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Wikipedia - IWF backs down

• Rory Cellan-Jones
• 9 Dec 08, 09:29 GMT

It must have been a long and difficult meeting. All day on Tuesday, the Internet Watch Foundation was taking calls from journalists like me and promising a new statement about what must have been the most controversial decision in its history - the blacklisting of a Wikipedia page about the heavy metal band Scorpions. That decision had sparked fury not just among Wikipedians - those people in the UK who found themselves unable to edit any pages in the online encyclopedia as a result - but among a wider public concerned about what they saw as covert censorship. On this blog alone, we had more responses than on any other previous post - more than 200 within 24 hours - and the overwhelming number were critical of the IWF.

The statement finally appeared on Tuesday evening, revealing that the watchdog's board had removed the Wikipedia page featuring the image of a naked child from its blacklist. But this was not a total climb-down - the statement starts by reiterating that the image in question "is potentially in breach of the Protection of Children Act 1978." It then goes on to concede that the picture has been in the public domain for a long time - it was of course first published in the 1970s and has apparently been reproduced in a number of books and on other websites.

The IWF admits that its actions have only made the "Virgin Killer" album cover all the more visible to millions of web users. Its objective is to minimise the availability of "indecent images of children", and it has had precisely the opposite effect. It finishes by apologising to Wikipedia and its users for the "unintended consequences" of its actions.

The Wikimedia Foundation responded in similar vein, thanking the IWF for making a swift decision. But the foundation's chief counsel Mike Godwin said the incident "underscores the need for transparency and accountability in the processes of the Internet Watch Foundation and similar bodies around the world".

So where does that leave the debate about internet censorship? The IWF's critics have been vehement in their denunication of the body - there has been talk of "Orwellianism" and comparisons with China and other countries where internet access is strictly controlled. Isn't this a little bit over the top? I didn't notice anyone being marched to jail for viewing that page. The whole affair seems to have got the web - how shall I put this? - a little over-excited. Here's one message I received: "We won't be boilled frogs. Once you start down the path to the Dark Side, forever will it dominate your destiny."

What the incident has done is shine a light on the workings of a watchdog of whose existence many were ignorant. The criticism is that it operates in secret, it is self-appointed, and that, in the words of one of my correspondents "it can control what we see, whether illegal or not". But it can only act as a censor if the ISPs who are its members agree to enforce its blacklist. It was their automatic blocking of the Wikipedia page which meant that users ended up getting "page not found" messages rather than being informed of the censorship, so perhaps they should be the ones answering for their actions.

And not everyone agrees that the IWF was in the wrong in the first place. Struan Robertson, a lawyer whose "Out-Law" blog covers web legal issues, points out that Wikipedia itself indulges in a form of censorship with a "blacklist" of people from certain IP addresses who are forbidden from changing Wikipedia's pages. Mr Robertson says it is no use telling the IWF and the ISPs to wait for a court ruling on the legality of the image: "Web hosts must not wait for an image to be declared unlawful by a court when they receive a complaint, albeit only a court can declare an image unlawful. If they wait, there is every chance that the declaration will come at their own trial."

It certainly appears that the IWF should have been aware that acting against one of the most popular sites on the internet was bound to cause an uproar. So the case for greater transparency in the Internet Watch Foundation's procedures seems pretty obvious.

But it strikes me that the critics too need to answer some questions. Is there any need to block access to child abuse images online? If so, should it be done by the Internet Watch Foundation or another body? Or should we just ask the police to watch out for these images - and let ISPs be sued if they fail to spot them?

Mind you, I've learnt one very important thing from this whole affair. The "Scorpions" are not an "obscure" German heavy metal band, but an enduringly popular rock phenomenon. Sorry.

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Kosmix - searching for optimism

• Rory Cellan-Jones
• 9 Dec 08, 08:57 GMT

What's the definition of optimism in these troubled times for the hi-tech economy? How about starting a business which plans to take on Google from a base in Mountain View, the search giant's home town? Or maybe ploughing $20m into that business as an investor when everyone else is hiding under the bed covers?

But that's the story of Kosmix, a new search business that has announced today that it has won $20 million in funding from investors who include Time Warner.

The co-founder of this apparently mad venture dropped into London a week or so back, and on meeting him I was almost convinced that he might just have a chance of success.

For one thing, Anand Rajaraman's idea does look quite compelling. He is very keen to stress that he isn't taking on the behemoth of search head-on. "Google is the best place to go if you're looking for a needle in a haystack - if you're looking for one single website or piece of information. But Kosmix is about exploring a whole topic." In the bar of the London hotel where he was staying he showed me an example. A search for Stonehenge grouped on one page pictures of the site, documents and discussions about its history, but also details of accommodation in Bath, should you want to stay there during your visit.

Later, I searched for "internet censorship" and found a useful collection of articles, videos and news relating to this topic. In this case, the results were not so different from what a Google search threw up, but they were organised in a more accessible manner.

The idea sounds a bit like the various "semantic search" companies that have popped up recently - from True Knowledge to Semantifind - but Anand Rajaraman said his firm had not gone down this path. "We deliver on the promise of semantic search without doing it that way." Instead, he explained, the Kosmix work involves "categorisation", crawling the web, extracting huge amounts of data, then using statistical analysis to figure out clever ways of extracting meaning from it. Such as working out that someone interested in Stonehenge might combine their visit with a trip to Bath.

The other impressive thing about Mr Rajamaran and his co-founder Venky Harinarayan is that they have a track record of turning their computer science expertise in to large piles of cash. They are friends who dropped out of Stanford in 1996, as part of the team behind Junglee - one of the web's firs comparison shopping software. That was sold to Amazon in 1998 for stock worth $280 million. Since then the two Indian-born entrepreneurs have used their share of that windfall to back other Silicon Valley start-ups, before setting to work to create Kosmix.

Still, even with a solid team and what appears to be impressive technology the odds must be against Kosmix making it big. Plenty of others have tried and failed to convince the world there is a better way to search. But there is no denting Anand Rajamaran's optimism: "It's a very good time to build a business," he told me. "There's not so much noise out there, and it's a great time to hire people." And when I suggested that Kosmix was entering a crowded market, he had a swift response: "It's getting less crowded every day."

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