[Wikimedia-l] Blocking of HTTPS connection by China

[Leslie Carr]

On Fri, Jun 7, 2013 at 6:42 AM, Benjamin Chen <bencmqwiki at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi,
>
> Since 31 May, China's Great Firewall has blocked the HTTPS connection to all language versions of Wikipedia, by blocking port 443 on two of our IPs. I was also told that service to Wikimedia Commons may be affected. Other projects, such as en.wikisource are not affected by this block (but they may still be subjected to keyword censoring on HTTP).
>
> Compared to the previous short-lived half-day block, this time the block has been in place for a week and as usual no one knows if it will last for long.
>
> Here is an article that has some explanation, some comments, and (their) opinions and suggestions for the Foundation.
>
> https://en.greatfire.org/blog/2013/jun/wikipedia-drops-ball-china-not-too-late-make-amends
>
> Regards,
>

Major technical issues.  If we switched IPs, we'd quickly run out of
IPs as china would quickly switch which IP they were blocking.  Also
manually resolving to certain IPs is not going to be helpful as we
migrate services around.

Jimmy Wales does not run Wikimedia and especially not our tech department.
" It might simply be that Wikipedia staff hold Chinese readers in less
regard to English ones and did not even discuss this change internally
in the first place."

That is ridiculous!

There have been many discussions on making https default (or at least
for login).  It's not as easy as throwing a switch --  ssl termination
is done on another layer of our infrastructure and we can't yet handle
100% ssl traffic.

VPNs are still a great solution for those stuck behind the great
firewall, TOR, IPv6, SSH tunnelling are also solutions --
https://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=2405036 is an interesting article.

Leslie


> Benjamin Chen / [[User:Bencmq]]
>
>
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--
Leslie Carr
Wikimedia Foundation
AS 14907, 43821
http://as14907.peeringdb.com/