
China is blocking all language editions of Wikipedia - JayXon
https://ooni.torproject.org/post/2019-china-wikipedia-blocking/
======
bspammer
This makes me sad. Wikipedia is surely one of humanity's greatest
accomplishments to date. Having such a resource be off limits to a large
section of our population is truly depressing.

Of course, there was always the language barrier, but zh.wikipedia.org could
definitely have been as high quality as the English version given the chance.

~~~
yorwba
Is zh.wikipedia.org not as high-quality as the English version in your
experience? I don't use it that frequently, but for topics like famous Chinese
people or linguistics of Sinitic languages, the English article is often just
a stub, while the Chinese version has all the information I'm looking for.

~~~
paulgerhardt
In my experience zh.wikipedia.org is largely authored by Taiwanese residents.
The quality is high but local narratives are often written with some bias not
entirely unlike what one would expect from a displaced population resulting
from a fairly recent civil war.

~~~
ekianjo
The English version of Wikipedia is not free of bias either. Wikipedia is not
a source of truth for everything out there.

~~~
madez
When I see that articles about the same thing in different languages state
different and incompatible numbers, then I always think that this is an
obvious and easily solveable problem; separate the data from the language and
reference it in the text. That way each language uses the same data. This
shouldn't just be done with numbers, but with dates, and other easily
convertible information.

Yes, this will create conflicts as to which information is correct, but
Wikipedia has had this problem since forever, and deals with it.

~~~
ekianjo
The problem is that most data can never be verified. A source may never be
fully accurate. A source could be a bunch of BS in the worst case. Even
government data and media-based data frequently contradict each others.

For recent events we have already seen large press groups spreading
misinformation. So when do you know when they actually produce facts or
produce biased BS? At the end of the day somebody makes a call and we know
nothing of their affiliations.

~~~
wongarsu
Wikipedia also has a notorious problem with "sources" that are written by the
same person that's editing the article.

------
KingMachiavelli
As the artical mentions, the Chinese version has been blocked since 2016 -
shortly after Wikipedia made the decision to move to mandatory HTTPS via HSTS.
I'm not sure how recent this is but it seems that the site is also on the HSTS
preload list used by most browsers - even within China (it seems Chrome is
very popular there). It seems they have just gotten arround to blocking all of
the other languages this year.

ESNI seems like it would work pretty well. Although the PRC firewall could
likely be used to block ESNI and/or TLS 1.3 and force plain-text SNI.

~~~
jerryzh
Well actually they have been blocked all language about a week ago on May 6th
or 7th.

------
netcan
Blocking the greatest encyclopedia that ever existed is the best example of
what this kind of censorship _is_.

~~~
ekianjo
Since Wikipedia can be dumped onto a memory card I am not sure how effective
the ban is supposed to be. It will constrain its spread but it is very hard to
block all means of transmission of information.

~~~
netcan
" _it is very hard to block all means of transmission of information._ "

I think this is something to understand about modern political information
manipulation/restriction.

The 1.0 version totalitarian censorship aimed for full information control.
This is what the soviets and pre-1990s CCP tried to do. It's difficult because
(as you say) information is hard to control.

The 2.0 version is about _enough_ control. You can use a vpn (or memory
stick), but most won't. This gives one version of events a major advantage
over the others. Easy-to-find praise for the government, difficult-to-find
dissent.It's about dominant influence, not absolute control. When needed,
regimes can temporarily increase control, like erdogan did during the last
turkish coup attempt.

A soft paralel is social media "bubbles." They don't "control" the information
you can access, but they are enough to influence your opinions in a direction.
There are lots of exceptions, but on average, these have a big influence on
who we think the good and bad guys are.

~~~
keepmesmall
Doesn't the "enough control" part come from the Internet's addiction factor?

As in, wouldn't software designed to work just as well without constant
Internet "solve" this?

------
CallMePK
I still remember that last year during my internship in Mainland China, clone
git repository from GitHub and GitLab is a pain and my professor even have to
use VPN too. China is basically hell for developers. I am afraid the new
generations in China will no longer know about the real Internet. *sigh

~~~
vaylian
Interesting comment. You make it sound like the real internet happens to be
US-centric. Yes, many important projects are hosted on Gitlab and Github, but
there are also other ways to share code. And these alternatives might not be
that well known to us developers in the western world.

~~~
EForEndeavour
For a software developer (or student thereof), the useful parts of the
internet are indeed quite US-centric.

Off the top of my head, losing access to any of the following platforms will
hamper your professional development: Github, Stack Overflow, cloud services
leaders (AWS, GCP, MS Azure, etc.), Coursera, Udacity, Youtube, Khan Academy,
Google Search, Google groups, Slack. At best, you'll have to use a VPN, or
maybe resort to a domestically developed and probably inferior alternative. At
worst, no such alternative exists.

~~~
barry-cotter
Udacity has a local Chinese version. Slack works, kind of. Google groups is a
shuffling zombie abandonware project outside China so I fail to see how the
lack of access within China will impact anything there.

~~~
EForEndeavour
I listed those platforms (some of which still work in China) just to
illustrate that a lot of developer resources are indeed based in, or at least
developed in, the USA.

PRC have proven repeatedly that they can and will arbitrarily block foreign
services without notice. Slack works today, but how long until they decide
that Slack facilitates too much discussion about Falungong, Tibet, Xinjiang,
Taiwanese independence, or Tiananmen?

------
HAL9000Ti
I assume that this is in preparation of the upcoming 30th anniversary of the
Tiananen massacre, they always make changes to the censorship when a big event
is comming up.

For instance for the 2008 olympics many blocked sites were opened up, and
conversely they tighten everything up before every National People's Congress
elections.

------
henryaspegren
A favorite quote of mine “The best way to build an authoritarian regime is not
to indoctrinate someone but to convince them that there is no such things as
truth”

~~~
JacksonGariety
Who wrote that? (Asking out of curiosity.)

~~~
netcan
Sound like Orwell, maybe paraphrased.

------
pimmen
Of course they are, it's almost June 4th which is the 30th anniversary of the
Tiananmen Square massacre. You know that events is going to be the featured
article on one of the Wikipedia editions, or at least be mentioned in the "On
this day" section.

------
paulcarroty
Chinese government are hyper coward, it's going to be fun.

”You’re braver than you believe, stronger than you seem and smarter than you
think.” – Winnie the Pooh

~~~
porlune
Side-note: Winnie the Pooh has been used as a sort of caricature of Xi
Jinping.

~~~
throwtt78oo65
Additional side-note: Winne the Pooh is not banned in China, despite what the
media is reporting.

~~~
namelosw
Additional (additional side-note): 'Winne the Pooh' movie has been banned[0]

[0] [https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/aug/07/china-bans-
win...](https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/aug/07/china-bans-winnie-the-
pooh-film-to-stop-comparisons-to-president-xi)

~~~
throwtt78oo65
Additional (Additional (additional side-note)): No it’s not. The Guardian and
other articles are wrong. [0]

[0]
[https://www.reddit.com/r/China/comments/au5hd6/is_winnie_the...](https://www.reddit.com/r/China/comments/au5hd6/is_winnie_the_pooh_really_banned_in_china/)

In addition, Peppa Pig is not banned and neither are time travel shows. In
2018, there were over 20 TV shows that had time travel in them.

~~~
gastlygem
The 2018 movie Christopher Robin didn't premiere in China. Moreover, there is
no way to legally download or view the said movie in any Chinese online movie
providers.

I'd like to be proven wrong. So wise throwtt78oo65, tell me about your facts.

------
anfilt
Sigh and this is why plain text SNI is was not a good idea...

~~~
vbezhenar
How SNI is helping there? You still will have the entire website blocked.
Clear HTTP would help, as they could block few selected pages and rest would
be available. I don't understand this entire movement to HTTPS. Some people
think that governments won't dare to block Wikipedia, Amazon or Google? Well,
they dared and now you have millions of useful articles blocked because of few
offending ones. If I would live in a China, I would prefer censored HTTP
access over unavailable HTTPS any day.

~~~
bo1024
Over plain http, how would you solve the problem of a government modifying
pages in transit or replacing them entirely with a new version? I suppose you
could use the https public key infrastructure with digital signatures so that
visitors know whether they're seeing the original...

~~~
vbezhenar
Well, if you want that property, technically there was NULL encryption
algorithm in early HTTPS versions (probably it's not supported now, but
there's nothing unusual about it). So you'll have page in cleartext, including
all headers (so censors can drop the connection if they don't like it), but
you'll have associated checksums and certificates, so changes should be
detectable.

------
NedIsakoff
I lived in China for 15 years. This is probably only temporary leading up to
May 35. It happens every year.

~~~
gastlygem
Took me a few seconds to realize what you are talking about..

------
sepent
I used the same method to see what is the blocking mechanism in Iran. I tried
to connect to www.bbc.com which is blocked in Iran.

The DNS injection is obviously in place. But something strange happened when I
checked the SNI filtering. The curl command stopped at "TLSv1.2 (OUT), TLS
alert, Client hello (1)" and never exited when I tried to connect to
www.bbc.com but with a --connect-to that is not blocked. Nothing strange until
now. If SNI blocking is in place, they probably drop all the remaining packets
of the connection. The strange thing is that when I try the opposite test and
I connect to www.kernel.org (not blocked in Iran, too!) but with www.bbc.com
SNI it still stops at TLS client hello.

First I thought they blocked the IP address, but I was able to connect to
212.58.244.210 (the IP address of www.bbc.com) on port 443 with telnet
command. So, is Iran's regime using some other blocking mechanism that I'm not
aware of? Or am I doing some kind of mistake?

------
kostajh
This article was accurate at the time but AFAIK the situation has changed. For
context:
[https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T208263#5170123](https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T208263#5170123)
tl;dr There were unintended consequences from refactoring DNS configuration
and the situation should be back to “normal” now.

~~~
JayXon
I think they were talking about wikimedia.org also being blocked due to CNAME
to wikipedia.org which is now blocked, and they fixed it by CNAME to
dyna.wikimedia.org instead, but wikipedia.org is still blocked:
[https://en.greatfire.org/https/en.wikipedia.org](https://en.greatfire.org/https/en.wikipedia.org)

------
magpi3
Does wikipedia have any read only mirrors?

~~~
ddalex
You can download it - the index of human knowledge isn't that big that it
wouldn't fit on a stick.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Database_download#Of...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Database_download#Offline_Wikipedia_readers)

~~~
magpi3
I am in China:-). That link is blocked.

~~~
whiskers08xmt
You should be able to find a torrent file for whichever subset of wikipedia
you need, which isn't too dated.

There's even something like this, that lets you browse via bittorrent:
[https://github.com/mafintosh/peerwiki](https://github.com/mafintosh/peerwiki)

~~~
magpi3
Thank you!

------
nerder92
This direct attack on culture and knowledge is just both sad and scary.

Thank you OONI and ellais for this report tho. Keep up the good work!

------
keepmesmall
Does China have something like the Cuban sneakernet, or is there a clear
reason why that wouldn't work there?

~~~
cooper12
> or is there a clear reason why that wouldn't work there?

There are Chinese-based alternatives to Wikipedia that are much more popular:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_in_China#Online_encyc...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_in_China#Online_encyclopedias).

------
amai
Is Stackoverflow still accessible in China? Or how do programmers work there?

~~~
dwohnitmok
Yes but it's very very slow (as in on the order of minutes for a page to
load). I think this has to do with how Stack Overflow's front-end code is
written. There's some non-essential Javascript that is blocked by the Great
Firewall which blocks the rest of the page from loading for a long time before
the page gives up and displays a banner that some Javascript failed to load.

All programmers I know have software to circumvent the Great Firewall and view
it as a necessary condition of their profession.

------
Yuioup
Stupid question, but does Encyclopedia Britannica still exist?

~~~
sorryforthethro
Yes, youtube links to it below many "conspiracy theory" videos

------
magnamerc
If only we had censorship resistant ledgers..

------
xvilka
And at the same time Wikipedia blocks edits from public VPNs.

~~~
cooper12
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Open_proxies#Rationa...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Open_proxies#Rationale)

------
tim333
Maybe part of the trade war retaliations?

~~~
amelius
Shutting down access to knowledge is not going to help them much, I suppose.

~~~
onion2k
Restricting access to information will help the Chinese government retain
power over the Chinese people. That's the point..

~~~
OscarTheGrinch
Yes, but another way to look at it, does China's micromanagement of the
domestic flow of information result in more or less prosperity for their
people? To misquote Hayek: communism is ultimately like telling every car
where they should go rather than just putting up street-signs.

* Please add to the debate rather than down-voting. Also Hayek wasn't musing about future autonomous cars, its a metaphor about how deciding what everyone in society should do/think doesn't scale.

~~~
onion2k
_does China 's micromanagement of the domestic flow of information result in
more or less prosperity for their people?_

The assumption you're making is that the Chinese government, or any government
actually, optimizes for the prosperity of the people. Governments optimize for
the prosperity of _some_ people. In China that appears to be the ruling elite.
In America it's the wealthy. Here in the UK it's the establishment (which is
the existing upper class and the newly wealthy).

I don't think any government genuinely has the interests of all the people at
heart, but I am _massively_ pessimistic and cynical so maybe it's me.

~~~
stupidcar
It's you. This kind of lazy pessimism strikes me as a peculiar privilege of
people who've grown up accustomed to living under a government that, while
unavoidably imperfect, does in fact give consideration to the rights and
desires of ordinary citizens. They don't take notice of all the ways their
government chooses not to oppress them, because they wrongly imagine this is
some natural state of things.

On the other hand, immigrants I've spoken to from countries with autocratic
regimes, while not starry eyed about the nature of western governments, have
no problem explaining why the situation in their countries of origin is much,
much worse, and why the government of their new country is much fairer and
functional.

~~~
onion2k
_They don 't take notice of all the ways their government chooses not to
oppress them, because they wrongly imagine this is some natural state of
things._

If you're looking for a way to describe how good your government is and you
come up with "Think how much worse it could be!" then I think the government
has failed in its duty.

There's a spectrum of government effectiveness that goes from "actively
oppressing the people" to "genuinely helping the people". Too many governments
are at the wrong end, and very few are at the right end. Most seem to be
somewhere in the middle. That, in my opinion, isn't good enough.

~~~
stupidcar
> If you're looking for a way to describe how good your government is and you
> come up with "Think how much worse it could be!" then I think the government
> has failed in its duty.

Yes, it would have, but many governments, including the UK, can be described
in far better terms than this, and my point was that living under such a
government can blind you to them.

The UK government does many things that it would not bother to do if it was
only concerned with a wealthy elite (note that I said "only", obviously the
government does plenty of things that _are_ for a wealthy elite). It funds
welfare programmes and state pensions that have no direct benefit to the rich
elite. It enforces a minimum wage that have no direct benefit to the rich
elite. It enforces worker rights and safety regulations that have no direct
benefit to the rich elite. It has a progressive tax regime that has no direct
benefit to the rich elite. It allows ordinary citizens a degree of freedom of
movement, expression, political affiliation and democratic expression that has
no direct benefit to the rich elite.

And yes, it's easy to find examples in all these areas where the
implementation falls far short of the theory. But nonetheless there is still a
huge difference between both the theory and implementation of government in
the UK vs a country like China, North Korea, Iran, etc.

Criticism of every government is useful and important, but criticism should be
grounded in reality. In a fair and reasonable assessment of what is done right
as well as what is done wrong. Instead, most criticism I see of western
governments by their own citizens is incredibly facile; uninformed by fact,
and ignorant of both the history and reality of its political institutions,
substituting nuance for lazy stereotypes and received opinions about the
supposed inherent corruption and incompetence of all politics and politicians.

~~~
klibertp
> It funds welfare programmes and state pensions ... It enforces worker rights
> ... a degree of freedom of movement, expression, political affiliation and
> democratic expression

I always thought the people in power do this because they learned the hard way
that revolutions and uprisings are frightening and that conceding to some,
mostly trivial, requests from the rest of the people is a good way to prevent
them from happening. As you point out, China, NK, Iran, Saudi Arabia & co.
show that there are other ways of doing the same that work just as well (for
now, at least - and with differing sets of side-effects, obviously), but they
all have the same goal: to stay in power and rule over the people.

I'm not saying it's intrinsically bad or anything, but I think that saying the
people ruling the West are all idealists who wish to serve the people, while
people in the exact same positions elsewhere in the world are power-hungry
despots seems kind of... too optimistic, maybe?

There was this consul in ancient Rome (IIRC) who was a farmer, was appointed
as a leader to win the war, then he won the war and then left his office to go
back to his farm. There's probably a reason why this became a legend - it
wouldn't be this famous a tale if things like that used to happen every other
day.

------
basetop
Considering how politicized wikipedia ( like most of tech industry has gotten
in recent years ), doesn't shock me. Jimmy Wales has pretty much come out and
said wikipedia will no longer be user driven but ideology driven. Which is one
of the reasons the other co-founder of wikipedia has criticized wales and
wikipedia.

Wikipedia is great for most generic topics, but for "sensitive" topics, it's
pretty much propaganda. Considering how heavily wikipedia is censored by
wikipedia itself, maybe a taste of their own medicine will make them change
their position, but I doubt it.

Sadly, as more and more people use the internet, it'll be censored more and
more by the elites in china, US, russia, EU, etc. What we are seeing is the
internet becoming an overt tool of propaganda rather than a platform of
discussion or exchange of ideas. Even worse, it seems like there are tons of
support for censorship, especially amongst the young "educated" demographics.

~~~
orwin
If you are making claims like this, you might want to source it. Like a Jimmy
wales interview link, a wikipedia link to a "sensitive" topic that have been
politized (that does not prove anything but still show that you've done some
research).

Also generalization is bad. You might want to visit a skeptic association and
follow a course about human cognitive bias (it is helpfull, but it won't
"cure" you from them, just make you more self-aware).

