[SharedKnowing] Regarding Virgin Killer

[David Gerard]

2008/12/11 Fred Bauder <fredbaud at fairpoint.net>:

> Contesting the issue worked out well for Wikipedia and was certainly an
> eye-opener for the residents of the UK. It was a public relations
> disaster for the Internet Watch Foundation, the IWF, as it resulted in
> negative publicity regarding what is a decent project. Their statement:
> http://www.iwf.org.uk/media/news.251.htm


It may be a well-intentioned project, but it's also an incompetent
one. They blocked the text page talking about the album, and they
blocked the text page describing the image.

However, they completely neglected to actually block the image itself,
as served from the image server.

I suppose it would come as an eye-opener to them that large websites
routinely use a separate image server ...

Good intentions aren't enough for a project with that much power to be
so utterly incompetent at what is supposed to be their job. There is
no evidence to suggest they are competent at censoring illegal images
from any other source - since, of course, there is no effective
watchdog over the IWF.


- d.