British ISPs blocking access to Wikipedia
At least six of the United Kingdom’s main Internet Service Providers (ISPs) have implemented monitoring and filtering mechanisms that are causing major problems for UK contributors on websites operated by the Wikimedia Foundation, amongst up to 1200 other websites. Some ISPs have blocked customers from accessing some Wikimedia websites including the free, online encyclopedia, Wikipedia, altogether. The filters appear to be applied because Wikimedia sites are hosting a Scorpions album cover which some call child pornography. The Scorpions are a German rock band who have used several controversial album covers and are perhaps best known for their song, “Rock You Like a Hurricane”. The measures applied redirect traffic for a significant portion of the UK’s Internet population through six servers which can log and filter the content that is available to the end user.
The filtering is in response to the Internet Watch Foundation’s list of websites that host or contain content that have been reported to contain inappropriate images of naked children, under the age of 18. The IWF considers those images child pornography. However, in the United States (where the websites of the Wikimedia Foundation are hosted), it is not considered obscene under the criteria of the Miller test, which requires that an obscene work lack “serious literary, artistic, political or scientific value” (as album art is used to “brand” the album, it is considered to be artistic). Contributors or individuals attempting to view an affected image or file, depending on their ISP, may get a warning saying, “we have blocked this page because, according to the Internet Watch Foundation (IWF), it contains indecent images of children or pointers to them; you could be breaking UK law if you viewed the page.”. Other ISPs provide blank pages, 404 errors, or other means of blocking the content.
Source: Wikinews
Comments(90)
Thanks for the news it works for me and im from the uk but there was no need to show me that image
At this point, the only way the Scorpions can make a buck is through controversy. It’s not like they can get by on their musical merits.
Child exploitation at it’s best. The record industry is full of it.Just to sell a few crap records
Meelu: They provided the link, you’re the one to fault for clicking it.
Iam from germany and ddint know that
But the question is why is the band allowed to use such a cover @_@ ?
Still its wrong from the isps to cut the uk users of from wikipedia
Pretty stupid imo
@Meelu: you know what is great about the internet? You don’t HAVE to click if you don’t want to see it. So stop whining, and don’t click on that link, it clearly says in the article “the cover which some call child pornography”.
@RLSLOG: showing the image in here is relevant. And thanks for not posting the image right away in the article. It might offend people like Meelu.
@3 dexter.. the album in question by the Scorpions is 33 years old! it was Virgin Killer and was released in 1975, and while it did have a nude girl on the cover, it was not in a pornographic way, that said, it was replaced anyway within weeks of it’s release and was always sold with the “new” cover which had no nudity or children on it. Wikipedia just had a link to the old album cover for comparison/hisortic sake obviously, but it has nothing to do with the band or recoard labels. It’s much ado about nothing, 33 year old news!
very funny!
wow this is pretty silly.
i gotta say though, that’s a killer album cover. IMO those pics of naked kids by that photographer were more obscene than this.
enter8, you attack the Scorpions as if they are creating this controversy, that album is over 30 years old.
okaaaaayyy? so ban nevermind cover too plzz
I am on virgin media here and the image is not blocked, but this appears to be.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virgin_Killer
let me know if its the same for anyone else.
i’m worried that virginmedia didn’t block the image for me…
why don’t they block this too, for example? it’s also on wikipedia. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:God2-Sistine_Chapel.png. f-in’ douchebags hypocrits.
every week there’s like a story of the UK banning, or suing someone
im glad i don’t live there
I’m from the uk it’s just another thing big brother is telling you what you can or can’t do. Soon i’ll have to get it in writing to take a dump then provide a sample for explosives to see if i’ve got terrorist intentions. lol.
Not blocked on Sky. That news to me as there has been nothing in the news to suggest that is happening
@13 this is the same for me.
@16
i hear ya, friend.
it’ll be sad day when we have to give up curry.
If your totally paranoid about big brother watching you watch the movie “Eagle Eyes” it’s starting to make me wonder just what I do online or by phone is actually been monitored.
Im virgin media too and btw i wasnt offended i was talking for the people who may accidently click the link and dont want to see the picture
it’s funny this was all brought about due a german rock band, when their own Blind Faith did pretty much the same thing with their album cover in 1969. ahh the british, always trying desperately to exude refinement and nobility; just to distract the worlds eye from their past transgressions to the rest of the world.
Fcking bastards burn to hell
I checked the link to see what the fuss was about. I understand that the album is 30 years+ old and this old news, however i was new to me. And it is sick that someone would want to put that on a album cover. Deeply disturbing. That said, I imagine those into child porn will get little satisfaction from it, so I suspect it is unnecessary to block. On the other hand, although I support freedom of the web 99% of the time, I do think there should be a line drawn with child porn and, in view FWIW, and this is pretty close to where the line should be drawn. Important lines of law/regulation often do well to be a few steps behind where they need to be.
This smells of christian nutjobs.
besides the fact that blocking of this image is ridiculous, blocking wikipedia is no harm. it’s full of lies from exactly those christian nutjobbers.
last year my old isp, beunlimited blocked badongo because of the same reason. instead of blocking the actual link of the alleged file, they blocked the whole domain.
I do think the whole censorship thing has gone to far you need to protect children from been abused and such but the album cover have no sexual content and most likely the child agreed to the photo shoot. I remember a news reporter sent some photos in for developing and some were of her kids in the bath and someone sent them to the police as child porn.
the image has not been blocked, only the article itself http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virgin_killer <- try that link
leaving the picture without explanation, gg iwf
talking about censorship…..
that page doesnt seem to be working from uk isp but it’s working from a french ip.
Can’t believe that crappy album cover is STILL causing controversy. Presumably people will be complaining about the covers to Lovedrive and Animal Magnetism next week. LOL
Smell the Glove, anyone?
“It’s such a fine line between stupid and clever”
it works on a french ISP … weird … ah right! that’s because it’s only blocked in the UK
@15 Damn
yeah, we’re quaking in our boots here in the UK. OHNOEZ we can’t look at some 30 year old album cover on wikipedia.
PROTIP: TYPE “VIRGIN KILLER” INTO A GOOGLE IMAGE SEARCH AND SEE HOW CENSORED THAT IMAGE REALLY IS.
blocked for me too on virgin media, the picture isn’t but the article is….because obviously a paedophile would want to read the whole article before looking at the picture
yes my isp has blocked url but not url for image lol google cache has page lol epic fail Internet Watch Foundation.
freaking insane not even pr0n. http headers point to:
X-Squid-Error: ERR_ACCESS_DENIED 0
X-Cache: MISS from wensleydale.karoo.lan
Via: 1.0 wensleydale.karoo.lan:3128 (squid/2.6.STABLE15)
some sort govt proxy big brother servers
@12 blocked article for me too, not the image though lmao
It just says Object not found
Ive got Orange broadband btw
All ok from BT
Same virgin media seems to be blocking the URL for that page. But Google cache works, epic fail. What next block Google and all US sites that host the image??? why not while we are at it block all sites that link to the image, or might link to the image. idiots.
I kinda understand the predicament. Block the specific images but dont block the whole of wikipedia…
My problem is, where does it stop, will that Nivarna album cover with the small baby on it be classified as Child pornography? What about articles covering puberty? After they’ve stopped the child pornography, they will have nothing better to do but block articles regarding illegal substances, and once all thats done, how about blocking all that government propaganda..
Soon I’ll start calling you Poms chinese
So BT and Tiscalli suppory peadophillia, probably dont want to lose the customers
I’m from the US, but it’s sad how much all of us are having to fight for the right to net neutrality. Also, I noticed that they block Wikipedia pages, but they don’t block any of the *chans, many of which are famous for hosting child pornography.
you can still view the wikipedia article over the https site…
system fail…
That’s not CP. She’s definately 18.
This album was released over 30 years ago, at that time, a photo like the one displayed was not considered to be pornographic (to some it would have been just poor taste)However, from this “news” you should expect the nirvana album with the naked boy to be declared pornographic and the child in the photo offered councelling within a couple of years. Yeah, it’s a crock
https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Virgin_killer
seems to work without being blocked, I guess we all have to use the secure version of wikipedia from now on to not be routed through a transparent proxy, you can even edit articles from that site.
Nude girl doesn’t equal childporn. But yeah better block it anyway, don’t want people to view and suddenly grow horns and turn into evil pedophiles who hang around outside schools plotting sickening deeds.
Some of the child pornography laws are ridiculous. This reminded me of last week when a teenage girl was arrested on child pornography laws because she shared nude pictures of herself using her phone.
I do believe that this cover could be offensive because with a title like “Virgin Killer” and the picture provided does pose sexual connotation without a doubt. But the album cover is over 30 years old and its more of a historical account than pornographic.
And yet again, this would NEVER happen in denmark.
Don’t you guys at UK have some constitutional? Saying something about the f…king freedom of SPEECH?
NOTHING can be blocked in denmark. (currently tpb.org is being blocked, and lots of ppl are going to trial over it, since it’s HIGHLY illegal).
They ban this as offensive but leave TV programs like ‘the X factor’ on. I cant think of anything more offensive than that show.
LMAO
here is a document that helps bypass internet censorship
http://rapidshare.com/files/128998574/bypassing_internet_censorship.rtf.zip
here is a page about extreme album covers. anonymized.
http://anonym.to/?http://www.orgasmatrix.com/blog/noticias/13-most-extreme-album-covers/
child porn? honestly? what about us 10 year old who want to see other 10 year olds naked? child porn should be legal for children… its not disturbing, i’d get naked for my fellow 10 year old friend if id get to see them naked..
Here’s another way – without using HTTPS – of accessing wikimedia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Virgin_Killer
thus proving that censorship of the internets just doesn’t work.
we are not baby’s anymore
our relationship with the government is fundamentally corrupt
we dont need people to tell us what is wrong, its irionic people defend that, its like your mother tells you you will die if they didnt excist. but we are grown up civilisation and our government is unnecesary and corrupt and full of crminals
… & the inage is still up on WikiNews LOL!
http://en.wikinews.org/wiki/British_ISPs_restrict_access_to_Wikipedia_amid_child_pornography_allegations
to those offended, dont limit your perspective. you cant be that single minded.
sidenote: didnt knew the scorpions had such a cover, but they always seemed to raise more controversy with their album cover then with their music. seems strange to me but hard to judge something which came out before i was born.
Quote #24 Pantman:
“although I support freedom of the web 99% of the time”
Then you don’t support freedom of the web, dummy.
I Lol’d.
Where do you draw the line in cencorship? What is acceptable and what is not?
Brits, REVOLT!
16 is the legal age in the UK…
I remember the daily sport running an week of pictures for a girl in my sister’s school. On the week that she was turning 16 they produced a more revealing shot every day in the run up to her 16th birthday, at which point she whacked her giant jubblies out.
or are the daily Sport pedaling child porn?
England is becoming more and more like that V is for Vendetta movie, bit scary.
I agree with #4 and #6 – when a site highlights the word ‘cover’- in an article about an allegedly offensive cover- you can reasonably expect the cover to appear if you click the link – der!
In my view the cover isn’t offensive -altho I can see how some prudes would see it as such – and blocking all Wikipedia links is just overkill.
We had a similar spat in Australia recently over nude photos of children taken by a well known photographer and part of an exhibition of his work. They were seized and consideration was given to prosecting him for obsenity and under child porn legislation (I approve of the legislation but not in this case). Even the PM had his say (he disapproved). Looks like Aust is going to go the same way as UK; soon won’t be able to access anything which offends the wowsers – back to putting frills on piano legs because the sight of ‘legs’ can excite passions ??? (check your history, it really happened in the late 19th century!)
Guys, the planet is on the brink of a global revolution. This revolution will originate from the USA, which will soon break down into seperate states.
Abit like the fall of the USSR. America is on the brink of destruction.
What will trigger the revolution? Well the fact that people are starting to finally wake up, and realise that this whole game is rigged. That we are existing in a world dominated by the greed, and corruption of afew sinister elitists.
Whether you believe this or not is completely irrelevant. The whole house of cards have finally started to fall. Don’t for a second think this ‘credit crunch’ will disappear anytime soon. It’s continuing to snowball, resulting in the worlds ‘freemarket’ being snapped up by afew powerful individuals. This in turn will result in the death of anything we have ever known. Prepare to beg like animals for food, or grab a shotgun, and lets finally put an end to this filth…
Peace…
#48
UK doesn’t have a constitution so people only have freedom of speech (and all the other things that get written into constitutions – like the right to bear arms!!) if they can prove that it is a tradition (in UK terms -the last 1000yrs) It’s only when it goes to court that anyone knows whether it’s allowed or not. In this case there is a law about child porn on the net (recent) and some w****r is applying that to a 30yo album cover – are they going to ban all the cherubs in the ‘fine art’? or on the Xmas cards?
How ridiculous; it’s cover art for goodness sake. Only a warped mind would see it as child pornography. Google images will return hundreds, if not thousands, of links to the same image. You never hear of people crying foul of old paintings featuring naked children.
@47
There was also that one that happened in america a while ago about the girl who found an old camera and decided to see what she had on it so she had the film developed and apparantly when she was 15 she tooks some nudes of herself and then completely forgot about them and the camera. She went to jail.
“… back to putting frills on piano legs because the sight of ‘legs’ can excite passions ??? (check your history, it really happened in the late 19th century!) …”
Urban Myth.
It was for protection.
Nothing more.
Damn, I love Q.I.
The irony about this one is what alot of people would call a classic film lolita is accepted around the world without anyone batting an eyelid which is basiclly a story about a bloke have an affair with a child. which shows the hypocritical attitude of everyone
#65 is right. This is Political Correctness Gone mad Nothing more.
Any of you have children? ever take a picture of your child when he or she was naked? If you have then by your plans you are guilty of child pornography. go hang yourself
Do you dress your kids? sounds like sexual harassment to me. go hang yourself
pictures of a person naked doesn’t make it pornography no matter how old the subject is.
If you think otherwise go hang yourself.
LOL @ Scorpions… the GARY GLITTER’s of the german rock world
“so, do you vant to be int my gang?”
Human League – anyone
http://www.last.fm/music/The+Human+League/Reproduction
The Scorpions are trying desperately to sting….themselves in the arse*
WOW thats someones Little girl. I wonder the girl that’s on the front cover is alive? If she is then she should give the consent? Right? anyways it would be interesting to hear the girl/woman now side of the story just to know who made her do it or was she with an agency or if she was ever abused. That would enlighten us on the issue and help us to make a better conclusion of this matter. For historical sake.
plz put warning before putting up link to the controversial image. thanks.
@#73 CoolBlade
According to the wikipedia article in question:
Quote:
The band’s rhythm guitarist Rudolf Schenker offers the following description of the circumstances behind the album cover.
“We didn’t actually have the idea. It was the record company. The record company guys were like, ‘Even if we have to go to jail, there’s no question that we’ll release that.’ On the song ‘Virgin Killer’, time is the virgin killer. But then, when we had to do the interviews about it, we said ‘Look, listen to the lyrics and then you’ll know what we’re talking about. We’re using this only to get attention. That’s what we do.’ Even the girl, when we met her fifteen years later, had no problem with the cover. Growing up in Europe, sexuality, of course not with children, was very normal. The lyrics really say it all. Time is the virgin killer. A kid comes into the world very naive, they lose that naiveness and then go into this life losing all of this getting into trouble. That was the basic idea about all of it.”
And:
Francis Buchholz was the bassist for the band and, in an interview conducted in early 2007, recollects that the model depicted on the cover was either the daughter or the niece of “the guy who did the cover design.”
@ CoolBlade
the band actually interviewed the girl 15 years later and she was perfectly okay with it. Apparently she was the niece of the artist who took the photo btw.
it’s only child porn if you are a pervert, for normal people it’s just a naked girl.
@Sistine Chapel poster dork: the questionable material here is not that it’s nudity, but it’s child nudity. So your post is irrelevant.
Er… Sorry, my above message is intended to show that not only is the girl alive and has decided that this cover was IN NO WAY a regrettable incident, but also that her family members gave consent and surely if there had been any abuse it would have come out at the time of the album release.
I noticed this on saturday night, i was not happy. virgin media will be receiving a letter from me monday morning, this is a bloody joke. They clearly wont win!
It is actually wikipedia blocking editors not signed in, not the ISPs themselves. This is because everyone on those ISPs is being routed through proxy servers that have a small number of IP addresses so therefore it makes it impossible for wikipedia to distinguish between users as they all report the same IP address, and so makes it impossible to ban individual users. A crap situation all round!
@24: Then don’t you dare bring your children to the beach, you noob, otherwise some pedo might take a picture of them in their swimsuit and masturbate to it. Make them wear burkas.
@60 yes, according to the laws in the UK and the US, pictures of nude 16 year olds is child pornography. Even if the age of consent is 16 (which it should be in the US as well…) it’s still illegal to take photos of them nude until they’re 18.
Vodafone blocks this site (rlslog) by default, when using their WAP services.
I swear for a second, I saw Pedobear on that cover!
I say we all start dropping our interent connections. I mean seriously disconnecting and unplugging from the so called “digital world” we’ve all been hooked on for to many years. Over the past two months I’ve been debating, trying to decide whether or not to drop out and take away the one thing that all these companies are so very hungry for, my money. Since they don’t seem to respect us, the end users. They don’t seem to respect our rights or our wishes and they certainly don’t seem to respect anyone’s freedom, maybe it’s time to pull the plug on them. What will the internet watch foundation watch without the internet? Who will big brother spy on without any users online? How will they control the flow of information if it’s all passed by word of mouth and print like it used to be? Why? Why are we allowing our lives to be run by people who will take all our money and then spit in our faces and treat us like dogs? Fight back I say, take back the one thing we can take back. Ourselves.
guess i just broke the law…
not that it doesnt happen everyday coming to this site anyway
On O2 Broadband here. The normal Wikipedia page for the article is blocked but the image is not! Also https works fine. FWIW I find the album cover quite offensive – but don’t agree with the censorship. Scorpions were popular when I was at school and friends of mine had this album. Anyone who wanted to see it could do so easily. Surely it is better to let people read the whole page and see the image in that context?
Ha Ha!
Europeans are all paedophiles.
Lot of “SICK” people here! If you think there is nothing wrong with that cover? You are MAD! Common! I dare anyone to photograph their 12 years old daughter like that and see if you can do it without any guilt! This is just 100% Evil! Unless you are phedopile! Right Martin?
This is ridiculous. The image is not pornographic; it is not indecent. It may be offensive, but the law in the UK (which is where the IWF has any effect) does not forbid offensive pictures, only indecent ones.
Pictures of children, simply sitting, with few or no clothes on, are not ‘obscene’ or ‘disgusting’ unless the context makes them so. Anyone who thinks that they *are* is being hysterical.
What’s next – banning the cover of the Blind Faith album? Someone has already mentioned the Nirvana album cover. It’s time for everyone to grow up and understand that no issue is helped by people over-reacting.
For those who still have doubts, read ‘1984′, in which Winston Smith works in the Ministry of Truth where he helps out with altering photographs in order to manipulate the understanding of history – Orwell was inspired by alterations in the Soviet Union to photographs of Stalin, in which his fellow revolutionaries were progressively edited out of the original as they met their deaths during Stalin’s purges. Some things are more important than a few people’s hysterical urge to gather up their skirts and jump on a chair as soon as they see something which upsets them.
@all
to start this kind of discussion was the reason of the cover in the first place. so the cover works pretty well.
if you get excited by it, it is your problem. its like rotten, everyone has seen it. that is the internet ppl…
what do you expect? (and yes, there are evilminded ppl out ther)
@74
There is a warning…
“he filters appear to be applied because Wikimedia sites are hosting a Scorpions album which some call child pornography.” … which some call child pornography.” That not a warning?
IWF backs down on Wiki censorship
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/7774102.stm