Wow, what a complete mis-understanding and misrepresenting of facts my that blog author On Friday, June 7, 2013, Benjamin Chen wrote:

We have had contact with the authors of the blog and they have said they will publish our response to their article, though I'm not sure when or in what format. This is the content of our response: "The Wikimedia Foundation doesn’t hold any readers of our projects in any less regard than others. Our mission is to bring the knowledge contained in the Wikimedia projects to everyone on the planet. There is no strategic consideration around how we can make one or another language project more accessible or readable in one part of the world or another. We do not have control over how a national government operates its censorship system. We also do not work with any national censorship system to limit access to project knowledge in any way. It is worth noting the blog post makes some incorrect assumptions about Wikimedia culture - including incorrect titling of some Wikimedia Foundation staff (e.g. Sue Gardner is the Executive Director of the Wikimedia Foundation, the non-profit that operates Wikipedia -- Wikipedia is written by tens of thousands of volunteers and has no director and no hierarchy of editors). There is also an incorrect assertion that Jimmy Wales has a direct role in working with our staff in making changes to core infrastructure. Of course Jimmy plays a role in the conversation, but he is participating in the conversation along with anyone else from the volunteer editor community. On the larger topic, the implementation of HTTPS by default across all Wikimedia sites for all readers and users is non-trivial, and a conversation is ongoing within the Wikimedia Foundation and within the community about how we might make this possible. We do have plans to eventually enable HTTPS as the default, but it's difficult and we're taking steps toward this goal over time. Our first step is to force HTTPS for logged-in users. The next step will be to expand our SSL cluster and to do some testing on a wiki-by-wiki basis with anonymous HTTPS. At some point later we'll attempt to enable HTTPS for anons on all projects. Then we'll look at enabling HSTS, so that browsers know they should always use HTTPS to access our sites. We've only had proper native HTTPS for about a year and a half. We attempted to force HTTPS by default for logged-in users last month and rolled it back. We'll be attempting this again soon. So, it's something we're actively working on. We've also hard-enabled HTTPS on all of our private wikis and have soft-enabled HTTPS on a single wiki (Uzbek Wikipedia), when it was requested by the volunteer editor community there." On Fri, Jun 7, 2013 at 6:50 AM, shi zhao <shizhao(a)gmail.com> wrote: -- Matthew Roth Global Communications Manager Wikimedia Foundation +1.415.839.6885 ext 6635 www.wikimediafoundation.org *http://blog.wikimedia.org/*

On 8 Jun, 2013, at 12:24 AM, Matthew Roth <mroth(a)wikimedia.org> wrote: Great. That's really fast response. On the issue itself, we haven't seen any large scale blocks for years (around the time since last time Jimbo visited some Chinese official more than 4 or 5 years ago I think). The secure.wikimedia domain was blocked long ago, but they waited till now to block HTTPS, after 3 years? (I can't remember when it was enabled). I wonder how long it took for them to realise. It is suggested that this could be a long term block similar to how secure.wikimedia was blocked - for HTTPS they have no control over content, so they are simply blocking it all. For HTTP they are still performing deep package inspection (means content censoring), so since they can filter what the Chinese people can see, it's likely that they'll leave HTTP alone. Regards, Benjamin Chen / [[User:Bencmq]]

This response seems to miss the fact that, in this particular case, censorship is being accomplished through eavesdropping. On Fri, Jun 7, 2013 at 6:24 PM, Matthew Roth <mroth(a)wikimedia.org> wrote:

On Fri, Jun 7, 2013 at 6:24 PM, Matthew Roth <mroth(a)wikimedia.org> wrote: Great response, which makes it clear that there is no politically biased motives here, just techinical issues. I hope they will be publishing it in some sort of decent form, though unfortunately the damage is generally never restored, it might go a long way. On a tiny side note: Is calling non logged in users on official communications a good idea? I've always found it to be sounding quite denigrating.

On Sat, Jun 8, 2013 at 12:01 PM, Brad Jorsch <bjorsch(a)wikimedia.org> wrote: That might not even work, if they decide to return the contents of the (proxied) https page rather than the redirect. Bleh, that's depressing.