[Foundation-l] WP edit/access blocking in the UK - statement from the WMF

[Gregory Maxwell]

On Mon, Dec 8, 2008 at 1:50 PM, Platonides <Platonides at gmail.com> wrote
> The real test would be checking
> http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/3/33/Virgin_Killer.jpg
>
> It's at a different ip and domain, so I wouldn't be too surprised to
> find that they're blocking the article (talking about the image issue)
> and not the image itself which they are supposedly trying to block.

This has been pointed out on the lists and the wiki.
They are not blocking the image itself. They are not even intercepting
the upload.wikimedia.org traffic.

As far as we are aware are blocking only two URL, the article and the
image description pages. The matches appear to be exact matches, all
of the above proposed evasions work.  The image shows fine when placed
in other articles.

Of course, we can't know what else is being done: Other pages could be
blocked, perhaps logs of everything you view are being sold to the
highest bidder?  Can't know. We just know that ISPs are running
servers which pretend to be Wikimedia's IP, which capture the traffic
and produce fake error messages for at least two URLs. That may be all
we'll ever know.