[Wikimedia-l] Blocking of HTTPS connection by China

[Benjamin Chen]

On 8 Jun, 2013, at 12:24 AM, Matthew Roth <mroth at wikimedia.org> 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.

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]]