Wikipedia’s Switch to HTTPS Has Successfully Fought Government Censorship

Post by ishitatsuyuki » Tue, May 30, 2017, 6:08 AM UTC

zeta0134 wrote: post #6

rocky1138 wrote: post #3

How 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…

Post by imron » Tue, May 30, 2017, 6:31 AM UTC

gman83 wrote: post #82

imron wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Baidupedia has been around for nearly a decade.

Which is a total ripoff of Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Mirrors_and_forks/Ba...

Post by Markoff » Tue, May 30, 2017, 7:04 AM UTC

shpx wrote: post #62

It won't last, at least for China. Their government is working on a clone of wiki, scheduled for 2018[0]. Once that's done they'll likely completely ban the original. Wikipedia publishes database dumps every couple of days[1]. So it shouldn't be that expensive for smaller governments to create and host their own censored mirror. You'd maintain a list of banned and censored articles, then pull from wikipedia once a mo…

Post by vbezhenar » Tue, May 30, 2017, 7:31 AM UTC

knome wrote: post #65

vbezhenar wrote: post #61

Currently HTTPS sends domain in clear-text before establishing a connection. It allows to host (and block) website by domain, not by IP. May be HTTPS should have optional extension to send URI in clear-text before establishing a connection. This way, if censors decide to block Wikipedia, users can opt-in into this behaviour and have unblocked Wikipedia except few selected articles.

Absolutely not. The response to censorship should not be to make things easier for the censor. Anyway, the idea is unworkable as the user's client could simply lie about what URI it's going to send after the encrypted connection is setup.

Post by comex » Tue, May 30, 2017, 8:10 AM UTC

throwaway2048 wrote: post #50

Edmond wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It isn't but if you live in China and want to use the internet, you'll likely be forced to use a proxy that MITMs and serves its own certificate....My point is that TLS is not a solution to prevent government interference when the user has to rely on the government infrastructure for access.

This is not how the great firewall works, check the facts known, not just baseless speculatation.