ISPs censoring wiki...

isps should forward information to the police that fall under this category

i know this will result in loads of 'big brother' and 'where does it stop' responses
 
To be honest it's a horrible system, it's blocked because of the IWF lists, which the government told ISPs to 'voluntarily' use or it would bring in new legislation. A lot of the larger ISPs mysteriously went along with it for whatever reason.

Even from the ISP point of view (which is what I do for a living) I'm slightly shocked at the routine screening of traffic through transparent proxies...
 
What's even more ironic is that while the page may be blocked, the contentious image itself isn't. If they'd just blocked the image the editing problem almost certainly would never have surfaced. I have no problem at all with this sort of child protection, but in this particular case it all seems like a storm in a teacup. :/

The transparent proxy thing doesn't surprise me at all. Most ISPs do that primarily because it helps keep traffic within their networks, thus reducing the size of the peering network needed. The fact they can use this configuration to censor as well is just an added 'bonus' to them.

PS - I've got a Wikipedia account anyway so I'm alright, Jack.
 
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Berserker said:
What's even more ironic is that while the page may be blocked, the contentious image itself isn't. If they'd just blocked the image the editing problem almost certainly would never have surfaced. I have no problem at all with this sort of child protection, but in this particular case it all seems like a storm in a teacup. :/

The transparent proxy thing doesn't surprise me at all. Most ISPs do that primarily because it helps keep traffic within their networks, thus reducing the size of the peering network needed. The fact they can use this configuration to censor as well is just an added 'bonus' to them.

PS - I've got a Wikipedia account anyway so I'm alright, Jack.
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We don't proxy any internet traffic, the infrastructure required to do it is too expensive to justify given that it also degrades service somewhat, it's cheaper to expand peering and transit capacity.

They're also not proxy-ing all traffic in this way, it appears it's been redirected to the proxy by DNS entries, anybody on openDNS is unaffected, which means it's only been done for certain sites by the looks of things.

I dislike the censorship, I'm alright with shaping traffic but outright blocking some based on the opinions of a single group like the IWF is going a bit far. They have a laudable aim but I'm not entirely comfortable with the implementation.

That said, the crowd going mad about it being a police state in the UK today are a bunch of idiots who need to try spending some time in an actual police state.
 
It isn't being done via DNS poisoning on Be at least. I don't use their DNS servers because I've got my own, and I get the same address both from a server that can access the page and one that can't.

Fair point about proxying though. You're on the inside, I'm not. I know some ISPs used to do the transparent proxying trick, and I suspect some still do.

As for your point about censorship, you're right in that it does smack rather of the Chinese approach, but then again I have no issue at all with preventing kiddie fiddlers from getting their fix. In this case, however, given the age and quality of the image involved I'm really not sure how that could be seen to apply.
 
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Berserker said:
It isn't being done via DNS poisoning on Be at least. I don't use their DNS servers because I've got my own, and I get the same address both from a server that can access the page and one that can't.
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I hear that virgin are using DNS poisoning. Different people will be implementing different ways I guess.
 
one of the things i like on this forum is the people who know facts, instead of speculating them :)

(not having a dig at you Berserker of course)
 
The main thing that worries me, is how long could this have been going on for? Could ISPs have been doing this sort of thing to other websites without the anyone knowing, and its only due to this wikipedia story that people are now hearing about it?
 
Dist said:
The main thing that worries me, is how long could this have been going on for? Could ISPs have been doing this sort of thing to other websites without the anyone knowing, and its only due to this wikipedia story that people are now hearing about it?
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Filtering based on IWF lists has been happening for a while (though they have a limited mandate so far - child porn basically).

The government, as I said earlier, basically told ISPs to voluntarily implement this filtering or it would legally compel them too. Small ISPs generally ignored them but the Virgin Media and Be*'s of the world fell into line pretty quickly. We don't internet traffic based on anything and won't unless legally required to but most of the bigger ISPs do these days, but unless you were bent on accessing child porn you likely wouldn't notice - until something like this came up...
 
bledd. said:
(not having a dig at you Berserker of course)
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Oh yes you were. :p

No offence taken - we all make mistakes sometimes. :)

And yeah, I agree, this isn't new at all. It all goes to demonstrate how much we all rely on ISPs to 'do the right thing', and how easy it is to 'subvert' the internet should someone wish to do so given the right level of access. That's probably not news to those of us (like me) who've been in this for a decade or more but I'm sure it'll come as a surprise to some.
 
bigredshark said:
We don't proxy any internet traffic, the infrastructure required to do it is too expensive to justify given that it also degrades service somewhat, it's cheaper to expand peering and transit capacity.

They're also not proxy-ing all traffic in this way, it appears it's been redirected to the proxy by DNS entries, anybody on openDNS is unaffected, which means it's only been done for certain sites by the looks of things.

I dislike the censorship, I'm alright with shaping traffic but outright blocking some based on the opinions of a single group like the IWF is going a bit far. They have a laudable aim but I'm not entirely comfortable with the implementation.

That said, the crowd going mad about it being a police state in the UK today are a bunch of idiots who need to try spending some time in an actual police state.
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I use opendns and its still being blocked :confused:I strongly disapprove of ISP level censoring, there needs to be a line drawn or it will only continue to get further out of hand i.e China...
 
tntcoder said:
I use opendns and its still being blocked :confused:I strongly disapprove of ISP level censoring, there needs to be a line drawn or it will only continue to get further out of hand i.e China...
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Which ISP? I've heard (I would have thought reliably given the people who told me) that virgin and openDNS worked fine and they were just doing DNS poisoning...
 
bigredshark said:
Which ISP? I've heard (I would have thought reliably given the people who told me) that virgin and openDNS worked fine and they were just doing DNS poisoning...
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Karoo, Hulls only ISP. Any idea how they would be filtering it if its not by DNS interception? Would they actually be doing packet analysis?
 
I believe Karoo use traffic shaping, so they could have implemented a rule on that platform to block the relevant connection.
 
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