Infact, now NSA can directly ask for keys :-). But more security is
always good.
see also: http://www.gossamer-threads.com/lists/wiki/wikitech/378940
On Wednesday 14 August 2013 07:17:48 AM IST, CherianTinu Abraham wrote:
*Times of India : "Wikipedia will go ‘secure’ to beat NSA surveillance"*
http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/tech/tech-news/internet/Wikipedia-will-go-secure-to-beat-NSA-surveillance/articleshow/21556479.cms
/Just days after reports revealed that National Security Agency (NSA)
in the US actively looked at what people read on Wikipedia, Wikimedia
Foundation announced on its website that it would implement HTTPS for
logged-in users.
The foundation, a non-profit organization, manages Wikipedia. The S in
HTTPS stands for secure.
Two days ago, Guardian newspaper revealed that with the help of a tool
called XKeyscore, NSA was monitoring web users who accessed Wikipedia,
the world's 7th most popular website.
Wikimedia said that to start with, it would offer HTTPS connection to
all logged-in users from August 21. It will then gradually roll-out
HTTPS for all users as well as implement additional security measures
to make it harder for governments to snoop on Wikipedia users.
However, it did not specify any deadlines for the additional security
measures.
Following the Guardian report, Jimmy Wales, the co-founder of
Wikipedia, had revealed on Twitter that the website was planning to
switch to HTTPS from HTTP but there were a few bugs that had delayed
the process.
"Our current architecture cannot handle HTTPS by default, but we've
been incrementally making changes to make it possible. Since we appear
to be specifically targeted by XKeyscore, we'll be speeding up these
efforts," Wikimedia said on its website.
On Friday Wales announced the Wikimedia decision and tweeted, "I
challenge the rest of the industry to join us. Encryption is a human
rights issue."
HTTPS is more secure compared to HTTP. Websites using HTTPS establish
a secure connection between their servers and the user's computer and
greatly minimize the privacy risk. The secure connection means that
third parties like government agencies or internet service providers
(ISPs) can not read the content of data that a website and its users
exchange.
However, the government agencies, hackers and internet service
providers can still collect this data and possibly read it if they can
break the encryption.
Initially, only banks and other organizations mindful of cyber
security risks used HTTPS. But gradually email service providers and
e-commerce websites started using it on their login pages. Currently,
popular websites like Google, Facebook and Twitter use HTTPS but the
majority of websites, including big ones like Yahoo! still rely on HTTP.
/
Regards
Tinu Cherian
pr...@wikimedia.in <mailto:pr...@wikimedia.in>
Important Note : Non-commercial reproduction for informative purposes
only. The publisher ( Times of India ) of the above news article owns
the copyrights of the article / content. All copyrights are duly
acknowledged.
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