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Venezuela's Government Blocks Access To Wikipedia (haaretz.com)

Haaretz (with contributions from Reuters and the Associated Press) reports: According to NetBlocks, a digital rights group that tracks restrictions to the internet, as of 12 January, Venezuela largest telecommunications provider CANTV has prevented access to Wikipedia in all languages. The internet observatory told Haaretz the ban was discovered by attempting "to access Wikipedia and other services 60,000 times from 150 different points in the country using multiple providers."

Roughly 16 million people have access to the internet in the South American country ravaged by poverty and now facing a political crisis as leader Nicolas Maduro attempts to cling to power following a highly contested re-election last year. Wikipedia receives on average 60 million views from the country every month.

According to NetBlocks, the ban was likely imposed after a Wikipedia article listed newly-appointed National Assembly president Juan Guaidà as âoepresident number 51 of the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela,â ousting Maduro from his presidential status on Wikipedia... Alp Toker, the head of NetBlocks, explained to Haaretz that the block followed a string of controversial edits on the Spanish-language article for Guaido as well as other related articles.

Long-time Slashdot reader williamyf identifies himself as "a Venezuelan in Venezuela." He reports that "The method used seems to be to intercept the SSL handshake and not a simple DNS block," adding "the situation is developing."

In May of last year the government declared a "state of emergency" that authorized the government to police the internet and filter content, rights activists reported Monday. They added that now Venezuela's new leaders plan to introduce legislation requiring messaging service providers to censor content, and implementing other so-called "content security" measures.

3 of 208 comments (clear)

  1. The internet treats censorship as damage by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

    This sounds like domain fronting would get around the block: Connect to a different site hosted behind the same load balancer, establish a TLS connection with the other site's domain name, then use the correct host header for the HTTP request inside the TLS connection. That's how Signal got around Russian attempts to censor them.

  2. Re:Socialism, falsified by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0, Interesting

    Norway has a tiny population, nearly 100% white and some of the strictest immigration policies on the planet. Great example there.

  3. Mussolini was the head of the Socialist party by raymorris · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Mussolini was at one time the head of the Socialist party in Italy, and was a follower of Georges Sorel. So pointing to Mussolini and pretending he was somehow the opposite of socialist or communist is a bit bizarre. That's kinda like:

    Republicans do this ...
    And Reaganites don't?!

    Fascism is what happens when socialist meets reality. Socialism is a fiction book has an imaginary race of people with no instinct for self-preservation or self-interest. Real people try to take care of themselves and their families, so fascism is required to force socialism on them.