On 23 August 2013 18:13, Tyler Romeo <tylerromeo(a)gmail.com> wrote:
On Fri, Aug 23, 2013 at 5:33 PM, Risker
<risker.wp(a)gmail.com> wrote:
As I said, Marc, there's already an offline
discussion happening looking
for ways to effectively manage this without outright banning editors from
those geographical regions from serving Wikimedia communities. A
decision
to prevent users from certain countries or with
certain technical
challenges from holding these permissions is as much a policy issue as it
is a security issue (it's also a cross-wiki one), so that aspect needs to
be considered from a broad community perspective.
It's statements like these that make me question whether the WMF actually
cares about its users' privacy in the first place. There's some big talk on
this list about "subverting the NSA" and making sure that users are secure
within their accounts when using Wikipedia. But if you're not willing to
actually do something about privacy, then it's just talk.
It is completely unacceptable for checkusers in China
to be logging in over
an insecure connection. The Chinese government directly monitors these
connections and can easily harvest these passwords en masse. I truly
sympathize with Chinese Wikipedians who aspire to hold checkuser positions,
but putting at risk the IP address information of every user on Wikipedia
just for the sake of one person who wants to volunteer in a certain
capacity is completely unacceptable.
I'm not disagreeing with you about Checkusers (wherever they're from)
needing to have secure connections when using the tools. If a community
RFC was posted today, I would support that requirement.
If a technical solution can be found that facilitates affected users being
able to securely use the tools, then the policy
discussion would focus on
whether we require those editors to use the technical solution, instead
of
recommending outright bans to granting advanced
permissions to those
affected by HTTPS issues. Solutions are already being considered and
examined for this; granted, the discussion is occurring off-wiki so you
wouldn't have been aware.
There is no technical solution, as has been discussed previously. The China
firewall blocks all HTTPS connections. There is no legal method of getting
around this. The only solution that would preserve both accessibility and
security would be if Wikipedia implemented its own application level TLS
protocol, which would be an absurd undertaking, and would probably just
result in the Chinese government blocking Wikipedia completely anyway.
You're going to have to choose: risk everybody's privacy or deny checkuser
opportunities to people in China.
There are other options. The question is whether or not they can be made to
work in the MediaWiki/WMF circumstances. If you looked at the data
collected to see where HTTPS attempts were unsuccessful, you'd see that
there are editors in a lot of countries with issues (i.e., greater than 5%
failure rates), and most of them are technical issues. Suddenly you're not
just talking about a few projects, you're talking about dozens who may have
difficulty getting CU/OS support internally.
The people in our many overlapping MediaWiki and Wikimedia communities have
come up with a lot of very creative solutions to problems that other sites
haven't figured out or don't care enough to bother with. I have a lot of
faith that some out of the box thinking might very well resolve this
specific issue, and possibly open a gateway to solving the security issue
for even larger groups.
Risker/Anne