So, some ideas:
As for the idea that we need to fix internet that's so bad it can't handle HTTPS for "technical reasons"; anything that's that broken is pretty hopeless to "fix" from the web server's end. Instead, consider: * provide support to groups working for improving internet access in areas with poor connectivity
And for the "some countries block our HTTPS" issue: * *actually support* use of Tor etc for editing, allowing folks "in the know" to work around the government blocks and use the site over HTTPS * provide support to groups working against government censorship of the internet * sponsor an official hosted-and-run-in-PRC censor-friendly mirror, and devise some way to migrate edits back
This last would probably be controversial, but if we're serious about 'providing access to knowledge' in PRC, I suspect that's our best bet. Good news is, we're an open-source open-content project, and so this service could be launched *by anyone at any time*. Arguably, Baidupedia already beat us to this.
-- brion
On Fri, Aug 23, 2013 at 3:31 PM, Risker risker.wp@gmail.com wrote:
On 23 August 2013 18:13, Tyler Romeo tylerromeo@gmail.com wrote:
On Fri, Aug 23, 2013 at 5:33 PM, Risker risker.wp@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.
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