I'm moving this from the English Wikipedia to wikipedia-l. It never really should have been on wikien in the first place.
On 5/14/06, Erik Moeller eloquence@gmail.com wrote:
Now, if we do all this, there's one additional little step we could take. As noted above, the fact that Wikipedia is free content itself helps to guarantee the availability of the text. So, while China's Wikipedia block is bad, I think in the long run it primarily hurts editors, not readers, who will hopefully find mirrors of the content. Now imagine most mirror copies of Wikipedia content carried a notice like this (in the applicable language):
I was thinking about this. Now I know there are tons of mirrors of the English Wikipedia, but what about the Chinese one? I guess I could just do my own study, but if someone happens to know already that'd be easier :).
Also, I'm not sure how advanced China's text filters are. According to Wikipedia they only apply it to certain pages they've designated ahead of time. But as that technology improves even many of the mirrored articles would still be blocked if they weren't served by https.
So that brought me to my current working idea, which is just a vmware player virtual machine [*] which hosts a Chinese Wikipedia mirror on https. So essentially all you'd have to do is download a file and click install and you'll be helping spread Wikipedia in China. The actual content could be downloaded in the background using bittorrent, so there wouldn't be any additional load on Wikipedias servers. Hey, if some people want to help me (it shouldn't be too hard), and we can finish by May 26th, we can even enter it into the contest at http://www.vmware.com/vmtn/appliances/challenge/, maybe get some extra publicity (I doubt it'd win, but might get some sort of special mention).
[*] Anthony, you don't need to tell me about the literal requirements of the GFDL. :-)
LOL, OK, but shouldn't the [*] have gone after the part about "we are legally allowed to incorporate their improvements into the Chinese Wikipedia"?
[*] Erik, yes, vmware player is proprietary freeware. You can port the software to QEMU or some free virtualization program if you'd like :).
2006/5/15, Anthony DiPierro wikilegal@inbox.org:
I was thinking about this. Now I know there are tons of mirrors of the English Wikipedia, but what about the Chinese one? I guess I could just do my own study, but if someone happens to know already that'd be easier :).
I did a small search, and could only find one: http://wikimiki.us/zh/%E9%A6%96%E9%A1%B5
My methods weren't nearly perfect though, so if anyone else thinks they can find other ones, I think they might well be right.
Andre Engels wrote:
2006/5/15, Anthony DiPierro wikilegal@inbox.org:
I was thinking about this. Now I know there are tons of mirrors of the English Wikipedia, but what about the Chinese one? I guess I could just do my own study, but if someone happens to know already that'd be easier :).
I did a small search, and could only find one: http://wikimiki.us/zh/%E9%A6%96%E9%A1%B5
My methods weren't nearly perfect though, so if anyone else thinks they can find other ones, I think they might well be right.
Why don't we advise the program Torpark to our Chinese friends. The Thai government is also very heavily censoring the internet and all sites that have anti government statements get blocked and from time to time all of geocities. A friend of mine recommended Torpark and it works perfectly no more redirects to the Thai policesite if you are surfing to blocked sites! :)
Waerth
On 5/15/06, Andre Engels andreengels@gmail.com wrote:
I was thinking about this. Now I know there are tons of mirrors of the English Wikipedia, but what about the Chinese one? I guess I could just do my own study, but if someone happens to know already that'd be easier :).
2006/5/15, Anthony DiPierro wikilegal@inbox.org: I did a small search, and could only find one: http://wikimiki.us/zh/%E9%A6%96%E9%A1%B5
There's also Qwika: Chinese mirror: http://wikipedia.qwika.com/zh/ Machine translation of the English Wikipedia into Chinese: http://wikipedia.qwika.com/en2zh/Wikipedia
Angela
Hi, I'm a zh: contributor from Hong Kong, where the people can enjoy the freedom of expression and press. Thank you guys so much for your care of this situation. There really aren't a lot mirrors of zh:, but there are tons of sites that copied our database to start their own wiki sites, though I believe the number of these sites has decreased since the block.
Currently the majority of our contributors from Mainland China are using proxy servers or the https provided by wikimedia (https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/zh/wiki/) to go around the Great Firewall. (Actually we have a page talking about the different ways to break through the block: http://zh.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:%E5%A6%82%E4%BD%95%E8%AE%BF%E9%97%AE%....) But even if a user knows how to visit zh:, I doubt he would have enough motivation to write on a site prohibited by the government... (who knows whether the government is watching).
So IMO the real problem is how the users could go around the block and reach us (having been living under the wall for so long, they already know how). Instead, it is how we could bring the knowledge, and more importantly the culture and the spirits of wikimedia, to the people (which is our goal, no?), and sadly, I don't think we could do that when the government says no.
Cheers zh:User:Lorenzarius
Try it with the program I mentioned Torpark it sends the data encrypted so no big comrade watching. It works in a firefox interface it is a bit slower but still it is nice :)
Waerth
Hi, I'm a zh: contributor from Hong Kong, where the people can enjoy the freedom of expression and press. Thank you guys so much for your care of this situation. There really aren't a lot mirrors of zh:, but there are tons of sites that copied our database to start their own wiki sites, though I believe the number of these sites has decreased since the block.
Currently the majority of our contributors from Mainland China are using proxy servers or the https provided by wikimedia (https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/zh/wiki/) to go around the Great Firewall. (Actually we have a page talking about the different ways to break through the block: http://zh.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:%E5%A6%82%E4%BD%95%E8%AE%BF%E9%97%AE%....) But even if a user knows how to visit zh:, I doubt he would have enough motivation to write on a site prohibited by the government... (who knows whether the government is watching).
So IMO the real problem is how the users could go around the block and reach us (having been living under the wall for so long, they already know how). Instead, it is how we could bring the knowledge, and more importantly the culture and the spirits of wikimedia, to the people (which is our goal, no?), and sadly, I don't think we could do that when the government says no.
Cheers zh:User:Lorenzarius _______________________________________________ Wikipedia-l mailing list Wikipedia-l@Wikimedia.org http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l
On 5/15/06, Lorenzarius lorenzarius@gmail.com wrote:
So IMO the real problem is how the users could go around the block and reach us (having been living under the wall for so long, they already know how). Instead, it is how we could bring the knowledge, and more importantly the culture and the spirits of wikimedia, to the people (which is our goal, no?), and sadly, I don't think we could do that when the government says no.
I think you're right - the Chinese Wikipedia will remain a niche phenomenon in mainland China unless and until the political situation changes. Of course, it's still a very important niche. As for directly effecting that political change, that truly is outside the scope of Wikimedia, though I very much hope that wiki tools and processes will play a part.
Erik
On 5/15/06, Erik Moeller eloquence@gmail.com wrote:
On 5/15/06, Lorenzarius lorenzarius@gmail.com wrote:
So IMO the real problem is how the users could go around the block and reach us (having been living under the wall for so long, they already know how). Instead, it is how we could bring the knowledge, and more importantly the culture and the spirits of wikimedia, to the people (which is our goal, no?), and sadly, I don't think we could do that when the government says no.
I think you're right - the Chinese Wikipedia will remain a niche phenomenon in mainland China unless and until the political situation changes. Of course, it's still a very important niche. As for directly effecting that political change, that truly is outside the scope of Wikimedia, though I very much hope that wiki tools and processes will play a part.
Erik
Fixing the bug in Mediawiki where blocking a user blocks everyone using an IP address that user tries to edit, would be a step in the right direction, though.
Anthony
On 5/15/06, Anthony DiPierro wikilegal@inbox.org wrote:
So that brought me to my current working idea, which is just a vmware player virtual machine [*] which hosts a Chinese Wikipedia mirror on https.
Could be useful - then again, aggressively pushing SSL as a method to circumvent censorship will likely lead to the authorities taking a closer look at methods to block it.
If there is indeed a shortage of Chinese mirrors, generating a fresh static HTML dump + free images and advertising it a bit would probably lead to hundreds of copies within weeks.
Erik
Erik Moeller wrote:
On 5/15/06, Anthony DiPierro wikilegal@inbox.org wrote:
So that brought me to my current working idea, which is just a vmware player virtual machine [*] which hosts a Chinese Wikipedia mirror on https.
Could be useful - then again, aggressively pushing SSL as a method to circumvent censorship will likely lead to the authorities taking a closer look at methods to block it.
If there is indeed a shortage of Chinese mirrors, generating a fresh static HTML dump + free images and advertising it a bit would probably lead to hundreds of copies within weeks.
HTTPS does not protect anonymity for editors. Neither does Tor. Low-latency encryption methods suffer a common flaw: an attacker can correlate timestamps and message lengths with the size and posting time of an edit. With ordinary HTTPS you can also correlate the destination address. You could almost say that encryption is useless for sending data which will be public 200ms after it arrives.
The situation is better for reading, not least because judging by the reports I've read, the Government is primarily interested in tracking down and prosecuting content producers, not consumers. But I think Wikipedia's strength is in its editability; that's how it maintains its growth, neutrality and timeliness. I think it would be a great loss if Wikipedia was only available in read-only form in mainland China.
Public HTTPS is vulnerable to blocking, almost as much as HTTP. HTTPS websites can be spidered, indexed and checked for offensive keywords, just like regular websites. Then they could be blocked at the firewall by IP. You'd have to use a captcha or some similar means of authentication to keep the bots out. But if it's not indexed by the major search engines, then its utility will be limited.
The advantage of HTTPS is that it resists traffic sampling at the firewall, which appears to be a mainstay of content filtering at the moment. But I think it's important to note that it's not a magic bullet. The point is, SSL isn't a good method to circumvent censorship, so the authorities would be unlikely to block it as a whole, as Erik suggests.
Unfortunately there's a fundamental conflict between offerring a popular service and offerring a covert service. There's only so much we can do. That's not to say we shouldn't try, of course.
-- Tim Starling
On 5/17/06, Tim Starling t.starling@physics.unimelb.edu.au wrote:
HTTPS does not protect anonymity for editors. Neither does Tor. Low-latency encryption methods suffer a common flaw: an attacker can correlate timestamps and message lengths with the size and posting time of an edit. With ordinary HTTPS you can also correlate the destination address. You could almost say that encryption is useless for sending data which will be public 200ms after it arrives.
The biggest vulnerability of Tor is when the attacker is able to observe both endpoints. Assuming the Chinese government is not able to do this, mere timestamps (accurate to the second) and message lengths are unlikely to be enough to correlate if there's even just a little bit of cover traffic (assuming the user is logged in and the Chinese govt doesn't have CheckUser access). Tor sends multiple TCP streams through the same outgoing connections, so an observer at the client endpoint wouldn't know the size of the message if there are other TCP streams going at the same time.
That said, I doubt it's perfectly safe to run Tor in China in the first place.
Anthony
Anthony DiPierro wrote:
On 5/17/06, Tim Starling t.starling@physics.unimelb.edu.au wrote:
HTTPS does not protect anonymity for editors. Neither does Tor. Low-latency encryption methods suffer a common flaw: an attacker can correlate timestamps and message lengths with the size and posting time of an edit. With ordinary HTTPS you can also correlate the destination address. You could almost say that encryption is useless for sending data which will be public 200ms after it arrives.
The biggest vulnerability of Tor is when the attacker is able to observe both endpoints. Assuming the Chinese government is not able to do this, mere timestamps (accurate to the second) and message lengths are unlikely to be enough to correlate if there's even just a little bit of cover traffic (assuming the user is logged in and the Chinese govt doesn't have CheckUser access). Tor sends multiple TCP streams through the same outgoing connections, so an observer at the client endpoint wouldn't know the size of the message if there are other TCP streams going at the same time.
... which is one of the claimed benefits of running a Tor server, even if it's only as a middleman node.
That said, I doubt it's perfectly safe to run Tor in China in the first place.
Quite so.
Tim Starling wrote:
Erik Moeller wrote:
On 5/15/06, Anthony DiPierro wikilegal@inbox.org wrote:
So that brought me to my current working idea, which is just a vmware player virtual machine [*] which hosts a Chinese Wikipedia mirror on https.
Could be useful - then again, aggressively pushing SSL as a method to circumvent censorship will likely lead to the authorities taking a closer look at methods to block it.
If there is indeed a shortage of Chinese mirrors, generating a fresh static HTML dump + free images and advertising it a bit would probably lead to hundreds of copies within weeks.
HTTPS does not protect anonymity for editors. Neither does Tor. Low-latency encryption methods suffer a common flaw: an attacker can correlate timestamps and message lengths with the size and posting time of an edit. With ordinary HTTPS you can also correlate the destination address. You could almost say that encryption is useless for sending data which will be public 200ms after it arrives.
Now, if there was a way to silently lock the article and delay the database update/timestamping for a few seconds...
On 5/18/06, Alphax (Wikipedia email) alphasigmax@gmail.com wrote:
Tim Starling wrote:
HTTPS does not protect anonymity for editors. Neither does Tor. Low-latency encryption methods suffer a common flaw: an attacker can correlate timestamps and message lengths with the size and posting time of an edit. With ordinary HTTPS you can also correlate the destination address. You could almost say that encryption is useless for sending data which will be public 200ms after it arrives.
Now, if there was a way to silently lock the article and delay the database update/timestamping for a few seconds...
The Mediawiki code goes out of its way to make it extremely hard to edit Wikipedia anonymously. If you want to allow anonymous editing, a start would be a check box which says "post this anonymously".
Anthony
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