On 09/02/2013 06:17 PM, Tim Starling wrote:
It would allow WMF to monitor censorship and
surveillance by being in
the request loop.
There's no guarantee they would accept HTTPS, even if there were still
user surveillance inside the data center.
It would be kind of like the cooperation we give to
the US government
at the moment, except specific to readers in China instead of imposed
on everyone in the world.
This is apples and oranges, in my opinion. Yes, the U.S. monitors
Internet traffic in some circumstances. And I assume they occasionally
serve subpoenas and such to Wikimedia.
But as far as I know, the U.S. government has never blocked the general
public from accessing a Wikipedia article, nor have they sent a takedown
that was based on ideology/"social harmony"/etc.
We would be able to deliver clear error messages in
place of censored
content, instead of a connection reset.
Not necessarily. Google was delivering such censorship notes for a
while
(
http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2013/jan/04/google-defeat-china-censo…),
but eventually conceded to China in a game of chicken.
As mentioned by other people, they also tried this approach of
tolerating censorship in China for google.cn, but eventually pulled out.
google.cn is now just a picture of their home page that links to
google.com.hk
I understand the goals of your hypothetical solution. However,
pragmatic matters aside, I think it's too far down the road of appeasing
censorship.
Matt Flaschen