cleanfeed and wikipedia

[Richard Clayton]

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In article <alpine.LFD.2.00.0812171228130.5839@localhost.localdomain>,
Paul Jakma <paul@clubi.ie> writes

>On Tue, 16 Dec 2008, Roland Perry wrote:
>
>> People don't just type in urls at random, they have to be sent to 
>> most pages/images they view. That might be a search engine, but 
>> also bloggers, urls in emails and usenet postings [spam or 
>> otherwise], web pages that say "here's a collection of links to 
>> rather odd pictures I've found", and so on.
>>
>> Blocking these links by "pretending" the destinations don't exist 
>> will stop the casual surfer from stumbling over the images, without 
>> troubling them with the news that they've had a "near miss".
>
>So why didn't they block google then? At the time the wikipedia 
>article was blocked, you could still view the same wikipedia article 
>via Google's cache, and hence view the exact same image which was the 
>intended subject of the block.

It depends when you looked...  Google certainly removed some of its
copies of the material; they added text to their image search to say
that one copy (of 60+ !) of the album cover had been removed. A link was
provided to the (somewhat anonymised) notice, which is archived at
Chilling Effects.

The search engines, as a matter of standard practice, remove items which
are on the IWF list from their search results (arguably having more
impact than all the blocking systems put together!)

Since the IWF made somewhat of a mess of identifying what they wanted to
be blocked (they didn't realise that there were two spellings of one of
the two URLs and they actually listed a third), it's probably not
surprising that Google was still returning something in the search
results...

<URL:http://www.lightbluetouchpaper.org/2008/12/11/technical-aspects-of-
the-censoring-of-wikipedia/>

>As much as I disagree with filtering the internet from me to prevent 
>me breaking laws I have no intention of breaking (for reasons of 
>principle and practice), 

If you encounter the material unintentionally and immediately delete it,
then you don't actually break the UK law....  However, there is of
course the risk that you'd have to go to court to present this defence,
and that will be at the end of a long inconvenient and humiliating
process.

>if there must be filtering I'd prefer as 
>much of the details to be open to scrutiny as possible. Particularly 
>the technical details of it, which should not affect operational 
>efficacy in any reasonable way.

ORG has blogged on just this topic

<URL:http://www.openrightsgroup.org/2008/12/15/lessons-and-questions-
for-the-iwf/>

- -- 
richard                                              Richard Clayton

They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary
safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.         Benjamin Franklin

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