Quick update, as this story went on Motherboard https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/wikipedians-want-to-to-put-wikipe... ;-)
Aubrey
On Tue, Jun 6, 2017 at 12:22 PM, Cristian Consonni cristian@balist.es wrote:
On 06/06/2017 02:10, Risker wrote:
As far as I can tell (and from comments made in the past by actual Tor users), there is no problem whatsoever for Tor users to read Wikipedia while using Tor.
Let me put it this way, I am sure that the WMF will always do its best to protect the privacy of our readers and editors. Alas, I am much more concerned by third parties trying to snoop on our users. We also know that this kind of surveillance happened and that's also why the WMF is currently engaged in a lawsuit against the NSA.
Using Tor to visit (i.e. read) wikipedia.org provides additional privacy and users can also circumvent blocks in their country, if necessary. Having an onion service gives similar benefits.
Furthermore, I think it is very important that major Internet websites provide themselves as an onion service. Even Facebook did it (at https://www.facebookcorewwwi.onion/) and there are good privacy and censorship-circumventing reasons for this[1]. I think that the least difference between the "privacy enhanced" (aka dark) net and the regular internet there is the more people will consider to use Tor. I think this is a good thing.
Frankly, I hate it when I hear Tor and onion services nominated by newspapers and newscasts only when talking about illegal activities. Then I remind myself that Snowden used Tor extensively and without it we probably would have not know about the NSA mass surveillance.
I think that having an onion service may be useful, but I also think that we could have it just because we should.
Editing is a completely different situation - and well it should be, given the pure unadulterated trash that tends to come in whenever a Tor exit node is missed in the routine lockdowns.
I understand the difficulties. Again, I don't think we should conflate the idea of providing Wikipedia as an onion service with the issues related to editing Wikipedia over Tor or open proxies.
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