anything but) I just cannot see how it is achievable. Indeed, as I said, I don't know what the best course of action for them is. Copying and making available large amounts of content without anyone examining it first is a rather risky business model. ___ Wikimedia UK mailing list wikimediau...@wikimedia.org http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_UK http://mail.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimediauk-l
