On 09/02/2013 06:17 PM, Tim Starling wrote:
It would allow WMF to monitor censorship and surveillance by being in the request loop.
There's no guarantee they would accept HTTPS, even if there were still user surveillance inside the data center.
It would be kind of like the cooperation we give to the US government at the moment, except specific to readers in China instead of imposed on everyone in the world.
This is apples and oranges, in my opinion. Yes, the U.S. monitors Internet traffic in some circumstances. And I assume they occasionally serve subpoenas and such to Wikimedia.
But as far as I know, the U.S. government has never blocked the general public from accessing a Wikipedia article, nor have they sent a takedown that was based on ideology/"social harmony"/etc.
We would be able to deliver clear error messages in place of censored content, instead of a connection reset.
Not necessarily. Google was delivering such censorship notes for a while (http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2013/jan/04/google-defeat-china-censor...), but eventually conceded to China in a game of chicken.
As mentioned by other people, they also tried this approach of tolerating censorship in China for google.cn, but eventually pulled out. google.cn is now just a picture of their home page that links to google.com.hk
I understand the goals of your hypothetical solution. However, pragmatic matters aside, I think it's too far down the road of appeasing censorship.
Matt Flaschen