Wikipedia will encrypt to fight UK spying

Jimmy Wales says that he'll configure Wikipedia to encrypt all user traffic to undermine the UK government's "Snooper's Charter," which will institute bulk, warrantless Internet spying on the whole nation. (via /.)

I write books. My latest is a YA science fiction novel called Homeland (it's the sequel to Little Brother). More books: Rapture of the Nerds (a novel, with Charlie Stross); With a Little Help (short stories); and The Great Big Beautiful Tomorrow (novella and nonfic). I speak all over the place and I tweet and tumble, too.

MORE: crypto • happy mutants • surveillance • uk • wikipedia

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http://tomxvesely.blogspot.com/ thomas vesely

awesome, a hero……………
Jonam

Australia’s the next place that will need this. The attorney general is proposing ISPs keep two years worth of data:

http://www.heraldsun.com.au/technology/nicola-roxon-backflip-gives-green-light-for-online-spying/story-fn7celvh-1226464553027
the_engineer

Just because you can do something doesn’t mean you should do it.
http://ryankiefer.me/ Ryan Kiefer

While this is nice as a threat to what sounds like an absurd monitoring scheme, I don’t know if it would actually happen. Wikipedia and most of its sister sites are largely self-governed, and would be very unhappy if decisions like this were made without their input. While the opinions of Jimmy Wales are generally respected by Wikipedia’s community, they are not final law.

Then again, it was that same self-governing community that decided to black out the site for a day against SOPA, so doing something to protest this law might turn out to be popular.
http://www.facebook.com/jason.amezquita Jason Amezquita

All they have to do it turn on https, pretty much no one will notice a difference, I don’t see how that would require much debate…
- 0xnemo
  
  Why? Because this is a great opportunity to make people care and aware of their abuses by government and private entities.
  HTTPS is already “turned on” for Wikipedia, you can already use it if you want. And you could already care for your security if you used EFF’s HTTPS Everywhere. Many do.
  The next step here, is enabling HTTP Strict Transport Security, which informs Web browsers to automatically connect to the site using only a secure connection, even if a plain HTTP link has been clicked. That is the “switch” we’re talking about.
  It should already be there, but the situation can be used to everyone’s advantage, making people know and discuss and criticize.
Coderjoe

Wikipedia ALREADY has the ability to browse via HTTPS. However, it is a bit slower, as I don’t think they have the same number of servers handling requests.

The EN main page: https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/w/index.php?title=Main_Page