Security threats Toolkit
Story: IWF chief: Why Wikipedia block went wrong
Explain this
I would like to know why, when the IFW filter kicks in, the ENTIRE rapidshare domain is blocked by my ISP. I and 1000s of others who actually pay for the legitimate and legal use of this service find that rapidshare.com is unavailab'le for no good reason. This is not a site hosting dodgy images. I dare say there are sites hosting linking content stored on Rapidshare but this content is removed by Rapidshare as soon as it is reported. The way this filter works, rapidshare.com home page is blocked, the rapidshare news page is blocked, rapidshare tools are blocked, and so on.
The same applies to Imageshack. Now I have never seen any dodgy images on imageshack, which is a legitimate image hosting site. I'm willing to concede that from time to time, some pervert somewhere will post a dodgy image. And yet it's not that site that displays this image that's blocked, it's an entire imageshack server. I suspect the same thing happens with Rapidshare. A dodgy image or file is spotted, reported and rather than the image or file being blocked, entire servers, entire domains are blocked. There are other examples, but these two are among the most well known and the most irritating.
Not only is this filter inefficient and irritating, it is also actually very easily circumvented.
So what is the point?
Full Talkback thread
