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Internet service provider TalkTalk has been throttling access to image hosting site Imgur in the name of the children!

TalkTalk customers trying to access Imgur links have been finding they are taking minutes to load, and many have taken to TalkTalk's forums to complain.


One poster, amfxc, received a reply from someone in TalkTalk's CEO's office, Michael Hopkins. He said it was all down to protecting people from child abuse images. "We currently block URLs recommended by the Internet Watch Foundation (IWF) that contain child abuse imagery. Due to the way we block these links, we are aware that some users may experience intermittent issues accessing some hosting sites for the days when a sub-URL, or content that is being hosted on that site, has been placed on the IWF list."

So the point is that when an illegal image is identified on a very popular site, such as Imgur, the whole site can suffer, as TalkTalk pushes all content through a single server in order to filter the offending content. This allows the ISP to block the particular URLs before the offending material is taken down, but has the unintended consequence of throttling access to the whole site.

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A community executive on TalkTalk's customer forums said: "We do however know this is very inconvenient for customers affected and we are working on an improvement to how we block the IWF list that is intended to stop this happening in the future. We hope this will launch very soon and we will keep you updated with news."

The IWF issued a statement saying that it doesn't block websites, but provides a list of URLs for companies to facilitate URL blocking, but "not IP address or domain-level blocking".


Redditor Antagony contacted Imgur and received a response which said that the image hosting site had "multiple issues with TalkTalk, including this exact same one in the past, but they are always unresponsive to our requests to work it out together". "We have not seen this issue with any other ISP, UK or otherwise," said the representative.

A spokeswoman told Wired.co.uk that Imgur had experienced a "complete domain block" from TalkTalk at the end of October 2013, which was lifted in November that year. The current issue of throttling or "monitoring" has been ongoing through March, our first user reports coming in on March 5. It is our understanding that under 10 instances of child sexual abuse imagery were included on the UK IWF watch-list, which prompted TalkTalk to throttle Imgur as a domain, despite that the watch-list includes only specific URLs."

She urged TalkTalk customers to "consider switching ISPs if browsing Imgur at full performance is important to them".


Given that Imgur is one of the top 100 sites in the world, pulling in two billion image views and 100 million uniques per month, it might be advised that TalkTalk works out way of blocking illegal links that doesn't affect users' ability to load content at speed.

Wired.co.uk has contacted TalkTalk and Imgur for comment.

Updated 21:00 01/04/2014: A TalkTalk spokesman told Wired.co.uk: "In blocking access to links identified by the IWF as containing child abuse imagery, it was never our intention to cause customers any delay in accessing other legal content hosted on the same domain. We apologise for this and we are in the process of improving the way we block access to the IWF list so this doesn't happen in future. This is absolutely a high priority. We are working closely with the IWF and we have also contacted Imgur directly. Users shouldn't currently be experiencing issues accessing the site and we will continue keep customers constantly updated as we have further developments via our forum."