So, it looks like Sky is blocking Mediafire.com!

[mitchell.john23]

I have just checked Mediafire.com with the IWF page and they say they are NOT blocking it. It can only be Sky that is Blocking this site. Isn't that ILLEGAL when there is no Court Ruling?

[robnobleuk]

Deleted.

[dragon2611]

All ISP's who have signed up to the IWF have all their traffic flowing through a transparent proxy. As indefatigable has already explained this is where the blocking happens. Your ISP has nothing to do with it.

Here are a few websites which can be used to check if IWF is blocking your access to the websites you are trying to visit:

- UK Censorship Checker
- IWF Checker By Lightning-Bolt.net - Home

The second link checks the status on Virgin Media but IWF does not have different block lists for different ISPs so anything on that website is being watched by IWF. Please note you might be able to access some of the websites on the list but they are still being watched/throttled by IWF.

The specific implementation of the filter is down to the ISP, but the list has to be loaded into the filter in such a way that no one at the ISP is allowed to access it's content, so no-one but the IWF knows for sure what's on that list.

Some ISP's are now using DPI based filters that don't need to proxy to avoid the problem where the proxy was getting blacklisted it depends on how sophisticated their filtering platform.

Personally I think its the most pointless system ever designed for a few reasons.

1) Anyone who wants to get around it can, quite easily usually.

2) We have all these blackbox's sitting around to proxy this traffic and who knows what else they're doing

3) In order to filter the real nasty stuff the filters need to have a list of it, whilst they do try to make it in such a way that almost no one has access to the list the saying goes if it can be made it can be unmade, if someone does Hack one of the filters we could suddenly find the list being disclosed - So the IWF in their mission to stop people finding child porn images end up being responsible for a massive list of all the nastiest stuff being In the wild... Genius!