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by tgandrews 5540 days ago
Looking at the IWF website. Only child porn is within their remit. This seems a little crazy breaking parts of the web and effectively assuming everyone visiting a file sharing site is a paedophile.

http://www.iwf.org.uk/hotline/the-laws
1 comments
cstross 5540 days ago
As is noted in the original article, this is a malfunction: IWF issue a blocklist of URLs, not IP addresses, but the ISPs filter content by proxying. Some of the ISPs have crappier proxy setups than others. Notably, the biggest ISPs (Virgin and BT) are the most aggressive at enforcement; smaller ISPs may not have the resources to waste on nannying their customers. I'm on Be Unlimited -- smaller, aimed at clueful users, features include stuff like static IP addresses and unblocked SMTP access -- and Filesonic.com appears to be accessible.

(I am not-dumpster diving for kiddie porn, however. It's a strict-liability offense: merely having the stuff in your hard drive cache, unlooked-at, is enough to draw a gaol sentence.)

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_delirium 5540 days ago
It's a strict-liability offense: merely having the stuff in your hard drive cache, unlooked-at, is enough to draw a gaol sentence.

That's something that comes up periodically w.r.t. to the IWF itself. It's not an agency of the police (or part of the govt at all), so the exception to child-porn laws that permits police to view such photographs in the course of an investigation doesn't apply. Thus, if the law were to be applied as written, it should be strictly illegal for IWF employees to have accessed many of the sites on its blocklist. So either they haven't done so, and their blocklist is of questionable accuracy; or they have done so, and thereby committed a crime.

Fortunately for them, the government supports the IWF and has no interest in prosecuting them.

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andyking 5540 days ago
There's a page on the Be User Group website about their proxying of the various file-storage sites, with workarounds. I'm with O2, and have found the messages about "failed the captcha too many times" or "you may only download one file at a time" popping up sometimes.

I don't suppose the ISPs are too bothered about the sites being filtered - although there is some legal content on them, they're mainly used to host copied music and TV, so there is little incentive for them to make allowances for access to the non-porn content.

http://www.beusergroup.co.uk/?id=468

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g_lined 5540 days ago
Be Unlimited is a very good ISP (I use it too) but since it is now owned by O2, though it hasn't been merged, I think it's now much more vulnerable to being forced down any route that the more generic O2 broadband takes.
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bodski 5540 days ago
It seems the proxies are filtering by URL but all requests to any part of a flagged domain go through the proxy and so the sites see all subscribers of a particular ISP appearing to come from the same IP address. Hence the "your IP address has failed the Captcha too many times" type of messages. The Wikipedia/IWF 'edit ban' debacle was exactly the same thing due to Wikipedia limiting edits from any given IP address to prevent abuse.

Incidentally, I'm with BeUnlimited and it seems uploading.com always thinks that my IP address has exceeded some download limit:

"Sorry, you have reached your daily download limit. Please try again tomorrow or acquire a premium membership."

This does not happen when browsing from a cheap Linux VPS box, looks like Be/O2 are proxying too, except from curl -I output it looks like it's a fully transparent proxy.

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