Jimmy Wales Threatens To Obstruct UK Government Snooping 198
judgecorp writes "Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales has threatened to encrypt communications between Wikipedia and UK users in order to frustrate the proposed Communications Bill, known as the Snooper's Charter, which would give the UK government the right to routinely track citizens' web and phone use. Wales was addressing the committee which is scrutinising the Bill before it is considered by Parliament."
Re:Why "threaten"? That's lame (Score:2, Informative)
Cost. https is slightly more expensive because it can't be cached, and as such, every access will hit his servers rather than someone's cache servers.
Video... (Score:5, Informative)
Video: http://www.parliamentlive.tv/Main/Player.aspx?meetingId=11355 [parliamentlive.tv] [Windows silverlight warning!]
To highlight what we are up against - the chairman wasn't aware that 'kids' these days are able to chat to each other in games using their Xbox - 'Good Lord' was his reaction.
The committee really do not have a clue, and have no real chance of getting it if the goverment machine gets their way - the witnesses here showed this.
The 25% arguement is laughable [That being it is claimed that 25% of internet data is not available to collect thorugh current legislation]
Re:Why not just do it? (Score:5, Informative)
I'm not sure how this could work with load balancing
Their load balancers probably already handle the SSL and unwrap it for the web servers.
Most decent load balancers support hardware-SSL these days.
Re:Why "threaten"? That's lame (Score:5, Informative)
He lives in Britain (in London), so perhaps he chooses to get more involved in politics here than anywhere else.
Re:Here we go... (Score:5, Informative)
If I were a Russian meerkat, I'd be sucking my teeth right now.
Re:Here we go... (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Why not just do it? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Explain me? SSL is not sufficient? (Score:5, Informative)
A SSL/HTTPS (transparent) proxy can only do a man-in-the-middle attack if you install the proxy-server's private CA (certificate authority) certificate in your browser. At your work place, IT may have installed one of those CA certificates for their own proxy in the browser on every computer they manage.
Basically for every website you try to access, the proxy becomes the end-point for the website, and then the proxy make its own fake-certificate for the website signed with its CA certificate. The browser checks the fake-certificate with the fake-CA-certificate and thinks everything is fine.
Governments can also transparent proxy specific websites which they have a fake-certificate for which was signed by a hacked real CA. Like what happened with a dutch CA diginotar.nl, which was used to create certificates for google.com and Facebook.com by hackers from Iran, if I remember correctly.
Re:Here we go... (Score:4, Informative)
The URL is encrypted:
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/499591/are-https-urls-encrypted [stackoverflow.com]