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The UK’s Internet Watch Foundation switched off most UK access to Fileserve over the weekend, after one single report of a “child abuse” photograph being found on the file sharing site triggered alarms.
Both free and premium accounts of users trying to download files shared through Fileserve were denied access late last week and over the weekend, with many UK users receiving the standard IWF blocking error when trying to access download links.
According to a Virgin Media employee quoted by ISP Review, the problem is likely to have been caused because the IWF requested the block of one single Fileserve URL, which caused the ISP’s proxies to take out access to most of the site. [ZDNet]
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So 1 dodgy picture and they manage to effectively cut off access to the site, but they’re powerless to stop all the pirated films, software and music download free-for-all
Agreed jimbo, one picture and the site is terminated almost 100% in the UK however for pirated films and software torrent sites that do more damage to the economy are left to carry on the work…
“that do more damage to the economy are left to carry on the work…”
Oh please. This government is doing more damage to the economy than any pirated films.
I was gonna say…
The economy isn’t what it is because people download movies and music… so a movie studio might make 190 million instead of 200. Big f’ing deal.
And I’d say the damage done by pirating is negligible compared to what damage is done by abusing children.
Ohhh the joys of the IWF … This as been happening regularly on megavideo, rapidshare, filesonic and the likes for years now (well, since the evil IWF was launched), mostly due to how stupid the implementation of the filter by ISP ‘s is.
The filter itself is more than capable of blocking just one page or even a bit of the page or replace a bit of the page with something else, I did some research on CleanFeed for a academic context, the problem here is human caused
Expect that to my knowledge, only BT (and BT Wholesale) use cleanfeed, whereas most other ISP’s usually use some sort of inhouse proxy-based filter. This usually means the entire black-listed domain is proxied, resulting in every visitor having the same IP and therefore messing up with ip-based websites (aka pretty much all download websites).
Remember that the IWF isn’t a filter, it is an organisation that simply maintains a list. It is up to the ISP’s to chose how to implement it.
Could it be that they blocked the entire site as a precaution, to make sure there weren’t any other such files stored on their servers?