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Archive for the ‘Wikipedia’ Category

Wikipedia Editors Delete Article Listing Wikileaks Mirror Sites

By Mike Melanson / December 9, 2010 9:53 AM

Ever since whistle-blowing site Wikileaks began its latest round of document releases, it has found opposition and support in various places. It has hopped around from server to server, had its bank account closed, watched as PayPal, Visa and Mastercard all shut down donations to the site, and even had an anonymous group of hackers retaliate in Wikileak’s name. One thing that keeps Wikileaks going, however, is the simple fact that it has hundreds of mirror sites in different languages and locales.

One such listing of these sites hosted on name-in-kind service Wikipedia has been deleted by the collaborative encyclopedia’s editors. Should we cry “Foul!” or is the deletion just more business as usual for the site?

If you take a look at the discussion page for the deletion of the “List of WikiLeaks mirrors” page, you can see some of the views for and against its deletion. While proponents argue that the list of links should be kept until Wikileaks finds more stable hosting, or that it offers a value outside of just listing links, most opponents cite clear Wikipedia policy stating that “Wikipedia is not a mirror or repository of links.” In the end, and despite all of the lofty debate, the article’s removal looks like a simple matter of policy.

We got in touch with Wikipedia’s parent organization, Wikimedia, to find out what was really going on. Moka Pantages, a spokesperson for Wikimedia, told us it was “business as usual.”

This article was started two days ago and deleted yesterday. This is business as usual for our community of volunteer editors. Deleting link lists are common. When there is no encyclopedic value, an article is deleted. In this case, the article was simply a list of links, so our community deleted it quickly. A recent article deleted for the same reason was “List of Active Drive in Theaters” People editing Wikipedia have nothing against drive-in theaters, of course, it’s just that lists like these don’t belong on Wikipedia.

For a bit of an interesting behind-the-scenes look at how this was done, you can look at the discussion page yourself. In the deletion of the article, editors cited a number of clauses, including a particularly interesting one – the “Snowball clause”. It states that “If an issue does not have a snowball’s chance in hell of being accepted by a certain process, there’s no need to run it through the entire process.”

Of course, if you were using the Wikipedia article to keep track of how to find your favorite classified document releasing, Whac-A-Mole website, you can also visit its own list of mirror sites. If that doesn’t work, simply search for “Wikileaks mirrors” and you’ll run across more than enough lists. This is, of course, the distributed wonder that is the Internet – take down one thing and a million more pop up in other locations.

So silly that I am also publishing the FBI seal……

FBI to Wikipedia: Remove our seal – CNN.com

By John D. Sutter, CNN
August 3, 2010 — Updated 1632 GMT (0032 HKT)

The FBI’s seal, shown here in a photograph, is the subject of a legal dispute between the bureau and Wikipedia.

* The FBI threatens Wikipedia with legal action over the use of its seal
* Wikipedia says it will not remove the FBI seal from an entry on the federal agency
* FBI claims website duplicated its seal without permission, in violation of federal law.

(CNN) — The U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation has threatened Wikipedia with legal action if the online encyclopedia doesn’t remove the FBI’s seal from its site.

The seal is featured in an encyclopedia entry about the FBI.

Wikipedia isn’t backing down, however. The online encyclopedia — which is run by a nonprofit group and is edited by the public — sent a chiding letter to the FBI, explaining why, in its view, the FBI is off its legal rocker.

‘In short, then, we are compelled as a matter of law and principle to deny your demand for removal of the FBI Seal from Wikipedia and Wikimedia Commons,’ the Wikimedia Foundation’s general counsel, Mike Godwin, wrote in a letter to the FBI, which was posted online by the New York Times.

‘We are in contact with outside counsel in this matter, and we are prepared to argue our view in court.’

The whimsically written letter from Wikipedia says the FBI’s reading of relevant law is both ‘idiosyncratic’ and ‘more importantly, incorrect.’ It also notes that the FBI’s seal appears on other websites, including in an online entry from Encyclopedia Britannica.

In a letter dated July 22, and also posted online by the Times, the FBI told Wikipedia it must remove the bureau’s seal because the FBI had not approved use of the image.

‘The FBI has not authorized use of the FBI seal on Wikipedia,’ the letter says. ‘The inclusion of a high quality graphic of the FBI seal on Wikipedia is particularly problematic, because it facilitates both deliberate and unwitting’ copying and reprinting of the seal’s image.

The FBI’s deputy general counsel, David Larson, cities a particular law that says duplicating an official ‘insignia’ is illegal without permission.

But Wikipedia strikes back on that point, saying the FBI redacted the most important part of that U.S. code, which defines an insignia as ‘any badge, identification card, or other insignia.’

‘Badges and identification cards are physical manifestations that may be used by a possessor to invoke the authority of the federal government. An encyclopedia article is not,’ Wikipedia’s letter says. ‘The use of the image on Wikipedia is not for the purpose of deception or falsely to represent anyone as an agent of the federal government.’

The Wikipedia letter also adds:

‘Even if it could be proved that someone, somewhere, found a way to use a Wikipedia article illustration to facilitate a fraudulent representation, that would not render the illustration itself unlawful under the statute.’

It’s unclear if this tussle — which has already made its way into a Wikipedia entry on the FBI’s seal — will be taken to court. For now, the tech press is weighing in, often with amazement.

On the blog BoingBoing, Rob Beschizza writes that this is a no-win situation for the FBI.

‘The part that’s hard to understand is why the FBI would seek to abuse the law in such petulant fashion,’ he writes, ‘knowing that it will be subject to public ridicule for its actions.’

The magazine Vanity Fair posted the FBI’s seal on its website in a symbol of jest. And, as the blog Geekosystem says, an editor on the site aggregator Reddit jokes that maybe the FBI got Wikipedia confused with WikiLeaks — the site that’s been causing a stir lately over leaked war documents.

Cindy Cohn, from the Electronic Frontier Foundation, told the New York Times, which first reported this story, that she found the whole ordeal to be ’silly’ and ‘troubling.’

Wikipedia to disclose user’s IP address in blackmail case: “

Complies with court order to unmask suspect Wikifiddler

The High Court has ordered the publishers of the Wikipedia user-generated encyclopaedia to reveal information which could identify a contributor in a blackmail case involving an unnamed famous businesswoman.…

“

(Via The Register – Public Sector.)

Wikipedia latest to reject Phorm ’snooping’ technology: “Wikipedia has joined Amazon.com in opting out of Phorm’s
controversial targeted advertising technology.”

(Via Tech and Web from Times Online.)

Wikipedia vandals: “The things they say about MPs and the battle to stop them”

(Via BBC News.)

Cyber rights groups denounce IWF’s Wikipedia ban – 17 Dec 2008 – Computeractive

Written by Andrea-Marie Vassou, Computeract!ve, 17 Dec 2008.

Online rights groups have described the Internet Watch Foundation’s decision to block a page on the Wikipedia online encyclopaedia as a “knee-jerk reaction” .

The IWF, a charity that works to minimise the availability of illegal content online, added one Wikipedia page to its watch list after it was reported to contain a picture of a naked young girl.

The watch list is used by all the major UK internet service providers, so most UK internet users were barred from viewing the page in question. However, the block accidentally left many UK users unable to edit any page on the online encyclopaedia.

Dr Yaman Akdeniz, director of the Cyber-Rights and Cyber-Liberties group, said the IWF went a step too far in imposing the block.

“It was a knee jerk reaction and it was wrong to block access to a site that gives people so much information,” he said.

He pointed out that the image, the cover of an album called Virgin Killer by German heavy metal band Scorpions, had been available on the internet for years.

Following representations from Wikipedia, the IWF reconsidered its decision. Although maintaining that the image “is potentially in breach of the Protection of Children Act 1978”, it said that “in light of the length of time the image has existed and its wide availability, the decision has been taken to remove this web page from our list.”

It added that it “regrets the unintended consequences for Wikipedia and its users” of the ban.

Ruth Hoy, partner at DLA Piper solicitors, said that new methods are likely to be needed to deal with illegal content on sites such as Wikipedia.

“As with many areas of internet regulation, the law has to tread a delicate balance: on the one hand safeguarding freedom of expression while on the other facilitating the removal of defamatory, illicit or other illegal content,” she said.

“As the internet diversifies and user-generated content abounds, it is clear that self-regulation may not be sufficient in the long term… some form of unified set of laws and global standards seems inevitable.”

The Observer: Wikipedia censorship highlights a lingering sting in the tail

John Naughton, The Observer, Sunday 14 December 2008

‘Scorpions’, says Wikipedia, ‘are eight-legged venomous arachnids. They have a long body with an extended tail with a sting.’ Staff of the Internet Watch Foundation (IWF), the self-appointed monitor of ‘child sexual abuse content hosted worldwide’ and of ‘criminally obscene and incitement to racial hatred content hosted in the UK’, may well find themselves in rueful agreement about the sting. Except that what they’ve discovered is that Wikipedia also has one.

Pause for a review of recent events. Among the subjects of interest to contributors to Wikipedia, the online, user-generated encyclopaedia, is the German heavy metal band Scorpions. A learned Wikipedia page (http://bit.ly/MgzH) covers their early history, rise to popularity, commercial success and ‘later days’ .

The page mentions the band’s 1976 album, Virgin Killer, the cover of which consisted of a striking photograph of a nude, pre-pubescent girl covered by broken glass. Someone reported this image to the IWF, which then implemented its well-oiled procedures for reviewing potentially illegal content.

The IWF concluded the image did indeed constitute illegal content and put the page on the blacklist it maintains for implementation by UK internet service providers. The ISPs, in turn, speedily blocked the page.

At which point all hell broke loose and the IWF, accustomed to dealing mainly with publicity-shy purveyors of filth, found itself under siege from Wikipedians and online libertarians. UK users (who account for 25 per cent of editing activity on Wikipedia) found themselves unable to edit. The story escalated in the media and even reached the dizzying heights of the Today programme. It was pointed out the offending album had been on sale for over two decades; had appeared over the years in print and on websites; and that it was ludicrous to penalise Wikipedia simply on the basis of a complaint.

In the end, sanity prevailed. The IWF rescinded its blacklisting and the page is back. But the IWF’s statement insisted that the image in question ‘is potentially in breach of the Protection of Children Act 1978′. It has changed its mind after considering ‘the contextual issues’.

The Wikimedia Foundation statement was similarly conciliatory. ‘We are grateful to the IWF for making this swift decision, and to thousands of internet users from around the world for their outpouring of support’, said Sue Gardner, the foundation’s executive director. ‘Millions of Britons now have access to all of Wikipedia, and volunteers can resume their important editing work.’

Any outbreak of sweetness and light is welcome in these gloomy times, but the episode highlights an issue most of us would prefer not to have to think about: who actually controls the net? And who – if anyone – should control it?

In the early days of the network, a kind of libertarian euphoria led people to suppose that it was beyond control. The internet, we were told in a celebrated aphorism, ‘interprets censorship as damage and routes around it’. Experience over the past decade has made us wiser (and perhaps sadder) on that score. It turns out that the internet is rather easy to control if you’re a sovereign state (cf. Australia, China, Burma, Zimbabwe) or have access to high-priced lawyers (cf. the music industry, innumerable large corporations, the ‘church’ of Scientology, etc.) The ease with which the IWF was able to turn off Wikipedia access in the UK was just the latest illustration of the controllability of the network.

Although the IWF may be subject to criticism over the lack of transparency of its decision-making, there’s no doubt that it’s a serious, well-intentioned, non-statutory body that is doing important work. And it’s a not-for-profit enterprise – so it’s not in it for the money.

But there is an aggressively for-profit outfit out there which exercises far more control over the internet than the IWF could ever dream of. It’s called Google. It owns YouTube, fast becoming the world’s main TV channel. In a recent New York Times article on ‘Google’s Gatekeepers’ (http://bit.ly/lg8h), Professor Jeffrey Rosen described how Google’s staff try to balance freedom of speech and thought on YouTube versus the demands of corporations, states and ideologies to restrict that freedom. What’s striking is the revelation that the Google folks don’t like what they have to do – but that at the moment there’s nobody else who can do it. How long, one wonders, will that uneasy state of affairs continue? Power, like nature, always abhors a vacuum.”

(Via .)

Technical aspects of the censoring of Wikipedia: “

Part of the encyclopaedia website Wikipedia was censored in the UK between Friday 5th December 2008 and Tuesday 9th December 2008. Errors in the way that this was done has shown up a number of inconsistencies in the blocking mechanisms employed.

The story is relatively simple. A member of the public made a ‘hotline’ report to the Internet Watch Foundation (IWF) about a scanned image of the album cover art for a 1976 LP from the German heavy-metal band The Scorpions. The IWF concluded that the image was ‘potentially illegal’ because they believed it to be an ‘indecent’ image of a child under the age of 18 (the definition in UK law, see statute as currently amended). They then added two URLs to their ‘Child Sexual Abuse Content URL List’. The IWF list is distributed twice a day to most UK ISPs, who then use various technologies to block access to the URLs.

The ISPs operate systems that don’t block entire websites. Instead they pass the traffic to suspect websites through a web proxy. This proxy checks the web requests and blocks only the specific URLs that are on the IWF list. However, the use of proxies meant that all of the Wikipedia users from major UK ISPs now all appeared to have one of a handful of IP address (of the ISP proxy machines). This broke Wikipedia’s security model in that they use IP addresses to distinguish between helpful editors who improve the content of the site and vandals who attempt to trash it. Therefore, rather rapidly (for vandalism is commonplace), all UK based editors (who were editing anonymously rather than from registered accounts) were barred. However, they couldn’t register for new accounts because the IP address from which they came was barred… and so this unfortunate situation rapidly came to the notice of Wikipedia’s administrators.

(more…)

Scorpions tale leaves IWF exposed: “

‘Look, that regulator isn’t wearing any clothes’

Opinion As the dust settles over the Internet Watch Foundation’s (IWF) little local difficulty with Wikipedia, the question that needs to be answered is whether this was all just storm in a teacup – or the beginning of the end of a conveniently complacent relationship between government and the internet industry.…

“

(Via The Register – Comms.)

IWF revoked its decision to block access to Wikipedia…. I will write soon a commentary on this but Who Watches the Watchmen? I thought courts of law decide on matters to do with legality or illegality. This is no more than “privatized censorship” in the absence of due process.

It is worth reading their (very recently amended) appeals procedure which states at the end that “If the complainant appeals against the reassessment decision the assessment on whether the content is potentially illegal according to the relevant UK legislation made by senior managers in CEOP or the Metropolitan Police will be final.”

Apparently they have not heard about due process or about the possibility of an appeal to a court of law. The IWF nor the police have the “power” to “block access” to any website. They are not “empowered by law” to block access to websites and there are no legal measures under UK law which provide “blocking as a preventative measure”.

It is now the right time to discuss these matters more openly and publicly scrutinize the role of the IWF. [Blog entry by Yaman Akdeniz]

IWF statement regarding Wikipedia webpage: “IWF statement regarding Wikipedia webpage

IWF LogoA Wikipedia webpage was reported through the IWF’s online reporting mechanism on 4 December 2008. As with all potentially illegal online child sexual abuse reports we receive, the image was assessed according to current UK legislation and in accordance with the UK Sentencing Guidelines Council (page 109). The content was considered to be a potentially illegal indecent image of a child under the age of 18, hosted outside the UK. As such, in accordance with IWF procedures, the specific webpage was added to the IWF list. This list is provided to ISPs and other companies in the online sector to help protect their customers from inadvertent exposure to potentially illegal indecent images of children.

Following representations from Wikipedia, IWF invoked its Appeals Procedure and has given careful consideration to the issues involved in this case. The procedure is now complete and has confirmed that the image in question is potentially in breach of the Protection of Children Act 1978. However, the IWF Board has today (9 December 2008) considered these findings and the contextual issues involved in this specific case and, in light of the length of time the image has existed and its wide availability, the decision has been taken to remove this webpage from our list.

Any further reported instances of this image which are hosted abroad, will not be added to the list. Any further reported instances of this image which are hosted in the UK will be assessed in line with IWF procedures.

IWF’s overriding objective is to minimise the availability of indecent images of children on the internet, however, on this occasion our efforts have had the opposite effect. We regret the unintended consequences for Wikipedia and its users. Wikipedia have been informed of the outcome of this procedure and IWF Board’s subsequent decision.