Are some UK ISPs censoring Wikipedia?
It looks like Wikipedia has fallen-foul of the long reach of the Internet Watch Foundation, which has decided to block pages on it. The main offending page is dedicated to the rock band The Scorpions album “Virgin Killer”, which featured on its original 1976 sleeve a pretty tasteless image of a naked pre-pubescent girl. Try and access this page from many UK ISPs at the moment, and you’ll get an error message telling you it was “not found on this server”. In fact, it is on the server – you’re just not allowed to access it. The issue first came to attention when it was noticed that a large number of UK ISP users were coming from a single IP address, including all of those from my own ISP, Be Unlimited. This address was used to spam Wikipedia, and so got blocked – leading to thousands of people unable to edit articles or create new user logins. The discussions of this on Wikipedia suggest that what’s happening is this: once a site has been notified to the IWF as containing child pornograp
