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| Wikipedia website new design |
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| tom66:
--- Quote from: james_s on November 29, 2020, 05:34:29 am ---I absolutely understand the reasons behind having encryption on the internet, what I don't understand is why anyone would care about wikipedia traffic. If somebody wants to intercept what I'm reading about on wikipedia they can go right ahead, if we're talking about my email or banking that's another matter. --- End quote --- Imagine you're in China and are looking up the behaviour of your government. Would you not want encryption to stop the Chinese government from seeing what you are looking at? Okay, you are probably not so worried about your government, but there are 'free' governments that have done dodgy things with the internet, too. For instance in the UK, there was a proposal to ban all adult content from the internet, unless the user opted in with their ISP or could prove via an active credit card that they were over 18 years old. This would be performed at the ISP and not on the router itself for reasons never justified by the government. Their proposal for doing this would be via deep packet inspection. Who knows what the government would do with that data if it were available to them - I highly doubt it would be exclusively used to stop people looking at nudity. Thankfully, the technical complexity of this, and industry reluctance, plus some press scandals over how it would work, led to it being dropped, but it was very close to getting thoroughly implemented (less than a month away before it was scrapped for good.) Encrypted HTTPS connections, and later, encrypted DNS (DNS-over-HTTPS or some other technology) will prevent any ISP or government from seeing what you are doing without having a direct exploit on your device. This is a good move for the internet, even if you live in a fairly free country like the USA. It's a good move for privacy and it has benefits for people living in countries with totalitarian governments. |
| SilverSolder:
--- Quote from: tom66 on November 29, 2020, 10:16:00 pm --- --- Quote from: james_s on November 29, 2020, 05:34:29 am ---I absolutely understand the reasons behind having encryption on the internet, what I don't understand is why anyone would care about wikipedia traffic. If somebody wants to intercept what I'm reading about on wikipedia they can go right ahead, if we're talking about my email or banking that's another matter. --- End quote --- Imagine you're in China and are looking up the behaviour of your government. Would you not want encryption to stop the Chinese government from seeing what you are looking at? Okay, you are probably not so worried about your government, but there are 'free' governments that have done dodgy things with the internet, too. For instance in the UK, there was a proposal to ban all adult content from the internet, unless the user opted in with their ISP or could prove via an active credit card that they were over 18 years old. This would be performed at the ISP and not on the router itself for reasons never justified by the government. Their proposal for doing this would be via deep packet inspection. Who knows what the government would do with that data if it were available to them - I highly doubt it would be exclusively used to stop people looking at nudity. Thankfully, the technical complexity of this, and industry reluctance, plus some press scandals over how it would work, led to it being dropped, but it was very close to getting thoroughly implemented (less than a month away before it was scrapped for good.) Encrypted HTTPS connections, and later, encrypted DNS (DNS-over-HTTPS or some other technology) will prevent any ISP or government from seeing what you are doing without having a direct exploit on your device. This is a good move for the internet, even if you live in a fairly free country like the USA. It's a good move for privacy and it has benefits for people living in countries with totalitarian governments. --- End quote --- This is all assuming that HTTPS is 100% safe... - I believe it is safe against "ordinary" hackers, but is it also safe against well resourced snoopers e.g. governments and the like? |
| amyk:
When I saw wikipedia start messing with the style I went to the archive.org, fetched the old stylesheets, and replaced it on the pages using my proxy server. A lot of wasted effort on their part, they must've run out of actually useful things to do... |O |
| james_s:
--- Quote from: tom66 on November 29, 2020, 10:16:00 pm ---Imagine you're in China and are looking up the behaviour of your government. Would you not want encryption to stop the Chinese government from seeing what you are looking at? --- End quote --- Yes, and I'd use an encrypted VPN to somewhere else as I already do any time I'm interested in any sort of actual privacy. That still doesn't explain the benefit of mandatory encryption. So scenario 1, there's an encrypted path and an unencrypted path, users can connect to either one, user who cares about encryption connects to the encrypted path. Big evil totalitarian government doesn't want people using the encrypted path so they block it, unencrypted path is still available to those willing to take chances, and for those in places where there is nothing to worry about. Or scenario 2, only encrypted path is available. Big evil totalitarian government doesn't want people using the encrypted path (which is the only connection available) so they block it and those citizens are locked out, as is anyone else who can't use the encryption for one reason or another. So much better I guess? Either way I don't care one bit what the Chinese government does internally. It's their country and their business, none of mine. If the Chinese citizens don't like it then it's up to them to rise up and do something about it. My country has a long history of meddling in the affairs of others and crusading around pushing our culture and values and it has brought us trouble to no end. |
| james_s:
--- Quote from: SilverSolder on November 30, 2020, 01:03:21 am ---This is all assuming that HTTPS is 100% safe... - I believe it is safe against "ordinary" hackers, but is it also safe against well resourced snoopers e.g. governments and the like? --- End quote --- I would bet money that it's not. There are all kinds of back doors for the US government at least and I can only assume that the governments of other developed nations have talent and infrastructure available to make short work of cracking just about any encryption available to the masses. Prism or whatever that was called was exposed but I think it's safe to assume that was only the tip of the iceberg. |
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