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UPDATED ISP Demon Internet Blocks Internet Archive via IWF URLs

Posted: 14th Jan, 2009 By: MarkJ
The Internet Watch Foundation (IWF), fresh from December 2008's blocking of Wikipedia content (original news), is back in the news today after customers of UK broadband ISP Demon Internet (THUS, C&W) began noticing that access to sites stored on the popular Internet Archive Wayback Machine website had been hindered.

The Internet Archive, much as the name suggests, is a website that automatically stores the past history of world websites in its database (e.g. you can see how ISPreview.co.uk looked nine years ago in 2000). It's a vast online history and a vital tool for old information that search engines have long since discarded.

However The Register reports that Demon customers posting to the ISPs Service Support Newsgroup are being blocked from accessing the sites content due to Demon’s IWF URL filters. One poster explains:

>I can access the archive.org homepage. What's being blocked?

In the slot at the top of the page (labelled Wayback Machine) enter:

http://www.demon.net and click "take me back".

You will see a list of the archived front pages of Demon's website. Click on any of the links, and you will see that they have been rendered useless because Demon's iwfwebfilter has wrecked the URL by adding the following:

http://iwfwebfilter.thus.net/web/..

Repeat for any URL you like (e.g. bbc.co.uk).

The site has been rendered unusable to Demon customers for weeks, but nobody seems to be bothered to fix it. Personally, I don't think it's Web Archive's fault that Demon haven't got their IWF filters properly sorted.

Indeed the IWF has since confirmed that "there is no entry for webarchive.org on the IWF URL list or reported to the IWF", which suggests that the fault is at Demon/THUS with regards to their implementation of the filtering system. We also note that no customers of other ISPs have reported the same problem, further pointing to a Demon specific issue.

UPDATE 15th Jan @ 8:40am:

The IWF appears to have backtracked after it initially informed at least one of Demon's customers that it had no entry for the webarchive.org site. In a new statement to The Register they now state something very different:

"The IWF can confirm it has taken action in relation to content on www.archive.org involving indecent images of children which contravenes UK law (Protection of Children Act 1978). The URL(s) in question were added to our URL list according to IWF procedures," said the IWF.

Reports are now surfacing from customers of UK ISPs Be Broadband (O2) and Virgin Media that they too are seeing a similar problem to the one described above. Once again the IWF's system appears to be inadvertently inhibiting access to vast areas of a whole site rather than restricting specific content. Curiously not all customers appear to be affected, though this could easily be due to the use of proxies or alternative DNS servers.
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