Karoo filtering Wikipedia

[Sacro]

Karoo are now censoring wikipedia pages and returning false 404 (File not found) pages.

Link NSFW.

[Halloway]

Can you be sure that Karoo have actively blocked the page themselves? My guess is that they have simply acted on the URL as provided to them by the IWF. Or it's possible that the blocking is happening somewhere beyond the extent of Karoo's network.

If you are desperate to see the original page, it's available on Wikipedia's secure site:

https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Virgin_killer

Still very very NSFW.

[desandcaz]

tried the first link twice now , no problem in connecting or reading page that is "blocked"  used windows and suse systems to test  Link NSFW.
very confused

[stormy]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virgin_Killer

Is the link which is blocked, Karoo gives 404 which in itself is bad form, there should be at least some explanation as a place holder. The cover is nothing new and has been on Amazon's website for aeons, I don't see what the big deal is now. What is worrying is that carpet blanch authority that the IWF have to block internet websites, the photo is not illegal, there has never been any police investigation or charges, or court hearing on the cover.

This is the start of things to come.

[chrisbyrd]

There's some suggestion that Amazon wasn't filtered because they have the cash to sue the IWF, whereas Wikipedia are a charity who are always short of cash.

The IWF are a pain in the ass and seem to have appointed themselves overlords of the Internet. Their actions probably impact a different one of our customers every single week. The trouble is, as soon as anyone questions their actions they always spin it as "So you think child porn on the Internet is fine then?", whereas in reality, things aren't even close to 'borderline'


(my own personal views, not that of my firm etc)

[dylan]

I think that one of the big problems is the way that Karoo manifest the blocking as a 404 error. For anyone that doesn't know - a 404 error should mean "Document or file requested by the client was not found".

I find it interesting that Karoo are using a transparent proxy, and would love to know whether or not they are keeping the logs of the websites I visit, and how long they keep them for. It may be an idea to make an information request from Karoo to that effect. I believe they have to respond to a request for information on the data that they may hold about you.

BT use a system called Cleanfeed to filter web content. Apparently it returns 404 error pages in response to material on the IWF blocklist. I wonder if this is coincidental / if Karoo are using it or just giving out 404's for the hell of it.
 
Another system is available (for free allegedlly, but only used by their own ISPs) from a company called Brightview. According to t'internet the system called Webminder uses Cisco’s proprietary Web Cache Communication Protocol version 2 (WCCPv2) to redirect suspect traffic to a number of patched squid proxy servers.

One thing I didn't realise until I started looking into this though, is that all ISPs are required to perform network level blocking of sites on the Internet Watch Foundation blocklist.

It's all rather mental methinks...

[dylan]

And the IWF has backed down and decided to let the image through again:

http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08%2F12%2F09%2F210230