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Wikipedia Blocks Qatar [Updated]
GrumpySimon writes "Wikipedia has blocked the entire country of Qatar from editing pages. Whilst the ban is due to spam-abuse coming from the IP address in question, the fact that this belongs to the country's sole high-speed internet provider has the unintended consequence of stopping Qataris from editing the wiki. The ban has raised concerns about impartiality — the majority of Al Jazeera journalists operate out of Qatar, for example. This raises a number of issues about internet connectivity in small countries — what other internet bottlenecks like this exist?" Update: 01/02 13:32 GMT by Z : Jim Wales wrote in the comments that the story is 'completely false'. Either way, the ban has been lifted and anonymous editing is once again possible from Qatar.
It's situations like this that should make small countries upgrade to IPv6. What surprises me is that they haven't already.
Inventions have long since reached their limit, and I see no hope for further development.-- Frontinus, 1st cent. AD
Whilst the ban is due to spam-abuse coming from the IP address in question, the fact that this belongs to the country's sole high-speed internet provider has the unintended consequence of stopping Qatarese from editing the wiki.
Actually, according to wikipedia, the correct word is Qatarded, not Qatarese.
Push Button, Receive Bacon
That an entry from a block log is all it takes to make Slashdot these days. This also means that any concerns have, so far, been raised only in the head of the submitter. Note also that the block was re-tooled to allow account creation, so that only anonymous editing is prevented. Finally, the block is in place for one month, not indefinitely. Nothing to see here, move along.
No statement is true, not even this one.
It is hard to block a country, they can just use a web proxy to bypass IP blocking and change the PC browser country code to something friendly. Cat and mouse at best.
This seems to be a technical weakness of Qatar's method of filtering the web access of its citizens. For a website which is accessible to everyone can, the IP address is the only way to distinguish visitors from each other. Now if the government of Qatar decided to hide all its citizen's IP addreses behind that of a proxy, then the citizens of Qatar should not be surprised when they cannot be distinguished from each other by web sites. Persumably Qataris who have Wikipedia user accounts (logons) would be able to edit anyway -- and others can petition their government to change its internet policy.
If Wikipedia's information on the linked page is correct, the reason that the entire Qatar is blocked, is that it is the ip of a proxy server...
It is common practice for ISP's in countries with limited bandwidth to transparently proxy all HTTP traffic in order to save bandwidth
South Africa's SAIX does the same. However they have several proxy servers doing load sharing, which cause even more problems with sites that associate session information with one's IP. Online games preventing the trading of items by users on the same IP is also problematic.
Sites offering access on an alternative port in addition to 80 would offer a solution.
Having read the page, it looks as if the Slashdot article may be incorrect. Users operating from that IP address and who are not logged in have been denied editing privileges due to abuse.
This is a far lesser issue, it's more accountability than censorship.
My Karma: ran over your Dogma
StrawberryFrog
A "Technical Note" on the talk page clarifies that the blocking of an IP address includes a ban on creating new user accounts. There's no discussion of what happens with existing accounts though.
The entire Calgary School District 192.139.27.18 is blocked and they are the biggest School District in Canada
yes it is because of vandals (at other schools) but still I cannot do anything and Im not trying to vandalize but only add good content
Wikipedia has blocked anonymous contributions from one IP, which happens to be a proxy from that country.
Users can still edit wikipedia throught this proxy by creating an account and logging in.
Creating a wikipedia account only requires a (throw-away) email, and is actually more anonymous, since your IP will not show up in the public logs if you are logged in.
Lots of people have tagged this story with 'uae'. Well contrary to what you might think Qatar is not part of the United Arab Emirates. It is an emirate and an independent state.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qatar
If you agree that Qatar is not part of the UAE, please tag this story 'notuae' and mod this comment 'Informative' so everyone will see it.
Let's show Qatar that unlike Wikipedia, Slashdot is not a haven of ignorance.
A state that has but a single ISP has the power of censorship readily available. By blocking this address, even as a side effect it is alerting the Quatarese to their peril. Conversely spam blocking is not censorship but rather the reverse, making public forums protected for the use of real speech. It also forces the the ISP to try to police it's own spam generators to our general benefit. Blocking it at the source is the desired solution. Hopefully people will vote with their feet and a new ISP in quatar will arise and give those folks some choice and protection from censorship.
This is not a bad thing. While the side effect is temporarily drastic, if quatar had multiple ISPS we would not be discussing this at all.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
Rather, I imagine the proxies are used for censorship.
I was stationed in the Kingdom of Bahrain for a few months, and apparently most of the country's internet goes through its University, which is (or was) blocked by Slashdot for some reason. I could access the site, but not login, even after I sent email to the Slashdot admins as instructed. Not very important in the grand scheme of things, just annoying at the time.
So, the problem appears to be fixed. Users can now register for accounts. Thank you slashdot front page (Kjkolb) ;)
The problem came from QTel censorship. Every connection passes through a QTel proxy server, which uses some simplistic rules to determine whether you should be protected from your own surfing habits. If you hit blocked pages too often, your phone rings and when you answer in English you get "I'm sorry, I must have a wrong number. CLUNK." Thus your voice has been recorded for posterity.
The shambles of Qatar's connection might be fixed soon. Q-CERT has just been set up and (hopefully), someone with a bit of influence will be in charge. It is obvious that a single point of failure for an entire population's internet connection is not sensible, but whether this means a better censorship system or the scrapping of censorship remains to be seen.
This explain to me a lot!
More likely, IPs are dynamically assigned, and Wikipedia banned the entire IP range of Quatar.
I've seen vandals being blocked - this is usually a slow and extremely lenient process, with something like 2-3 offenses tolerated before they start handing out even day-long blocks for a single IP. I'd like to know what this guy did to make it necessary to prevent him from coming back for a month.
I don't know about spammers though, they might be blocked more quickly.
Please cite your sources.
my password really is 'stinkypants'
I work for a company that filters spam. We have to block big blocks of spammers now and again. To get off our blocked list, companies just have to stop the spammers. It usually just take a few days.
You may be asking too much. :P :)
I think many Slashdot readers will have an opinion based on the title of the posting.
"Two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity; and I'm not sure about the universe." Albert Einstein
"The ban has raised concerns about impartiality"
Don't mask it with that or any other excuse. It's not Wikipedia's fault that they have only high speed provider who can't fix a simple problem.
ISP:
Problem: User X is abusing other networks.
Solution: Account is turned off.
Yes it's that easy if laziness weren't involved. This is exactly like those who whine when their network gets listed on an RBL. Where do those who are blocked go? They whine to the RBL or since they, the RBLs, aren't going to listen the world. They should complain to their network provider - it's where the problem is.
IT DOESN'T, YOU TARDS!
I'd complain about the lack of editing skills on the part of the Slashdot guys, but we already know that when they say "editor", what they really mean is "monkey trained to click a button when a text blurb makes him grin."
If a job's not worth doing, it's not worth doing right.
Exactly. The same happened for my school district; I wrote a note that it was a school proxy server on the IP's talk page, and they modified the block to only apply to unregistered users. Make a note and I'm sure they'll do the same for you.
Omnes stulti sunt.
Slashdot blocks logins from the UAE as well most of the time. I have to use an http proxy to post comments. Several other sites do the same thing. The whole country's traffic goes through a handful of proxy servers, which are used by UAE's infamous monopoly ISP to censor content and block VoIP calls.
I can't speak for Wikipedia's spam blocking process, but I operate a Wiki that is well known enough to get a lot of spam. I block that fairly effectively. Seven pieces of true spam have gotten through over the two and a half years since I implemented the first version of my spam blocking, but I had almost half my site overwritten at one point before that, so I take it pretty seriously. I fully understand why many Wiki owners have decided to make their Wikis read only rather than deal with it and why others have resorted to required logons, confirmations of the existence of a human, and other measures. Some useful factoids:
I don't want to make any great claims, at least in part because I don't want to increase the attack frequency on my site or get slashdotted, but my software has been very effective in blocking almost everything that the spammers throw at me. I don't currently block any countries and am reluctant to publicly reveal the rules I use for the blocking, but do block about a dozen IP addresses that have been used enough to suggest that they are directly associated with individual spammers.
Davis http://davis.foulger.net
Assuming the block on your school district is the same type as the one being discussed here, you can still "add good content". You just need to create a Wikipedia user account and do it while logged in. The block only stops contributions from non-logged-in users.
Read my blog.
Not only Qatar but also Thailand has large ISPs that are being blocked with some regularity. It is certainly not an isolated issue.
Thanks,
GerardM
Qtel is probably using private ip addresses, and a NAT.
Isn't Bahrain the location of the guy who was posting off-topic comments during Pete Townshend's pedophilia trial?
You don't want to mess around when it concerns ol' "Rough Boy" Pete.
Great, now all an authoritarian country has to do is have the state-controlled ISP flood Wikipedia with spam.
Wikipedia blocks that country's editors.
Editors cry "censorship."
Wikipedia blames ISP for allowing spam.
ISP says "they will look into it" but conveniently never fixes the problem.
On a side-note, Wikipedia should allow editors who are registered, provide a valid email-address, and can prove they are human to continue to edit from all blacklisted IP-blocks except perhaps those known to be used only by troublemakers.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
If Qatar get's whacked as a nation I don't really care. It's because of their flagrant disregard for the number one problem on the internet today. SPAM.
And it wasn't Qatar that got whacked. It was their only ISP that got whacked. How is this any different from blocking res.rr.com? Answer: It's not. It just happens that they don't have a lot of other ISP choices out there. Too bad.
I have no sympathies for any nation that tops the list of spam abuse and I have no sympathies for ISP's that have no real controls on spam abuse. It's a huge problem and it will continue as long as companies/nations believe that they can run spam through their doors without ramifications.
http://www.ripn.net/ix/en/
Why UNIX?
Wikipedia wouldn't have this sort of problem if they implemented a policy where you had to register an account in order to edit. Then they could block offending accounts and impose a temporary block on new account creation from an IP address or range whenever a problem arose. This would allow all the established editors to continue editing even if they share an IP address with an entire flotilla of spammers/vandals.
I don't see the connection here, because qatar's isp is having issues with some punk editing wiki pages, and because many of al jazeera's reporters live in qatar, means their impartial ? i don't get it.
...
so
the unibomber being from the usa makes all citizens of the usa terrorists ? or does it imply only that cnn is impartial ? I don't get it.
The reason why there is spamming is because the ISP is irresponsible and doesn't enforce its own terms of service among its users. In lieu of rogue ISPs (which also include domestic ones like Comcast, AT&T and others) the only realistic alternative is to wholesale ban their IP space until they get their act together and start clamping down on the illegal activities of their customer nodes.
It sucks this has to be done, but there's no other way, short of civil/criminal prosecution, to make them take responsibility for the behavior of their customers who are wreaking havoc on the rest of the Internet.
Nope! Only ONE IP address for the whole country.
Dog is my co-pilot.
Good luck trying to register a username if you find yourself on the wrong end of a mistaken block. Neither is there any way to contact anyone who might be of any help--remember, you can't edit talk pages either.
And this is the way things are supposed to work, according to Wikipedia's admins.
And now, a PSA from David Lynch.
I have faith that Wikipedia will resolve this problem. We should sympathize Wikipedia for they have made such great projects for the benefit of all the people, and the Qatarese people for they are no longer able to access this website, this great source of information, all because just a few very malicious indivisuals try to sabotage this great effort of making this project.
We should give moral support to Wikipedia and the Qatarese people, and give our best wish to them that one day this problem will be resolved.
By the way, the author of this article should say 'Wikimedia' instead of 'Wikipedia', right? Because Wikipedia is the name of the encyclopedia, and Wikimedia is the company that manages Wikipedia. (Maybe I should write 'Wikimedia' instead, too.)
If they want to edit Wiki so bad, they can dial up the old modem and do so slowly.
A person who is a citizen of Qatar is called a Qatari, and plural is Qataris.
Qatarese is wrong.
2bits.com, Inc: Drupal, WordPress, and LAMP performance tuning.
So it's not only heavy-handed governments blocking WP. It can work backwards too. Oblig: in Soviet Qatar, Wikipedia blocks you!
This post contains no rudeness or derision of any kind. All arguments are friendly. Terms and exclusions may apply.
Uhhhh, what do you think this is, Wikipedia?
The chief obstacle to the progress of the human race is the human race. - Don Marquis (1878-1937)
On the Wikipedia designated for the English language, you are expected to contribute text readable by speakers of the English language. What's so hard about picking some transliteration for your username? Even IM-speak would work.
So create an account from another computer outside of the proxy force field, or tunnel out to another proxy. It's not that hard to dodge these autoblocks.
I used to get high on life, but I developed a tolerance. Now I need something stronger.
I wonder what will happen at the end of that month-long ban. The overwhelming influx of spam from the same country as many Al-Jazeera journalists sounds like a digital equivalent of Feds dressed as anarchists throwing bricks through Starbucks windows to discredit a peace rally.
e rence_of_1999_protest_activity#.22N30.22
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WTO_Ministerial_Conf
No, not too difficult, that is if you spend your entire life being a computer geek. But for the average person whose contributions Wikipedia claims to want, it might not be worth the effort.
And now, a PSA from David Lynch.
I can understand the tunnel being geeky, but the easier solution of just leaving the proxied network is simple even for the most technophobic individuals. Obviously this doesn't work for those unfortunate people in countries like Qatar, but this thread was about a school district in Canada. Canada being a first-world country with multiple competitive ISPs, it won't be hard to leave that particular network.
I used to get high on life, but I developed a tolerance. Now I need something stronger.
When you are blocked, you can still post to your user talk page, except in the most exceptional cases. I think administrators can change a non-Latin username on request.
No - we only blocked one IP (I was implicitly involved in the blocking process). However, from time to time we do block IP ranges when we get a lot of vandalism/spamming from dynamic address. We allow multiple offences in many cases so that we can warn the user, in the hope that they will change their ways. In this case, we saw an IP address with over 150 edits, mostly spam, and 4 or 5 previous blocks. We tend to increase blocks in length each time we have to repeat, so this IP had spammed often enough that we issued a 1 month block (at thi stage not knowing that it was the whole of Qatar). Later, after those affected by the block contacted us, and we verified their claims, we adjusted and ultimately removed the block.
This could become a small but interesting example of a sociological/technological interface quirk pivoting on an event and eventually taking on greater weight historically or sociologically. (Such as the oft cited connection between horses behinds and the space shuttle design http://www.aqua.co.za/assa_jhb/Canopus/c99aSpec.ht m) As web 2.0 takes on greater weight, monolithic ISP's poorly managed centralized systems etc, may have their flaws highlighted, and in order to keep up, will have to mend their ways. So it is entirely possible that years from now, someone might cite this as an example of how spam helped end authoritarian rule in the 21st century....well, we can hope!
Even if the edit is to the account creation log? How are contributors who live in Qatar supposed to create Wikipedia accounts if the country's only ISP's entire IP address space is blocked?
Does Wikipedia permit users on blocked IP addresses to create accounts? Or is account creation denied in an attempt to prevent block evasion? Or do people have to already have a friend outside Qatar who is willing to create an account?
The government would then only allow and control the single IPv6 address into the country... I may be unaware of part of IPv6, but my recollection is that it allows for more addresses due to a larger format. It doesn't look like that would solve this problem. The issue here lies in the very small and controlled pipe into the country, not with the network running on either side.
Look behind you...
What makes you think that? The template used to make an administrative request places your user page in a category that the administrators check routinely.
I don't know what else to say about it. Wikipedia is not blocking Qatar. An IP number was blocked for about 12 hours. There was an admin discussion about the issue. The IP number was unblocked.
Move along, nothing to see.
--Jimbo Wales
Wikia
The problem is that these countries (Kuwait, Qatar, Bahrain, etc) all censor the net to some extent or another and therefore, their entire population appears to use one IP address. If I do not have a cookie already set, I can not log in to Slashdot from several different countries.
Since at least one person in any given population is going to be a real jerk, most of these countries are going to find themselves as second class net participants. The only way to avoid this is for each site to accept only individual sign-up accounts and prohibit anonymous posting.
strike
"Someone needs to talk to the tree of liberty about its ghoulish drinking problem." by ohnocitizen
A group of Wikipedians has been trying to raise awareness about RFC 1918 private networks among admins and other sysops at Wikipedia. The Qatar issue is just the latest. T-Mobile Hotspots is another big example of these networks. A small group of administrators is trying to hide this information from other admins and even spread disinformation about the issue. You can read user Dmcdevit spreading some crazy disinformation about private networks in this thread. Another admin associated with Dmcdevit, Naconkantari, has been edit warring on the main WikiMedia site over a simple proposal to improve WikiMedia to deal more favorably with these networks. That edit war has gone on for weeks over a simple proposal on the Babel page. I have no idea why anyone would want to tighten a wiki to keep out users of large private networks, but there you have the edit histories on Wikipedia and Wikimedia. Something is afoot.
What makes you think a less restrictive system would be worth the effort to Wikipedia? There are many, many thousands of casual contributors, but only a fairly small number of people with enough interest and ability to serve as moderators. Your individual contribution is insignificant to the project as a whole.
I'm not trying to discourage anyone from editing Wiki. Your contribution is still significant to the people reading it. Just don't expect the project to bend over backwards for you.
The Administrators noticeboard (search for "Qatar") specifies that the ban on creating accounts is an optional part of an IP block, and that it initially came with this one as default, and was removed once the scope of the block was realized.
The noticeboard also states, repeatedly, that the block had nothing to do with censorship or antipathy towards Qatar. It was result of normal vandal-fighting while not knowing the specific circumstances of this particular instance at the time. But where's the fun of that?
Or you could always find the "E-mail this user" link that's in plain sight on the user page of anyone who's enabled this option. It seems very popular. I'd guess that a not insignificant part of the admins have.
According to the Wikipedia page (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:82.148.97. 69), this is a misunderstanding. I didn't figure I would be the first to post on this, but here goes.
The article says, "If you came here from a news headline saying that Wikipedia has banned all of Qatar, please pop right back over there and post in the comments that the story is not true. This IP number was temporarily blocked for less than 12 hours, and a block of an entire nation would go absolutely against Wikipedia policy. In the English Wikipedia, such an action would require approval of at a minimum the English Arbitration Committee and/or me personally, and would never ever be undertaken lightly, nor without extensive attempts at direct negotiation with the ISP and/or nation in question."
Go to the updated site, and it explains it all. I really was doubtful that Wikipedia would indefinitely ban an entire country anyway. Certainly, Wikipedia does not unilaterally censor an entire country.
In one of William Poundstone's Big Secrets books, he notes in a chapter on fast-food that the CEO of a major US chain (Burger King, IIRC) once said in an interview that the "secret" to their fries was that after the potatoes were cut, they were sprayed with a sugar-water solution before freezing.
In the fryer the sugar quickly carmelizes and turns crisp, while the inside is still left soft and white. This CEO said he did not know for certain that every other fast-food chain did it that way, but that was the only way they'd ever found that worked right.
~
...wikipedia censors you!
They did ban the country of Qatar without the approval of any committe or the director of the Foundation. What's more Wikipedia has a group of administrators who work to make sure the technology behind such a national block is poorly understood by other administrators. So they may protest innocence, but there's something sinister going on there at Wikipedia (despite what their press release may say).
Not so: Qatar formally lifted censorship of the media in 1995 and since then the press has been essentially free from government interference. However, social and political constraints make self-censorship commonplace.
(from http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/middle_east/count ry_profiles/791921.stm)
The very reason al-Jazeera is there is because there is no overt censorship.
Real Daleks don't climb stairs - they level the building.
According to the IPI,
Al Jazeera's critical coverage has angered some Arab leaders. In Algeria, Iran, Tunisia and Saudi Arabia, reporters were refused accreditation and bureaus' were denied permission to open this year.
They're nice about Qatar - self-censorship again, even in the absence of official coercion - but they're certainly not a mere propaganda mouthpiece. Indeed, I'd say that any channel which is denounced angrily by both the Americans and the Iranians must be doing something right - in the same way that the writers of Spitting Image used to feel proud of getting complaints of bias from all the parties :-)
Real Daleks don't climb stairs - they level the building.
They'll be strapping on laptops with Sony batteries and heading for the Wikipedia office. p.s. It's a joke, but if you must mod me flamebait... go ahead.
You can view the block log (though the block log descritpison do not always accurately describe the type of block. You can see the contribution history for these anonymous editors. From a cursory glance at this information, it's hard to imagine an admin would find a one month block justifiable (even if the admin did not know it was an entire country). One month definitely looks like an over-reaction.
However, we've seen more and more problems with admins lately on Wikipedia. Wikipedia is no longer relying on volunteers, but more and more relying on paid staff, working in shifts aroudn the clock. Often times these admins show no interest in building an encyclopedia, but do want to excercise their uninformed editorial slant whenever possible. Consequently, we have admins blocking valuable editors because they hold the wrong point-of-view (i.e., not the point-of -view of the admin).. There are still many volunteers working on Wikipedia, but things don't work as smoothly as they used to.
The issue of proxy servers is also just per speculation. The term open proxy is bandied about among Wikipedia admins as if it's some sort of evil. I'm not saying there aren't problems with proxy servers, but whenever there's a problem they cry "open proxy server", whether they have any evidence of that or not. Clearly, there's no information that anyone has presented that shows us that Qatar has an open proxy server. We don't even know if they use a proxy server at all. However, from what we're hearing it looks like Qtel uses an RFC 1918 private network to conserve IP addresses. This is a very common internet standard. It's something admins on any wiki should be aware of (they're not on wikipedia). And it's something to be careful about when encountering very large private networks (like the nation of Qatar).. Wikipedia administrators seem very resistant to learning about internet technology. They just react in knee-jerk fashion to any threat (no matter how small). I think the wiki software and the wiki concept are both good ideas. Unfortunately Wikimedia and it's related projects have lost sight of that project.
I'm smarter than you are.
Out of interest, have you checked your facts? There are certainly a number of paid employees (I think it's about 4 or 5). There are no paid administrators, and there are over 500 of them on the site last I checked. I should point out that not all administrators know (or indeed should know) about subnetting or CIDR, and mistakes can be made.
As Jimbo said, move along here, nothing to be seen.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.