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Wikipedia article blocked worldwide by Delhi high court

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Re: Wikipedia article blocked worldwide by Delhi high court

#411

Post by Jach »

lxgr wrote: post #382
Jach wrote: post #343

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'll believe Google cares about extension security when they allow the user to trivially disable auto-updates.

That would be the express road to long-term unpatched vulnerabilities. There's basically two ways to have safe web extensions: Carefully control their entire supply chain (which could easily cause big antitrust problems for Google as the vendor of the most popular browser), or minimize the things they have access to.

It is the better road, and the road chosen by most other things that aren't SaaS, including Google's other most popular thing, Android. Keep the default to auto-update, fine, but let me disable that, as the Android app store does. Attacks from previously trusted extensions (and apps) being updated and then doing malicious things (requesting new permissions to do them is not significant friction) are worse and more frequent than old unpatched extensions being vulnerable to something. (That "something" likely being in the realm of XSS or click-jacking from a malicious page, much harder to widely exploit.)

I'm sure it's happened, but I haven't heard of an extension suffering from a significant "unpatched vulnerability" and being exploited in the wild -- I have heard of things like this click-jacking issue in Privacy Badger: https://blog.lizzie.io/clickjacking-privacy-badger.html No wild exploits afaik, just the PoC, and the ultimate worst-case impact was just (reversibly) disabling the extension for the page or a site, which isn't very severe. Perhaps a more advanced extension like Ruffle that uses Rust and WASM has a more severe attack surface than the majority of extensions written in JavaScript, but even if it does, it must be exploited by a malicious page targeting it, vs. the alternative of auto-updating to a malicious version and doing whatever it can get away with immediately.

Extensions getting taken over or just transferred to new owners and updating to do something new and malicious is quite routine and multiple examples come readily to my mind. The first to come to mind is Stylish, several years ago: https://robertheaton.com/2018/07/02/stylish-browser-extensio... (I was not impacted because I didn't update the extension during its vulnerable window, which was months, and apparently over a year for Chrome.)

The safe way to handle these issues is to let users turn off auto-updating, and to have actual policies to mitigate the damages from malicious extensions. Firefox itself will disable extensions that become known to be defective in someway, this can be independent of whether the issue is an unpatched vulnerability, whether there's a patch/update to address it, whether the extension isn't just bugged but doing something malicious, whether it always was malicious from first install or just suddenly became malicious... See https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/add-ons-cause-issues-ar...

Re: Wikipedia article blocked worldwide by Delhi high court

#412

Post by f1shy »

avazhi wrote: post #316
jampekka wrote: post #273

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Wikipedia looks like a fantastic resource, but it's not really a reliable source of information. It's about as reliable it gets. It cites sources, has whole history available, has little conflicts of interest and has transparent editorial guidelines and process. Many people are probably shocked to find views in WP that aren't aligned with what their newsmedia reports and frames.

I’ll take Britannica any day.

I would take almost ANY real encyclopaedia, any day, for very general topics. For specifics, I would go to specific literature, or just google it to find sources myself. Often what I search is either wrong, or for example math or physics things are written in a sooo complex form, that I just cannot do anything with it.

Re: Wikipedia article blocked worldwide by Delhi high court

#413

Post by YetAnotherNick »

madebymaya wrote: post #360
YetAnotherNick wrote: post #330

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As an Indian, I hope they go this path to be banned. Imagine media coverage of a fight between a non functioning and corrupt government vs the most important source of knowledge for everyone.

such an asinine but casual remark about the elected government in power without any credible allegations of corruption nor non-functioning. this was a case between one private news agency (ANI) vs another private foundation WMF in a court of law that's independent of any government influence or intervention. Why should the central government be brought in here in the critic of this dispute? Such nonsense based on hat…

Indian government has three branches: the legislative, the executive and the judiciary and court is part of third branch. Nowhere in my comment I said elected government or central government or politics.

Re: Wikipedia article blocked worldwide by Delhi high court

#414

Post by pas »

instagraham wrote: post #274

As an Indian, you cannot understand the despair this makes me feel. ANI is a bit like privatised Pravda operating in service to the government, yet, still pretending to be independent journalism. Wherever there is a critic of the government, ANI exists to slander such critics as a service. As a discerning reader, you learn to avoid mainstream media that quotes ANI (don't even consider watching a TV channel). You seek…

"Code is law" is a meme.

Law is a social concept, it has many parts, the statutes, that serve as mementos for past power struggles, the active part which consist of the courts, prosecutors' discretion, enforcement, and of course society itself, as the workings of these reified components reflect society itself.

Code can of course model some of these, be part of law, and even it can try to complement or supplant certain roles and/or functions from the aforementioned ones, but as long as there are humans in the loop code will not be itself law.

Sure, soon we'll probably end up with RoboCops patrolling the streets, and maybe even AI writing much of the statutes, and eventually even AI making most of the law, but even then code won't be law.

Re: Wikipedia article blocked worldwide by Delhi high court

#416

Post by smsm42 »

sofixa wrote: post #212
smsm42 wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes. People who want to control the information want to distribute misinformation freely and be guaranteed nobody can contest them. That's the link. The censors always will be the liars, because once you can control who can say what, it is impossible to resist the temptation to lie a little bit for a good cause. And then a little bit more. We have seen it happen many, many times.

> We have seen it happen many, many times. Have we? I can only think of wartime censorship (which, even if it was sold for protection from enemy propaganda, was always about morale, so doesn't apply here), and authoritarian regimes, which also don't apply here.

Yes, we have. Those same people who whine about "misinformation" are repeatedly caught lying to the public - for the public's benefit, of course, which they get to define. Which only makes sense - if you think the public is not smart enough to be trusted with figuring what is true and what is false by themselves, and needs a gatekeeper class to define it for them, then it's only a little step from that to deciding the public is not smart enough to make correct decisions based on facts, and needs to be manipulated by the same gatekeeper class by telling them what they need to hear, for their own good. Again, this happened many times just in the recent years.

Re: Wikipedia article blocked worldwide by Delhi high court

#417

Post by rpdillon »

riffraff wrote: post #180
chris_wot wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If adblockers have a huge amount of access, then consider how much access ads themselves have. uBlock Origin is open source.

They have less access? When I visit my national healthcare website extensions can look at my traffic, but there are no ads. I'm not saying ad blockers are bad, but it's not like we didn't have extensions being subverted in the past.

You can disable your ad blocker on sites that have no ads.

Re: Wikipedia article blocked worldwide by Delhi high court

#418

Post by _el1s7 »

jampekka wrote: post #273
_el1s7 wrote: post #270

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wikipedia looks like a fantastic resource, but it's not really a reliable source of information. Everyone can write things there, including people with biases and conflicting interests. Their rules about editing are really annoying and unfair, they don't care about facts. I enjoy reading Wikipedia sometimes, but it's a broken system, a lot of truths missing in it's articles because of crap editors and political propa…

> Wikipedia looks like a fantastic resource, but it's not really a reliable source of information. It's about as reliable it gets. It cites sources, has whole history available, has little conflicts of interest and has transparent editorial guidelines and process. Many people are probably shocked to find views in WP that aren't aligned with what their newsmedia reports and frames.

I would change that wording to say that: it's mostly reliable, but not perfect and not as objective as it purports to be.

Re: Wikipedia article blocked worldwide by Delhi high court

#419

Post by sunshowers »

madebymaya wrote: post #363
sunshowers wrote: post #359

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In India like in many other countries, the judiciary is one of the three branches of government. As an Indian citizen I certainly don't trust the Indian judiciary to be impartial when it comes to literally ANI.

the opening statement is your opinion which is obviously incorrect, stated as if it's factual. In India, as in many countries that follow rule of law, judiciary is independent from government. It's the third pillar of democracy not government. Classic Doctrine of separation of powers. the latter part of the statement is clearly given as your opinion which of course one is free to carry.

No, in fact what I said is the generally understood meaning of the constitutional structure of India [1] [2].

[1] https://www.britannica.com/place/India/Constitutional-struct...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Government_of_India

Re: Wikipedia article blocked worldwide by Delhi high court

#420

Post by pclmulqdq »

signatoremo wrote: post #303
pclmulqdq wrote: post #295

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wikipedia is often wrong once you stray from mainstream topics. Subspecialties often have 1-2 super-contributors, whose blind spots and misunderstandings become part of Wikipedia. Plenty of articles also have no actual citations of their technical content.

Nobody says Wikipedia is perfect. The fact that you can point out that certain content are wrong proves what the GP said — “[It] has whole history available, has little conflicts of interest and has transparent editorial guidelines and process.” It’s also worth pointing out that it could be you who has blind spots, not the contributors. And if you’re certain they are wrong you can always try to correct them, or creat…

> It’s also worth pointing out that it could be you who has blind spots, not the contributors. And if you’re certain they are wrong you can always try to correct them, or create a competing topic?

No, it's not me who has the blind spots in the cases I have seen, sorry. Also, they are not worth the work to correct, since the overlord of the niche is usually someone with far too much time on their hands to argue, even when presented with incontrovertible proof. They also often have "Wikipedia editing" as a hobby, and know all the nitpicking rules of the site that they will use against you if you encroach on their domain. And yes, I tried this once for an obvious error in a math article (with no citation in the original article, mind you).

> So it’s a good source for topics with the largest audience.

Also not for topics of any political bent, but sure, if your target audience is at a high school level or below and you can separate out the facts from the editorialization, it's not bad.

At this point, I want Encyclopedia Britannica back. I would take it any day of the week over Wikipedia. The golden age of Wikipedia, when that was reversed, seems to be over.

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