On 8/24/07, Gwern Branwen <gwern0(a)gmail.com>
wrote:
On 0, Thomas Dalton <thomas.dalton(a)gmail.com> scribbled:
On 24/08/07, Gary Kirk
<gary.kirk(a)gmail.com> wrote:
Did I miss something, how can *they* block people
from editing? Or do
they mean something like a filter blocking access to Wikipedia URLs
containing, say, &action=edit in them?
That's what I'm assuming they've done.
Shouldn't be too hard to test. We could just ask someone working for them
(there's got to be at least one Wikipedian who works there!) to edit through
secure.wikimedia.org and see whether that works; or to just try editing
one of the non-En WPs. I very much doubt that their IT department would have
written a filter broad enough to catch all that, like
".*wiki.*/&action\=edit.*" - too many ways to edit WMF projects and too
many
other sites that might get hit.
--
gwern
bce EAM MKSEARCH KLM evasion RSO varon 11Emc industrial NSWT
_______________________________________________
WikiEN-l mailing list
WikiEN-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org
To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit:
http://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Depending on their setup, you'd think it would be easier to just drop all
POST requests to any *.wikipedia.org hosts (plus a few others - but I don't
think other projects are a concern here, just Wikipedia). I can't see a use
for
secure.wikimedia.org to them either, so they would probably have made an
outright block on that host (or at least port 443).
Still, only one way to find out :-)
(I should probably say this as well)
But also, ".*wiki.*/&action\=edit.*" doesn't catch them all either.
Remember
you can go to
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foo?action=edit as well. (note no
&action, but a ?action)
Also remember that even though the edit form is &action=edit, the page save
is still &action=submit, so it's still technically possible to make an edit,
though completely impractical (you'll find it very hard to save a page when
you can't get the source code, you can't get the timestamp of when you hit
edit, and when you can't even use a normal browser to save the page, but
it's still possible, and that's all that matters)
Cheers,
--Michael Billington
I've worked for a defense department or two, and they also record what
you use your computer for, so asking someone who works there to
purposely break the ban to see if it works, should come with the
knowledge that you may be suggesting, if they don't know this, that
they compromise their employment.
There are many instances where military personnel use defense
department computers, in those cases they might be banned from
accessing the computers.
Almost all Wikipedia editors I have encountered outside of the biology
area use on-line sources to the exclusion of almost everything else.
A major topic in the biological and earth sciences went up for
deletion because the editor wasn't a scientist and couldn't find
anything on the web.
Why should soldiers, sailors, airmen and marines be any different than
the bulk of Wikipedia editors? Well, probably that they're in
uniform, they're not the priviliged few.
KP