Wikipedia’s Switch to HTTPS Has Successfully Fought Government Censorship
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Wikipedia’s Switch to HTTPS Has Successfully Fought Government Censorship
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Re: Wikipedia’s Switch to HTTPS Has Successfully Fought Government Censorship
#2I just wonder what UK government has against German metal bands
Re: Wikipedia’s Switch to HTTPS Has Successfully Fought Government Censorship
#3How do governments censor only parts of Wikipedia when the site is encrypted? How do they know which pages you are browsing if they can't see the URL?
Re: Wikipedia’s Switch to HTTPS Has Successfully Fought Government Censorship
#4I just wonder what UK government has against German metal bands
Against album cover:
Re: Wikipedia’s Switch to HTTPS Has Successfully Fought Government Censorship
#5How do governments censor only parts of Wikipedia when the site is encrypted? How do they know which pages you are browsing if they can't see the URL?
That's exactly the point of the article?
Re: Wikipedia’s Switch to HTTPS Has Successfully Fought Government Censorship
#6How do governments censor only parts of Wikipedia when the site is encrypted? How do they know which pages you are browsing if they can't see the URL?
That's just it; they can't! When you visit Wikipedia over HTTPS, the only thing actually visible in plain text is wikipedia.org, and that's only if your browser is using Server Name Identification (SNI).
Since the rest of the request, including the URL is hidden, governments and other malicious agents between you and the server cannot actually see what pages you're requesting directly. They can only see that you are accessing wikipedia.org and transmitting some data. You may still be somewhat vulnerable to timing attacks to try to identify what pages you're viewing, but censorship can't happen at the page level over HTTPS; you have to block the whole thing in one go.
Re: Wikipedia’s Switch to HTTPS Has Successfully Fought Government Censorship
#7How do governments censor only parts of Wikipedia when the site is encrypted? How do they know which pages you are browsing if they can't see the URL?
Governments can't censor parts of Wikipedia when it's all encrypted, that's sort of the point of the article.
Re: Wikipedia’s Switch to HTTPS Has Successfully Fought Government Censorship
#8Re: Wikipedia’s Switch to HTTPS Has Successfully Fought Government Censorship
#9How do governments censor only parts of Wikipedia when the site is encrypted? How do they know which pages you are browsing if they can't see the URL?
Governments can't censor parts of Wikipedia when it's all encrypted, that's sort of the point of the article.
Well, they can block it whole. Once they figure out they can't block parts that's exactly what they will do. Either that or a re-host on their own infrastructure with the offending parts removed, conveniently seizing whatever domain names wikipedia has in that country for added authenticity.
Re: Wikipedia’s Switch to HTTPS Has Successfully Fought Government Censorship
#10How do governments censor only parts of Wikipedia when the site is encrypted? How do they know which pages you are browsing if they can't see the URL?
That's just it; they can't! When you visit Wikipedia over HTTPS, the only thing actually visible in plain text is wikipedia.org, and that's only if your browser is using Server Name Identification (SNI). Since the rest of the request, including the URL is hidden, governments and other malicious agents between you and the server cannot actually see what pages you're requesting directly. They can only see that you are…
This is how "domain fronting" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domain_fronting) works as well -- encryption makes blocking an all-or-nothing deal, and blocking everything that goes to an extremely popular IP range / SNI causes too much collateral damage :)