On Sat, Apr 11, 2015 at 7:44 PM, Brian Wolff <bawo...@gmail.com> wrote:
> On Apr 11, 2015 1:18 PM, "Pine W" <wiki.p...@gmail.com> wrote: > > > > https://citizenlab.org/2015/04/chinas-great-cannon/ > > > > Pine > > _______________________________________________ > > Wikitech-l mailing list > > Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org > > https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l > > A surprisingly bold move on China's part. > > Im not sure if what is talked about applies directly to Wikipedia. Seems > the goal was to try to compel github to remove specific content "hostile" > to China's censorship interests, without china itself getting blocked, > which might happen if DDOS was comming entirely from China IPs (since > blocking github angers local programmers). To do that they needed to > intercept connections inbound to servers in China, which doesn't apply to > us as our servers are mostly in US (and despite various abuses of the NSA > so often talked about, it is hard to imagine the US would ever consider so > blatently misusing other people's computers in a ddos-via-mitm-js attack). > Of course one never knows if future attacks might target outbound > connections from China, or if some other group might try to do something > similar (again hard to imagine, and it seems like there are very few > entities other than China who could get away with this, but im still kind > of shocked that China did this) > > - > > The most interesting aspect of the report (imo) from the context of > Wikipedia is, to quote: > > "The attack on GitHub specifically targeted these repositories, possibly in > an attempt to compel GitHub to remove these resources. GitHub encrypts all > traffic using TLS, preventing a censor from only blocking access to > specific GitHub pages. In the past, China attempted to block Github, but > the block was lifted within two days, following significant negative > reaction from local programmers." > > So because github encrypted everything with https (and thus blocking is an > all or nothing afair), and because it was very popular, China was unwilling > to block it entirely despite a small portion being objectionable. > > I don't really know what the status of wikipedia in China is, or how > popular it is, but its conceivable that we could be in a similar position. > Food for thought. > > The only reason we remain unblocked is because we don't force SSL. Wikipedia is relatively unused in China. If it was blocked, there'd be no major public outcry. - Ryan _______________________________________________ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
