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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.
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.
always goes full censorship.
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
Why? It's everybody who whinges about "Socialism" and "Venezuela" who is ignoring the reality of the country being an oppressive and exploitative tyranny just like Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Turkey, Russia, China, and Trumplandia.
Besides, they're just doing what has been done for centuries, blocking stuff they don't like. Nothing you don't do six times before breakfast.
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.
We are at a point where there is simply no excuse to be a Socialist.
At this point there's no excuse to NOT be a socialist. Just look at what happened in Sweden, Norway and Denmark.
Not really, because it is possible to count the places its working too. You can be socialist and fiscally responsible, or socialist and fiscally irresponsible (Venezuela). Look at somewhere like Norway, a social democracy with very high levels of social welfare spending etc, driven by natural resources. They have saved the money and not just spent it all as soon as possible. Obviously Norway had a different starting point, but look at Bolivia too, right next to Venezuela, also has natural resources, also a socialist democracy, but has been more fiscailly conservative and used money to diversify and invest in the economy rather than just using it for social welfare spending.
You can understand why a poor country's people see all this oil money and demand it gets spent on the people now. A clever government would spend it on the people later.
When socialism works the capitalist side of the economy is also healthy, so we seem to forget that there is a socialist underpinning that enables that.
Pretty sure I'm just feeding a troll, but I'm not sure where you're getting any of those statistics, considering crime has been increasing in Venezuela since Slashdot was founded.
Those countries aren't socialist though. If you don't believe me, take it from the mouth of their Prime Minister. Up until Trump's tax cuts, they also all had lower corporate tax rates than the United States. Sweden has loads of charter schools, which are obviously a well known feature of socialism.
Those countries aren't socialist though
Venezuella is also not socialist. They don't have a centralized planned economy. They instead have a capitalist system with a weak central government that uses income from export to maintain handouts.
Think of all the insight the Venezuelan people could have added to the pages of food, healthcare, security and Communism.
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
Venzuela's problems began when the government started taking over the country's profitable industries. They have massive petroleum resources yet their oil companies collapsed when the state took them over. That's socialism in action.
We really need to get back to bashing the USA.
Sorry, but you don't seem to know what you're talking about. The government took over the economy and the current result is not only predicable, it was predicted by those opposed to socialism, i.e. "For more than a decade people opposed to the government of Venezuela have argued that its economy would implode." was written in 2013.
Those in favor of socialism went on and on about how wonderful Venezuelan socialism was for people.
A "weak central government" doesn't nationalize huge parts of the economy, including all the most essential industries, like Venezuela had. That's (coincidentally, I'm sure...) when those industries then fell apart and stopped being able to produce nearly as much. A "weak central government" doesn't set wage and price controls with rationing and trying to make the government the sole provider for food.
All the attempts at having the government run the economy have ended the same way. It's not something which is even controversial among economists anymore. It's been proven by repeated experiment.
The party of stupid and the party of evil get together and do something both stupid and evil, then call it bipartisan.
It was the Venezuelan government's attempt to quash a small edit war about who's the (legitimate) president, waged on the articles on Venezuela and President of Venezuela. AFAIK the blocking was implemented only by the state-owned ISP, which serves a large majority of domestic connections by virtue of being the only landline phone company.
Anyway seems they gave up on it, yesterday or early today:
openssl s_client -connect en.wikipedia.org:443
CONNECTED(00000005)
depth=2 OU = GlobalSign Root CA - R3, O = GlobalSign, CN = GlobalSign
verify return:1
depth=1 C = BE, O = GlobalSign nv-sa, CN = GlobalSign Organization Validation CA - SHA256 - G2
verify return:1
depth=0 C = US, ST = California, L = San Francisco, O = "Wikimedia Foundation, Inc.", CN = *.wikipedia.org
verify return:1
---
Certificate chain
0 s:C = US, ST = California, L = San Francisco, O = "Wikimedia Foundation, Inc.", CN = *.wikipedia.org
i:C = BE, O = GlobalSign nv-sa, CN = GlobalSign Organization Validation CA - SHA256 - G2
1 s:C = BE, O = GlobalSign nv-sa, CN = GlobalSign Organization Validation CA - SHA256 - G2
i:OU = GlobalSign Root CA - R3, O = GlobalSign, CN = GlobalSign
---
Server certificate
-----BEGIN CERTIFICATE-----
-----END CERTIFICATE-----
subject=C = US, ST = California, L = San Francisco, O = "Wikimedia Foundation, Inc.", CN = *.wikipedia.org
issuer=C = BE, O = GlobalSign nv-sa, CN = GlobalSign Organization Validation CA - SHA256 - G2
--- .... ....
No client certificate CA names sent
Peer signing digest: SHA512
Peer signature type: ECDSA
Server Temp Key: X25519, 253 bits
---
SSL handshake has read 3515 bytes and written 403 bytes
Verification: OK
---
New, TLSv1.2, Cipher is ECDHE-ECDSA-CHACHA20-POLY1305
Server public key is 256 bit
Secure Renegotiation IS supported
Compression: NONE
Expansion: NONE
No ALPN negotiated
SSL-Session:
Protocol : TLSv1.2
Cipher : ECDHE-ECDSA-CHACHA20-POLY1305
Session-ID:
Session-ID-ctx:
Master-Key:
PSK identity: None
PSK identity hint: None
SRP username: None
Start Time: 1547943159
Timeout : 7200 (sec)
Verify return code: 0 (ok)
Extended master secret: yes
---
DONE
In case it happens to you, there's several mirror sites:
https://en.wikipedi0.org
https://wikipediaproxy.org
https://www.wikiwand.com
This post contains no rudeness or derision of any kind. All arguments are friendly. Terms and exclusions may apply.
They instead have a capitalist system
I suppose it's all privately owned right up until the government decides to nationalize it.
This started in jun 2018. Before that, the censorship was based in simple DNS manipulation, afterwards they implemented some form of deep packet inspection, which also attempts to block TOR (fixed by using obfuscated bridges).
Censorship has been going for a few years. It started with media sites, extended to porn sites, at some point they put pastebin because someone pasted a political message, and now this.
They did back down on pastebin and wikipedia (this is coming to slashdot way late).
Artix
Your Linux, your init.
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.
It's everybody who whinges about "Socialism" and "Venezuela" who is ignoring the reality of the country being an oppressive and exploitative tyranny just like Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Turkey, Russia, China
You're contrasting Russia and China with socialist countries?
Egypt too, the government owns the large companies and means of production.
Because real human beings seek to take care of themselves and their families, because they don't like to have the fruits of their labor taken from them, socialism requires "an oppressive and exploitative tyranny" to force socialism on the people. Socialism is *why* the countries you listed have "an oppressive and exploitative tyranny". If people are free, they'll support their families, including by buying and selling stuff - capitalism.
You can't sodomize a cucumber
In Soviet Russia, cucumber sodomizes you!
If it weren't for deadlines, nothing would be late.
Considering how badly the government has screwed up the parts that it nationalized [bloomberg.com] perhaps the small bits of private enterprise (and black markets) are probably all that's keeping it afloat.
Or maybe: "Even the small remaining amount of capitalistic imperialism is keeping Venezuela from restructuring its economy". This is actually true, the government can't set prices for individual goods because people will immediately exploit it. Not unprecedented, btw, it happened before in Berlin just before the Wall.
You would have to explain why countries like Vietnam and China that instituted capitalist reforms to move away from their even more socialistic policies have seem massive growth instead of downward collapse
Because capitalistic economy tempered with socialistic policies actually works much better than pure dog-eat-dog capitalism?
I agree with your description of Norway. You're misinformed about Venezuela. They've nationalized at least oil, steel, aluminum, cement, gold, iron, farming, transportation, electricity, food production, banking, paper and the media. By nationalized, I mean that the government publicly announced their nationalization and directly controls how the groups involved act, rather than private owners.
From a story which is 5 years old, the number of private companies in Venezuela was 14K in 1998. In 2011 it was 9K. The government has been identified as running over 500 state-run industrial entities, at least 70% of which are losing money.
Is Venezuela 100% socialist? No, but they're mostly socialist in terms of government direction of the economy and they were being lauded as a wonderful example of how great socialism could be by people who are pro-socialist before their economy finished falling apart, which makes it much tougher to suddenly decide they aren't socialist anymore.
The party of stupid and the party of evil get together and do something both stupid and evil, then call it bipartisan.
Denmark officially calls itself "Social Democracy", one of their major parties is even called that ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... ).
You somehow think that "socialism" means "everything bad" (up to and including earthquakes). It's not.
communism is the (closest) opposite of capitalism
No. You're inventing your own definitions. "Communism" as defined by Marx is basically an utopia that is not achievable right now. What you're thinking about is a planned economy which _is_ the opposite of capitalism. Historically planned economy was called "socialism" but that's a misnomer.
Socialism is a VERY different beast, Socialism is a system where the state takes capital from people who are judged to have too advantaged, and given by those who are judged to be disadvantaged. Socialism is by definition unstable, as the resources it takes from do not last.... It is the social equivalent of everything people are turning away from these days - consumptive behavior.
Incorrect again. Socialism as practiced in successful countries results in disadvantaged people becoming productive members, thus INCREASING the total amount of capital.
Meanwhile, true unconstrained capitalism results in monopolies, asset bubbles and race to the bottom yielding de-facto slavery. Last century the US was saved first by direct socialistic intervention during the Depression, then by the WWII artificially inflating the demand and finally by strong socialistic after-war policies (GI bill, government-funded Interstate system, Medicare, etc.).
No we don't.
Wikipedia isn't "the media". And we haven't banned it here.
We haven't banned "the media" either, nor have we banned Twitter.
Over the last hundred-or-so years, almost all federal; state; and local laws banning speech have been knocked down or weakened. We've wiped out laws against pornography, we've made it easy to attack establishment religion (especially Christianity), and we've made it easy to support anti-establishment political movements of all kinds. House Unamerican Activities Committee? Gone. Senator McCarthy? Ridiculed, and gone. It's even possible to produce art calling for the murder of political leaders, police, and other public servants. People might not like you for doing so; regardless, there remains the option.
The United States is experiencing perhaps the greatest freedom of expression ever in the history of civilized humanity. We shall see if we use that freedom wisely.
There's no way that President Trump's blathering about the media is equal to Maduro's attempt to block Wikipedia in Venezuela.
Socialist countries have to be repressive.'
A lot of countries with socialist government weren't and aren't. Tell that to Salvador Allende or Evo Morales or Lula.