from the little-old-lady-next-door-is-watching-you dept.
UK ISP TalkTalk have been throttling the whole Imgur domain whenever it receives notice from the Internet Watch Foundation that a single URL from the image sharing site contains child abuse imagery.
[Editors Note] The IWF isn't a legal body, but a registered charity. From wikipedia:
From 2010 the Office of Government Commerce (OGC) required all procurement specifications for the provision of Internet-related services to government agencies and public bodies to require the Internet service provider (ISP) to block access to sites [sic] on the IWF list.
The IWF operates in informal partnership with the police, government, public, and Internet service providers. Originally formed to police suspected child pornography online, the IWF's remit was later expanded to cover criminally obscene material.
The IWF is an incorporated charity, limited by guarantee, and largely funded by voluntary contributions from UK communications service providers, including ISPs, mobile phone operators, Internet trade associations, search engines, hardware manufacturers, and software providers. It also receives funding from the Association for Payment Clearing Services and the European Union.
(Score: 1) by Ethanol-fueled on Wednesday April 02 2014, @11:51PM
No doubt heinous crimes are committed and any right-thinking citizen when presented with the opportunity would act to stop those crimes, but at the same time you have to wonder why those people are spending so much of their free time to go out of their way to obsessed with such things. Perverted Justice is a good example of this, started by an angry professional wrestling-watching neckbeard and inhabited mostly by angry unemployed housewives. I bet the breakdown of this and similar groups is:
5% - People who would no doubt be justified, because they or somebody close to them was actually harmed by a related crime,
25% - Bored and angry housewives and other unstable women who offset their glaring personal deficiencies and idle hands by seeking to gain power over others,
30% - Neckbearded and sexually-frustrated man-losers with no control whatsoever of their lives, seeking to gain some modicum of power or control,
30% - reaction-formation pervs who hang around high-school swim meets and hate themselves for it on some level,
5% - Do it FOR TEH LULZ,
5% - Sick but functioning fucks (the local police chief, YMCA soccer coach, or Catholic priest) who need a socially acceptable method to view illicit porn.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 03 2014, @12:43AM
I don't really feel that non law enforcement organisations should be involved with child pornography in any way. I mean, I think that it's horrible and that it should absolutely be hunted down and people arrested but to me I can't really see any way this could or even should be legal, imagine if we had organisations we no oversight that bought guns and drugs off the streets to turn them over to the police - the risk is very high that such an organisation would attract the wrong kind of people.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 03 2014, @02:57AM
Fun fact: around here, the police chief's wife recently got spanked for stealing inmate money [union-bulletin.com] to feed her drug habit. Her husband claimed he knew nothing about it. The guy who pushed it to the public view is now in prison on child pr0n conviction for pictures he took in the 80s of some women his police friends brought to him when he was into photography.
This was in the appropriately named 'town' of CP, next to Walla Walla, WA, US, where the police generally have nothing better to do than harass college students and play security for Walmart.
(Score: 2) by tibman on Thursday April 03 2014, @06:26PM
Sounds like she was "spanked" pretty good. Carole Lepiane was sentenced to prison for stealing funds over a five-year period. Under the terms of a plea agreement, she will serve six months in a federal facility followed by four months in a halfway house and In addition to the prison time, Lepiane was ordered to pay $81,271.63 in restitution to the county. This includes $67,145.63 stolen from the sheriff’s office and $14,126 paid by the county to the state Auditor’s Office as part of the investigation..
The guy who pushed it to the public view is also a Sheriff. I couldn't find the article about him though. Pretty interesting!
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(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 03 2014, @12:31AM
Uhm, I don't know, but wouldn't it be easier to just work with imgur since they seem eager to do so and let them remove the images? I mean if it's as few images as this article seems to imply it really shouldn't be hard.
(Score: 2) by lhsi on Thursday April 03 2014, @08:00AM
It would be. From the article:
"Redditor Antagony contacted Imgur and received a response which said that the image hosting site had "multiple issues with TalkTalk, including this exact same one in the past, but they are always unresponsive to our requests to work it out together".
There is an update that supposedly TalkTalk have now contacted Imgur directly to try and work things out.
(Score: 2) by stormwyrm on Thursday April 03 2014, @01:44AM
It's not like http://imgur.com/removalrequest [imgur.com] doesn't work right? Child pornography is still very much in violation of their terms of service [imgur.com] no?
Numquam ponenda est pluralitas sine necessitate.
(Score: 2) by lhsi on Thursday April 03 2014, @08:05AM
It looks like the ISP handle all requests to Imgur through a special server to filter out the specific URLs until the images are removed, then it goes back to normal.
(Score: 1) by julian67 on Thursday April 03 2014, @02:41AM
I'm on TalkTalk dynamic adsl at home and imgur loads perfectly normally. If there was a problem it's gone, and if there wasn't then never mind - it's important to never let facts spoil the opportunity for some "me too" expressions of faux outrage and deep(ly tedious) political analysis by people unaffected by the "issue".
(Score: 1) by guises on Thursday April 03 2014, @04:06AM
I'm on a minor US dial-up ISP and Imgur stopped working for me a month or two ago. Though I can still access it through a proxy. I had assumed that the issue had something to do with my slow connection, since most of my problems seem to have something to do with my slow connection, but it's possible that my ISP got a message from these jokers and just blocked it. Maybe I should ask them.