[Wikimedia-l] Blocking of HTTPS connection by China

[Martijn Hoekstra]

On Fri, Jun 7, 2013 at 6:24 PM, 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.
>
> This is the content of our response:
>
> "The Wikimedia Foundation doesn’t hold any readers of our projects in any
> less regard than others. Our mission is to bring the knowledge contained in
> the Wikimedia projects to everyone on the planet. There is no strategic
> consideration around how we can make one or another language project more
> accessible or readable in one part of the world or another. We do not have
> control over how a national government operates its censorship system. We
> also do not work with any national censorship system to limit access to
> project knowledge in any way.
>
> It is worth noting the blog post makes some incorrect assumptions about
> Wikimedia culture - including incorrect titling of some Wikimedia
> Foundation staff (e.g. Sue Gardner is the Executive Director of the
> Wikimedia Foundation, the non-profit that operates Wikipedia -- Wikipedia
> is written by tens of thousands of volunteers and has no director and no
> hierarchy of editors). There is also an incorrect assertion that Jimmy
> Wales has a direct role in working with our staff in making changes to core
> infrastructure. Of course Jimmy plays a role in the conversation, but he is
> participating in the conversation along with anyone else from the volunteer
> editor community.
>
> On the larger topic, the implementation of HTTPS by default across all
> Wikimedia sites for all readers and users is non-trivial, and a
> conversation is ongoing within the Wikimedia Foundation and within the
> community about how we might make this possible. We do have plans to
> eventually enable HTTPS as the default, but it's difficult and we're taking
> steps toward this goal over time.
>
> Our first step is to force HTTPS for logged-in users. The next step will be
> to expand our SSL cluster and to do some testing on a wiki-by-wiki basis
> with anonymous HTTPS. At some point later we'll attempt to enable HTTPS for
> anons on all projects. Then we'll look at enabling HSTS, so that browsers
> know they should always use HTTPS to access our sites.
>

> We've only had proper native HTTPS for about a year and a half. We
> attempted to force HTTPS by default for logged-in users last month and
> rolled it back. We'll be attempting this again soon. So, it's something
> we're actively working on. We've also hard-enabled HTTPS on all of our
> private wikis and have soft-enabled HTTPS on a single wiki (Uzbek
> Wikipedia), when it was requested by the volunteer editor community there."
>
>
>
Great response, which makes it clear that there is no politically biased
motives here, just techinical issues. I hope they will be publishing it in
some sort of decent form, though unfortunately the damage is generally
never restored, it might go a long way.

On a tiny side note: Is calling non logged in users on official
communications a good idea? I've always found it to be sounding quite
denigrating.






>
>
>
> On Fri, Jun 7, 2013 at 6:50 AM, shi zhao <shizhao at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> > https://upload.wikimedia.org also blocked
> > Chinese wikipedia: http://zh.wikipedia.org/
> > My blog: http://shizhao.org
> > twitter: https://twitter.com/shizhao
> >
> > [[zh:User:Shizhao]]
> >
> >
> > 2013/6/7 Benjamin Chen <bencmqwiki at gmail.com>:
> > > 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,
> > >
> > > Benjamin Chen / [[User:Bencmq]]
> > >
> > >
> > > _______________________________________________
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> >
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>
>
>
> --
>
> Matthew Roth
> Global Communications Manager
> Wikimedia Foundation
> +1.415.839.6885 ext 6635
> www.wikimediafoundation.org
> *http://blog.wikimedia.org/*
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