The Great Firewall of Britain

It has emerged these past few days that we here on this little island are all behind a wall, a firewall that is censoring the Internet. I often find some of the headlines the Daily Mail prints a little hard to believe, the other week they had “POLICE STATE BRITAIN” splashed over their front page in relation to the arrest of the Damian Green the Conservative MP but when things like this begin to come to light it all becomes that little bit more believable, not to mention frightening.

This instance however is seems perfectly innocent, the discovery that UK Internet users whilom use the “big six” to get on-line are being given generic or hardly informative error messages when trying to access the Wikipedia entry regarding the German heavy metal band Scorpions’ album Virgin Killer released in 1976. The problem being that the original album cover has a picture of a naked pre-pubescent girl which has been deemed inappropriate by the Internet Watch Foundation which monitors and provides data on among many things illegal material such as child pornography.

Now, I can understand that the censorship of the Internet in this regard is a good thing unless that is you believe in the absolute freedom of speech in which case you’re already pretty much fucked living in the UK anyway however, the fact that this censorship is occurring hasn’t been made public and the fact that this album cover can be found all over the Internet including Amazon.co.uk and it hasn’t been censored begs the question, what else are they censoring and why are they only censoring Wikipedia? if you’re going to do a job do it properly and not some half arsed effort and be open and transparent about what you’re doing – the days of the Stasi inspired civil surveillance are over aren’t they?

Anyway, if you want to know more about how this works technically there is a very good write up on The Nock Blog about how PlusNet work this, I personally am with Orange and I can’t access the Wikipedia entry either although Orange are not mentioned as far as I can see so far as being an ISP blocking this page however I just get a un-descriptive error message.

Object not found

That’s really useful Orange, about as useful as your Customer Service team.