[Wikimedia-l] Blocking of HTTPS connection by China

[Brad Jorsch]

On Sat, Jun 8, 2013 at 9:41 AM, Anthony <wikimail at inbox.org> wrote:
>
> What is this "hard-enabled" and "soft-enabled"?

I hope someone will correct me if I'm wrong, but...

I believe that "soft-enabled" means that https was set as the protocol
in the canonical URLs for uzwiki. So search engines should start
linking to the https URLs, and non-relative links generated by
MediaWiki on WMF wikis would link to https rather than http. And,
eventually, the links that people post to other places would start to
be more often https too. But a visitor may still go to the http URL if
they want to.

Bug 43466[1] seems relevant, and links to other discussion.

"Hard-enabled", on the other hand, means that anyone fetching the http
URL would be redirected to the corresponding https URL.[2] If this
were somehow done now, then people in China would not be able to read
Wikipedia at all because the http links would just redirect to https
and then China's firewall would block the https request. The blog post
mentioned earlier in this thread hopes that that would make China back
down and unblock https to Wikipedia.

 [1]: https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=43466
 [2]: With an HTTP 301 redirect, most likely.