Apologies for accidentally over-quoting on my last post :-s
On Mon, Dec 8, 2008 at 1:22 PM, R E Broadley rebroad+wikimedia.org@gmail.com wrote:
On the show, the last thing said (in the mp3) file is "we've only blocked the URL that contains the image". Does this mean that:-
- they have just blocked the URL to the actual JPG file?
- they have blocked the URL to the actual article (not just the image file)?
If it's number 2, I wonder if Susan Robertson would argue it to be correct to say "we've only blocked the URL that contains the image" if the whole of wikipedia.org had been blocked? Cheers, Rebroad
On Mon, Dec 8, 2008 at 8:24 AM, R E Broadley rebroad+wikimedia.org@gmail.com wrote:
Apologies for accidentally over-quoting on my last post :-s
On Mon, Dec 8, 2008 at 1:22 PM, R E Broadley rebroad+wikimedia.org@gmail.com wrote:
On the show, the last thing said (in the mp3) file is "we've only blocked the URL that contains the image". Does this mean that:-
- they have just blocked the URL to the actual JPG file?
- they have blocked the URL to the actual article (not just the image file)?
If it's number 2, I wonder if Susan Robertson would argue it to be correct to say "we've only blocked the URL that contains the image" if the whole of wikipedia.org had been blocked?
They have blocked http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virgin_Killer (the article) and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Virgin_Killer.jpg (The "Image page")
They have not blocked http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/thumb/3/33/Virgin_Killer.jpg/200px-... or any other URL for the image itsel on Wikimedia's servers as far as I am aware.
Gregory Maxwell wrote:
On Mon, Dec 8, 2008 at 8:24 AM, R E Broadley rebroad+wikimedia.org@gmail.com wrote:
Apologies for accidentally over-quoting on my last post :-s
On Mon, Dec 8, 2008 at 1:22 PM, R E Broadley rebroad+wikimedia.org@gmail.com wrote:
On the show, the last thing said (in the mp3) file is "we've only blocked the URL that contains the image". Does this mean that:-
- they have just blocked the URL to the actual JPG file?
- they have blocked the URL to the actual article (not just the image file)?
If it's number 2, I wonder if Susan Robertson would argue it to be correct to say "we've only blocked the URL that contains the image" if the whole of wikipedia.org had been blocked?
They have blocked http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virgin_Killer (the article) and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Virgin_Killer.jpg (The "Image page")
They have not blocked http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/thumb/3/33/Virgin_Killer.jpg/200px-... or any other URL for the image itsel on Wikimedia's servers as far as I am aware.
The poor woman clearly didn't know the difference between a URL and a web page. Most likely the same can be said about the IWF staff member who listed those two pages.
-- Tim Starling
2008/12/8 Tim Starling tstarling@wikimedia.org:
The poor woman clearly didn't know the difference between a URL and a web page. Most likely the same can be said about the IWF staff member who listed those two pages.
Apparently their "guidance" is to routinely block the page containing an image as well as the image itself.
(What could possibly go wrong?)
- d.
On Mon, Dec 8, 2008 at 9:32 AM, Tim Starling tstarling@wikimedia.org wrote:
The poor woman clearly didn't know the difference between a URL and a web page. Most likely the same can be said about the IWF staff member who listed those two pages.
The colatteral damage will mostly go away if they block the image itself instead of the text.
Perhaps we should send the the ~3 URLs they need for the images, and tell them that if they want the image to stay blocked they should block those. Then change the knams rr IP for text, and refuse to respond to en.wikipedia.org DNS requests from the proxy boxes, if we can.
Gregory Maxwell wrote:
On Mon, Dec 8, 2008 at 9:32 AM, Tim Starling tstarling@wikimedia.org wrote:
The poor woman clearly didn't know the difference between a URL and a web page. Most likely the same can be said about the IWF staff member who listed those two pages.
The colatteral damage will mostly go away if they block the image itself instead of the text.
Perhaps we should send the the ~3 URLs they need for the images, and tell them that if they want the image to stay blocked they should block those. Then change the knams rr IP for text, and refuse to respond to en.wikipedia.org DNS requests from the proxy boxes, if we can.
If we can get them to filter upload.wikimedia.org instead of en.wikipedia.org, that would fix the vandalism issue. Failing that, I'd like to see if we can get the ISPs to send XFF headers. The vandalism issue was mostly ignored in the news reports, and mainly affects Wikipedia editors and administrators rather than the general public.
-- Tim Starling
On Mon, Dec 8, 2008 at 10:06 AM, Tim Starling tstarling@wikimedia.org wrote:
If we can get them to filter upload.wikimedia.org instead of en.wikipedia.org, that would fix the vandalism issue. Failing that, I'd like to see if we can get the ISPs to send XFF headers. The vandalism issue was mostly ignored in the news reports, and mainly affects Wikipedia editors and administrators rather than the general public.
Can we get a list of current thumbnails for the image that they would want to be blocking?
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/thumb/3/33/Virgin_Killer.jpg/200px-... http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/3/33/Virgin_Killer.jpg
Anything else?
2008/12/8 Gregory Maxwell gmaxwell@gmail.com:
On Mon, Dec 8, 2008 at 10:06 AM, Tim Starling tstarling@wikimedia.org wrote:
If we can get them to filter upload.wikimedia.org instead of en.wikipedia.org, that would fix the vandalism issue. Failing that, I'd like to see if we can get the ISPs to send XFF headers. The vandalism issue was mostly ignored in the news reports, and mainly affects Wikipedia editors and administrators rather than the general public.
Can we get a list of current thumbnails for the image that they would want to be blocking?
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/thumb/3/33/Virgin_Killer.jpg/200px-... http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/3/33/Virgin_Killer.jpg
Anything else?
Since wikipedians can rapidly generate very large numbers of thumbnail URLs and have just the "sod you" attitude to do it such an approach is unlikely to be effective. Blocking wikipedia by URL is unlikely to be effective.
On Mon, Dec 8, 2008 at 10:16 AM, geni geniice@gmail.com wrote:
Since wikipedians can rapidly generate very large numbers of thumbnail URLs and have just the "sod you" attitude to do it such an approach is unlikely to be effective. Blocking wikipedia by URL is unlikely to be effective.
We could sod-you rename the article too, but we haven't yet. Arguably the article is incorrectly named at the moment, as there are other notable things called the virgin killer.
On Mon, Dec 8, 2008 at 10:17 AM, Nathan nawrich@gmail.com wrote:
I understand the intent in helping ISPs to limit collateral damage, and it certainly would be handy to have the problem resolved for the UK editors effected...
But in the midst of the news cycle, and with a bit of a PR backlash in progress, I'm not sure you want to get into "Wikipedia administrators, developers, work with ISPs to block access to images." It can wait a day or two, I think, to see if the IWF or the involved ISPs take action on their own.
A fair position. I just want to make sure we have the moral high ground on this: They are blocking the text when they could just as well block the image. They are censoring knowledge about the subject rather than just the objectionable image, they have had actual knowledge of this concern for going on 48 hours now and have not resolved it. I want it to be clear that there was and is no excuse for the continued blocking of the text.
I understand the intent in helping ISPs to limit collateral damage, and it certainly would be handy to have the problem resolved for the UK editors effected...
But in the midst of the news cycle, and with a bit of a PR backlash in progress, I'm not sure you want to get into "Wikipedia administrators, developers, work with ISPs to block access to images." It can wait a day or two, I think, to see if the IWF or the involved ISPs take action on their own.
Nathan
2008/12/8 Nathan nawrich@gmail.com:
I understand the intent in helping ISPs to limit collateral damage, and it certainly would be handy to have the problem resolved for the UK editors effected...
But in the midst of the news cycle, and with a bit of a PR backlash in progress, I'm not sure you want to get into "Wikipedia administrators, developers, work with ISPs to block access to images." It can wait a day or two, I think, to see if the IWF or the involved ISPs take action on their own.
Indeed - give it a couple of days and the public pressure might be enough to force a U-turn. The media seems to be largely on our side for a change, which is nice. Perhaps they are finally coming to see up as one of their own and are seeing this as the authorities censoring the media?
2008/12/8 Thomas Dalton thomas.dalton@gmail.com:
2008/12/8 Nathan nawrich@gmail.com:
I understand the intent in helping ISPs to limit collateral damage, and it certainly would be handy to have the problem resolved for the UK editors effected...
But in the midst of the news cycle, and with a bit of a PR backlash in progress, I'm not sure you want to get into "Wikipedia administrators, developers, work with ISPs to block access to images." It can wait a day or two, I think, to see if the IWF or the involved ISPs take action on their own.
Indeed - give it a couple of days and the public pressure might be enough to force a U-turn. The media seems to be largely on our side for a change, which is nice. Perhaps they are finally coming to see up as one of their own and are seeing this as the authorities censoring the media?
Doubtful. More likely that since IWF were out of the office over the weekend they haven't been able to present their side of the story. It's equally possible that the IWF is unsure if it should have blocked the image in question.
2008/12/8 geni geniice@gmail.com:
2008/12/8 Thomas Dalton thomas.dalton@gmail.com:
2008/12/8 Nathan nawrich@gmail.com:
I understand the intent in helping ISPs to limit collateral damage, and it certainly would be handy to have the problem resolved for the UK editors effected...
But in the midst of the news cycle, and with a bit of a PR backlash in progress, I'm not sure you want to get into "Wikipedia administrators, developers, work with ISPs to block access to images." It can wait a day or two, I think, to see if the IWF or the involved ISPs take action on their own.
Indeed - give it a couple of days and the public pressure might be enough to force a U-turn. The media seems to be largely on our side for a change, which is nice. Perhaps they are finally coming to see up as one of their own and are seeing this as the authorities censoring the media?
Doubtful. More likely that since IWF were out of the office over the weekend they haven't been able to present their side of the story. It's equally possible that the IWF is unsure if it should have blocked the image in question.
The IWF put a statement on their website last night and sent a spokeswoman to the BBC Radio studios this morning, they have been presenting their side of the story.
The poor woman clearly didn't know the difference between a URL and a web page.
Indeed, but in her defence to two are generally in one-to-one correspondence (they aren't for Wikipedia, of course, and the fact that IWF don't know that means people can bypass the block pretty easily).
On Mon, Dec 8, 2008 at 10:15 AM, Thomas Dalton thomas.dalton@gmail.com wrote:
The poor woman clearly didn't know the difference between a URL and a web page.
Indeed, but in her defence to two are generally in one-to-one correspondence (they aren't for Wikipedia, of course, and the fact that IWF don't know that means people can bypass the block pretty easily).
No, they really aren't. Any given web page will normally correspond to a practically unlimited number of URLs: append ?unused=meaningless to the end, or #nonexistent-id. (Although the latter doesn't travel across the network, so isn't relevant here.) Conversely, many -- possibly most -- URLs don't correspond to web pages, but rather to images, scripts, etc.
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/3/33/Virgin_Killer.jpg?this_does_no... http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/3/33/Virgin_Killer.jpg?this_also_do... http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/3/33/Virgin_Killer.jpg?I_can_make_l...
2008/12/8 Aryeh Gregor Simetrical+wikilist@gmail.com:
On Mon, Dec 8, 2008 at 10:15 AM, Thomas Dalton thomas.dalton@gmail.com wrote:
The poor woman clearly didn't know the difference between a URL and a web page.
Indeed, but in her defence to two are generally in one-to-one correspondence (they aren't for Wikipedia, of course, and the fact that IWF don't know that means people can bypass the block pretty easily).
No, they really aren't. Any given web page will normally correspond to a practically unlimited number of URLs: append ?unused=meaningless to the end, or #nonexistent-id. (Although the latter doesn't travel across the network, so isn't relevant here.) Conversely, many -- possibly most -- URLs don't correspond to web pages, but rather to images, scripts, etc.
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/3/33/Virgin_Killer.jpg?this_does_no... http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/3/33/Virgin_Killer.jpg?this_also_do... http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/3/33/Virgin_Killer.jpg?I_can_make_l...
Yes, but in the experience of someone non-technical they generally are. You don't generally see the URLs for images/scripts/etc. directly, and if a URL has lots of confusing stuff appended to it you just ignore it as being far too scary and complicated, so the only URLs you see are ones that canonically describe a particular webpage.
On Mon, Dec 8, 2008 at 10:34 AM, Thomas Dalton thomas.dalton@gmail.com wrote:
Yes, but in the experience of someone non-technical they generally are. You don't generally see the URLs for images/scripts/etc. directly, and if a URL has lots of confusing stuff appended to it you just ignore it as being far too scary and complicated, so the only URLs you see are ones that canonically describe a particular webpage.
Which is precisely why "didn't know the difference between a URL and a web page" accurately describes someone who doesn't have any significant technical knowledge of how the web works.
2008/12/8 Aryeh Gregor Simetrical+wikilist@gmail.com:
On Mon, Dec 8, 2008 at 10:34 AM, Thomas Dalton thomas.dalton@gmail.com wrote:
Yes, but in the experience of someone non-technical they generally are. You don't generally see the URLs for images/scripts/etc. directly, and if a URL has lots of confusing stuff appended to it you just ignore it as being far too scary and complicated, so the only URLs you see are ones that canonically describe a particular webpage.
Which is precisely why "didn't know the difference between a URL and a web page" accurately describes someone who doesn't have any significant technical knowledge of how the web works.
Indeed, I never said it was inaccurate. However, there is no reason to expect a PR person to have significant technical knowledge of how the web works (it would be nice if they did, but I'm sure we've all learnt better than to expect it).