Wikipedia – the Community encyclopedia is looking for donations from the community again. And is fast approaching it’s target of 6 Million USD (currently sitting at 5.4 Million). But.. would you give a donation to Wikipedia, to enable paychecks for its 23 Official members of staff. What about the rest of the Internet community (150000 strong) who is responsible for adding the content that makes wikipedia what it is. I personally belive that wikipedia should run ads, like the rest of the blogging community and stop the funding drives every so often. The bulk of the Open Source world acknoeledges the contributions of non-paying (cash) but givers of time.

So Tripmela, the travel meta search engine run by Jared Blank has put itself up for sale on eBay. But along with the company and its assets Рit has also decided to sell 80000 strong, validated database as well.  So I kind of read that as extremely unethical and I said so on Alootechie where I first read this and Jared actually commented, that his privacy policy allowed him to sell the database. The core issue at play here is that Tripmela is planning to sell its database in seperation from the site on a platform like eBay without validating the buyer, wherein any Joker with a Credit Card can get peoples data.

In what is obviously a win for net users worldwide, UK ISPs have removed the controversial filtering of conten that a governing body construed as possible child pornography. It was a side effect of this filtering which would also disallow UK residents from activly editing other Wikipedia pages, as it prevented the IP protectection features of Wikipedia from working correctly. This was due the fact, that the whole of UK had been given 1 IP. This would have pulled down the whole superstructure of the community encyclopedia for the UK. It is a scary fact that this was ever allowed to happen, a self governing Рalbeit non-profit -  body was given control over content that effects an entire country.

Ok maybe not so dramatic… and maybe not as restrictive as the Chinese version… Yesterday, it was revealed that the UK is employing a transparent proxy – in the lines of the system used in china to filter ISPs – to block pages on Wikipedia. The page in question is about a 1970 LP Cover¬†(Rated M16) which is considered to be in violation of child pornography laws. The issue here is not that residents have protested the protection of children online – infact that is one thing that should be done whole heartedly, and actually parents should be made an active part of this effort (which is not happening) causing the state to intervene (which is not a good thing)