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Wikipedia's Switch To HTTPS Has Successfully Fought Government Censorship (vice.com)
Determining how to prevent acts of censorship has long been a priority for the non-profit Wikimedia Foundation, and thanks to new research from the Harvard Center for Internet and Society, the foundation seems to have found a solution: encryption. From a report: HTTPS prevents governments and others from seeing the specific page users are visiting. For example, a government could tell that a user is browsing Wikipedia, but couldn't tell that the user is specifically reading the page about Tiananmen Square. Up until 2015, Wikipedia offered its service using both HTTP and HTTPS, which meant that when countries like Pakistan or Iran blocked the certain articles on the HTTP version of Wikipedia, the full version would still be available using HTTPS. But in June 2015, Wikipedia decided to axe HTTP access and only offer access to its site with HTTPS. [...] The Harvard researchers began by deploying an algorithm which detected unusual changes in Wikipedia's global server traffic for a year beginning in May 2015. This data was then combined with a historical analysis of the daily request histories for some 1.7 million articles in 286 different languages from 2011 to 2016 in order to determine possible censorship events. [...] After a painstakingly long process of manual analysis of potential censorship events, the researchers found that, globally, Wikipedia's switch to HTTPS had a positive effect on the number censorship events by comparing server traffic from before and after the switch in June of 2015.
censorship from the Wikipedia "mods" who've decided which pages are "theirs" and only they are allowed to update them?
Did you know 80 to 90% of the moderators on slashdot wouldn't recognize a troll even if one dragged them under a bridge.
Ah cool - left and right -- what a simple world!
Sounds like the Donnie Dark "LOVE or FEAR" measuring stick.
The free market probably was once a "liberal" idea, back in the days of Dukes and Lords who wanted to control all commerce. Segregation is making a huge comeback, is the idea of segregation supposed to be a "left" or "right" idea ... if so why is "the left" pushing it.
So is Smokey The Bear not wanting you to litter a "left thing" ("the environment") or a "right thing" ("use a trash can, lazy ass")? Is wanting fuel efficiency a "left thing" ("air quality") or a "right thing" ("use your resources efficiently").
Left and right is so various knuckleheads can argue with each other and navel gaze and repeat arguments someone else told to them on the television.
any decent overlord is using SSL inspection (seemlessly via compromised root certs), so this is a non-issue
Why are you so negative?
I'm trying to provide some counter-balance to unconscious positivity.
More seriously the religious conservatives in those countries who are employing censorship to "protect public morals" (or whatever they imagine themselves doing) do not regard the successful circumvention of censorship as positive. To call an objectively negative effect on a number 'positive,' betrays the tacit liberal ideological bias of the author. Better to call a spade a spade and allow the reader to draw her own conclusions as to the desirability of the outcome.
Most censorship actually comes from leftists ...
Wrong. Most censorship actually comes from "countries like Pakistan or Iran", that is to say, from religious conservatives.
For example, a government could tell that a user is browsing Wikipedia, but couldn't tell that the user is specifically reading the page about Tiananmen Square.
This is hard to believe. The vast majority of Wikipedia pages contain several images and the file sizes for each of these images is different. When you load a page, the browser first loads the text of the page, then in separate https requests, it loads each of the images, usually in the order listed in the page's HTML. Each page then has a unique signature: the size of the text, and the sizes of each of the images in order. It would be very easy for an adversary to build up a database of these signatures, simply by analyzing their own traffic when they examine various pages. Even if the traffic is encrypted, by looking at the amount of data transferred and the timing, it seems it would be almost trivial to figure out which pages a user was visiting.
If I can be modded down for being a troll, can I be modded up for being an orc, or a balrog?
No. Wrong!
Most censorship comes from *AUTHORITARIANS*. From both sides of the aisle. By their very nature authoritarians want to control what you can do, and that includes what you can read. Regardless of which way someone leans politically, if they are more libertarian they will be against censorship, and/or pretty much telling people how to live their lives. If they are authoritarian, they will want to meddle, and that includes censorship.
Authoritarian left, authoritarian right; they BOTH suck. No matter how you lean politically the most important thing is to remember that we shouldn't be telling people how to live their lives.
When China provides not only the browser, but the entire OS that the majority of people there run, don't you think they can insert their own trusted CA into the mix? How hard is it for a country to require users to access essential government services online, and oh look, they might just have their own trusted CA that you have to accept. If the certs are only presented to connections in their own country it becomes that much harder for security researchers to detect. There are so many ways to pull this off it's ridiculous, and countries that can't can still use one of the other methods I outlined.
Windows is a bonfire, Linux is the sun. Linux only looks smaller if you lack perspective.
It's a lot worse than that. Governments as powerful as the U.S. and China have a dozen different ways to snoop on what citizens are ingesting. Remember that snowden slide about "we unencrypt and reencrypt ssl here" bit? Now yes, ssl is like, the first obvious step towards doing things the right way. But Snowden revealed to us that several not so completely trustworthy governments are a dozen steps ahead of that and have been for many years. Time has since revealed that the situation isn't getting better. Now if in 2014 Amazon had gone https only, I might have the faintest hope that we have a realistic chance of seeing a decent path in our lifetimes. But here it is in 2017, and the Amazon quasi-monopoly (AWS holy shit) is cementing the expectation of lack of privacy of much of our purchasing logs. Remember that biblical bit about the number of the beast, it had more than a passing reference to commerce tracking the likes of which we've been living with for many years now.
For a few moments we had hope that someone like Snowden could legitimately turn things around. Now I'm quite convinced it's going to take another Holocaust. No joke. And even then it's not going to get better, it will just regress to something much different with new possible directions for the long term, and perhaps hope that people then will have better learned the lessons of history.
Wikipedia is definitely part of the problem as well as Amazon. There is no good reason why they need to have a centralized infrastructure that NO DOUBT is being tracked WHOLESALE by at least the U.S., Russia, and China. Censorship of the sort this summary talks about is a red herring. China after getting the U.S. to help whitewash the Tiananmen Square Massacre in '89 has so much power over their citizens that they can go ahead and let people have unfettered access to information. People learn that it's smarter not to go choosing to ingest the 'wrong' type of information. The government is quite effective at educating the people over their lifetimes as to what the 'wrong' types of information are.
It's so much worse than you think.
Nothing Snowden released was unsuspected; but there is a fair difference between "Yeah, I strongly suspect that my TLAs have some scary capabilities and enjoy using them." and actually seeing the slide decks outlining the 'and this is how we capture a genuinely impressive percentage of traffic; including more flavors of VPN and the like than you might hope."
Even when history gives one little reason to trust the spooks; the kooks always have a bad time getting taken seriously, even when they have good evidence; and much more so when they can only speculate.