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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.
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.
"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.
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
Qtel is probably using private ip addresses, and a NAT.
If you're going to be elitist, it would help to be elite.
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
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.
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.