I think that making us not-a-source-of-referred-traffic might
be a good thing. (It disincentivises those
who should be disincentivised, while not harming
anyone else)
sincerely,
Kim Bruning
On Tue, Mar 10, 2015 at 09:21:57AM -0700, Pete Forsyth wrote:
> There's a relevant research project outlined on Meta, about HTTPS:
>
> https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research:Wikimedia_referrer_policy
>
> Here's the "nutshell" description:
>
> "Since we started switching to HTTPS and an increasing portion of inbound
> traffic happens over SSL, Wikimedia sites stopped advertising themselves as
> sources of referred traffic to external sites. While this is a literal
> implication of HTTPS, it means that Wikimedia's impact on traffic directed
> to other sites is becoming largely invisible: *is Wikimedia turning into a
> large source of dark traffic?* I review a use case (traffic directed to
> CrossRef) and discuss how other top web properties deal with this issue by
> adopting a so-called "Referrer Policy"."
>
> I don't know anything about this beyond what I've read on Meta, but I think
> it offers some useful background for this discussion.
>
> Pete
> --
> Pete Forsyth
> [[User:Peteforsyth]] on English Wikipedia, Wikisource, Commons, etc.
>
> On Tue, Mar 10, 2015 at 7:58 AM, Andrew Lih <andrew....@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> > Probably a good time for everyone to know about EFF's HTTPS Everywhere:
> >
> > HTTPS Everywhere is a Firefox, Chrome, and Opera extension that encrypts
> > your communications with many major websites, making your browsing more
> > secure. Encrypt the web: Install HTTPS Everywhere today.
> >
> > https://www.eff.org/https-everywhere
> >
> >
> >
> > On Tue, Mar 10, 2015 at 10:02 AM, Johan J??nsson <brevlis...@gmail.com>
> > wrote:
> >
> > > 2015-03-10 13:26 GMT+01:00 Comet styles <cometsty...@gmail.com>:
> > >
> > > > for an organization taking on the NSA for "spying"..why are we using
> > > > https? doesn't that show that we are already scared of them and
> > > > running with our tail between our legs?
> > > >
> > >
> > > (For non-technical readers: the HTTP protocol is the normal way to send
> > > around information on the web. HTTPS is the secure way of sending said
> > > information, adding encryption among other things, to avoid
> > eavesdropping.)
> > >
> > > HTTP traffic can easily be tracked by people sharing the same network, by
> > > your Internet service provider and so on. If one cares about privacy,
> > HTTPS
> > > is always important. It's worth noting that the NSA is not the only
> > > government agency in the world. I'd be even more worried about a number
> > of
> > > countries where there would be little chance to fight the intruding party
> > > in the courtroom.
> > >
> > > Side note: you could probably track most HTTPS traffic to Wikipedia as
> > > well, even if you're not the NSA. Normally you would see that the user
> > has
> > > accessed Wikipedia, but not which article. A way around that would be to
> > > let a spider (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_crawler) track the byte
> > > size of Wikipedia articles, which should be individual enough as soon as
> > > images are involved and compare it to the size of the page the user just
> > > accessed. If two articles happen to be of exactly the same size, compare
> > > with incoming and outgoing wiki links and see if the user accessed any
> > page
> > > linking to or linked from one the articles to determine which one. But it
> > > would at least take some sort of effort, and wouldn't be perfect.
> > >
> > > //Johan J??nsson
> > > --
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