Finnish ISP thinks W3C.org is a child-porn site

The Finnish ISP Mikkelin Puhelin is blocking access to the W3C (World Wide Web Consortium) site, describing it as child porn.

Due to reasons yet to be determined, the website of the World Wide Web Consortium, w3.org/w3c.org, is being filtered as child pornography (wget/curl) by the Finnish ISP, DNA Internet.
Update Sept 27. 3PM: DNA has removed w3c from their list, but another ISP, Mikkelin Puhelin (MPY) has added it (dig/host).
From Wikipedia: The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) is the main international standards organization for the World Wide Web (abbreviated WWW or W3). It is arranged as a consortium where member organizations maintain full-time staff for the purpose of working together in the development of standards for the World Wide Web.

W3C filtered as child porn by Finnish ISP (Thanks, Andrew!)

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mdh

@#1 what meaning do the names of the unix-tools in the brackets have in that quote’s context?

They mean you’re too lazy to either look them up yourself, or too lazy to hit the scroll bar and move along to something you understand

Either of which would have been more productive and less time consuming than what you did there.
Chairboy

Obviously child-porn websites can’t exist without protocol standards that designate how things like HTTP and HTML are to work.

The police who created this list were simply cutting off the head of the beast. Sure, there might be a little collateral damage… but won’t somebody think of the children?

Anyhow, mission accomplished. You might even say it’s finnished.
mikelotus

What’s funny is very little child porn would ever come from a website as they are too easy to take down and/or block.
bwcbwc

Probably they got on the list because some genius porn purveyor put the w3c.org link logos on their site. So they are being linked to by an actual child porn site, which is usually a bad thing. Way to go asshole!
netsharc

Copy and paste FTL… what meaning do the names of the unix-tools in the brackets have in that quote’s context? Bah to the stupid Digg imbeciles who can’t form their own words and only poorly regurgitate other site’s content, why is this disease spreading here, and WTF don’t do the editors do anything about it.
Jake0748

Anonymous @11 said, “Finnish Police thinks W3C.org is a child-porn site’ because that’s what’s actually going on here.”

Pardon me if I dispense with the usual cutesy internet abbreviations. I’d just like to ask you what the fuck you are talking about. Are you saying that the World Wide Web Consortium has something to do with child porn? If so, do you have any citations? If not, can you please just apologize and go away?
Kevin Kenny

Bah to the stupid Digg imbeciles who can’t form their own words and only poorly regurgitate other site’s content…

Any bets that the same phenomenon applies to block-lists? Now that w3c is listed, the list will get passed from site to site, while the correction will travel much more slowly. Moreover, I speculate that many of the sites involved don’t have procedures for whitelisting, so the blacklisting will keep coming back as the list gets passed back and forth. I’ll be ecstatic if the “W3C is a porn site” report can be nipped in the bud, because otherwise ISP’s are going to be blocking it, spottily, forever.
Antinous

Jake,

You misread him. He said that what’s really going on is that the Finnish police are doing this.
Jake0748

Yikes, my mistake. Apologies offered.
- Antinous
  
  It seems to be International Misconstrual Day. I’ve already done it.
threepointone

Pedobear says hai
:D
Jake0748

Why didn’t the dumb asses responsible for the blocking at least LOOK at the site before putting it on the shit list?
lionelbrits

#4, a bit of a catch-22, don’t you think. If you were in the position of that dumb ass, you’d be doing an awful lot of looking. And you’d die a little inside every time.

I’m not sure how the authorities handle this, though I guess it’s fundamentally no different than investigating other violent crimes.

While I’m mostly against filters altogether (they have a place in parental controls, not, say, in schools), I suggest you cut the “dumb ass” some slack.
Jake0748

@LIONELBRITS – No, I don’t think they deserve any slack on something as idiotic as this. Its a matter of a few seconds to look at http://www.w3.org/ and see that this site is a universe away from anything to do with child porn.

If someone is responsible for vetting websites for immoral/disgusting/illegal content, then during the course of their job they will undoubtedly see some horrible things. Its one of those jobs where one needs a strong stomach and has a strong conviction that they are doing what’s right.

I don’t see anything like a catch-22, I just see someone failing to do their job. If they can’t handle the horrors they might encounter, its time for a different line of work.
Bloodboiler

#4 and #5 It’s probably just a human screw up. Someone attempted to check something from w3c site and wrote the address to a text area used to enter sites to the black list. Stuff like that happens all the time, and add hoc in house data entry systems don’t have undos to allow easy corrections.
alowishus

Enough! I’m finnished with them!
frankiez

@threepointone:

Yessss, I want that W3C pic, pedobear approved !

:D
dainel

We all know about China’s firewall. But why is Finland’s police giving a list to ISPs to block? Why are the ISPs filtering/blocking websites? Did I miss the announcement that Finland is no longer a democraccy, that it is now a communist state? Is it the first one in the EU?
raistlinwolf

@netsharc
I would have understood unzip, finger, touch etc., but wget&curl? they probably have urls you can curl through and grep unix commands out of – like scripts for converting .lit files and whatnot? I dunno.
Anonymous

I feel the need to post a comment here to clarify and inform; these are not ISP run block-lists of child porn, this is done by FINNISH POLICE, they are the ones who compile the block lists that the ISP’s use. This is Finnish government censorship of the internet.

This was not DNA and MPY who placed w3c.org on the blocklist, they updated to using the latest block-list provided by the Finnish Police. A better headline would be ‘Finnish Police thinks W3C.org is a child-porn site’ because that’s what’s actually going on here.

http://lapsiporno.info/english-2008-02-15.html gives a good overview of the topic and the issues with Finnish internet censorship.

With love from Soviet Finland,
T
HarshLanguage

#10 Antinous – I think you misunderstand the complaint. Cory copied and pasted from the source article, but didn’t recreate several site links in the copied text. That’s why those odd non-linked “wget”, “curl”, “dig” etc are in there. If completely and correctly copying text and links is “doctoring quotes”, or correcting the mistake afterwards, you have a strange idea of accuracy. And threatening someone who points out a mistake with… well, with whatever you were threatening (disemvoweling or banning I guess), isn’t a great response for a moderator to give. BB commenters should be allowed to have and express opinions about BB.
- Antinous
  
  Ah. Then I’ve removed the offending comment.