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By way of an update to my earlier post, The Guardian reported late on Tuesday that the Internet Watch Foundation has decided to reverse “its ban on a Wikipedia page and image of a record album cover showing a young nude girl”.

This apparently “unprecedented move” (of what, jackasses changing their mind when they’re clearly wrong?) is a brilliant thing. As though it couldn’t get better, they even admitted that it actually had the opposite effect to what they’d intended. In other words, many more people have seen the album cover now.

This whole situation is hilarious. They’ve now admitted that they can, at times, be wrong, which is going to make life a hell of a lot more difficult for them in the future. Enjoy, IWF. Here’s a link to their press release.

Here’s the deal, if you haven’t heard this blow up in the last couple of days. It first kicked off around midday on the 5th December when it was discovered on Wikipedia that all users in the UK were being passed through a transparent proxy; allowing content to be filtered, in this case the Virgin Killer article and image.

The Internet Watch Foundation is deeming that this image should be blocked in the UK because, after receiving a report from a member of the public, they decided it was child pornography. Whether it is or isn’t is up for debate (though personally I think there’s no way in hell it qualifies), but what really pisses me off is that they don’t even apply their own rules across the board.

The following screenshot was taken from my O₂ phone (because thankfully we’re not filtered here at uni):

On this same phone, the Wikipedia article mentioned is blocked – if you’re interested, I get an "HTTP/1.1 403 Forbidden" error. I guess the only message I have to share is that censorship does nothing.

There’s a good conversation from BBC Radio 4’s Today programme between David Gerard (a Wikipedia contributor) and Susan Robertson of the IWF included below, originally here. There’s a massive discussion on Wikipedia about it, and Ian Betteridge has one of the better articles.

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