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.

Comments

Delusional

[gravewax]

It is completely delusional to think this effectively prevents government censorship as if they can't selectively block content they simply take the sledgehammer approach and ban the site altogether.

Only a temporary solution

[PAjamian]

The only reason this is working for now is because the censoring governments haven't implemented a workaround for it yet. There are various ways they can still censor Wikipedia:

They can use their own CA (don't even think that a country like China doesn't have access to be able to generate certs for any hostnames they want from a trusted CA) to generate a wikipedia.com cert and proxy wikipedia traffic through their own servers censoring it in the process.

They can proxy traffic from http to https and locally block the https traffic so the people in their country are foced to use the http version which is censored.

They can block Wikipedia alltogether by various different means.