China is blocking all language editions of Wikipedia

This makes me sad. Wikipedia is surely one of humanity&#x27;s greatest accomplishments to date. Having such a resource be off limits to a large section of our population is truly depressing.<p>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.

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&#x27;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.<p>ESNI seems like it would work pretty well. Although the PRC firewall could likely be used to block ESNI and&#x2F;or TLS 1.3 and force plain-text SNI.

Blocking the greatest encyclopedia that ever existed is the best example of what this kind of censorship <i>is</i>.

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

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.<p>For instance for the 2008 olympics many blocked sites were opened up, and conversely they tighten everything up before every National People&#x27;s Congress elections.

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”

Of course they are, it&#x27;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 &quot;On this day&quot; section.

Chinese government are hyper coward, it&#x27;s going to be fun.<p>”You’re braver than you believe, stronger than you seem and smarter than you think.” – Winnie the Pooh

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

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

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.<p>The DNS injection is obviously in place. But something strange happened when I checked the SNI filtering. The curl command stopped at &quot;TLSv1.2 (OUT), TLS alert, Client hello (1)&quot; 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.<p>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&#x27;s regime using some other blocking mechanism that I&#x27;m not aware of? Or am I doing some kind of mistake?

This article was accurate at the time but AFAIK the situation has changed. For context: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;phabricator.wikimedia.org&#x2F;T208263#5170123" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;phabricator.wikimedia.org&#x2F;T208263#5170123</a> tl;dr There were unintended consequences from refactoring DNS configuration and the situation should be back to “normal” now.

Does wikipedia have any read only mirrors?

This direct attack on culture and knowledge is just both sad and scary.<p>Thank you OONI and ellais for this report tho. Keep up the good work!

Does China have something like the Cuban sneakernet, or is there a clear reason why that wouldn&#x27;t work there?

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

Stupid question, but does Encyclopedia Britannica still exist?

If only we had censorship resistant ledgers..

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

Maybe part of the trade war retaliations?

Considering how politicized wikipedia ( like most of tech industry has gotten in recent years ), doesn&#x27;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.<p>Wikipedia is great for most generic topics, but for &quot;sensitive&quot; topics, it&#x27;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.<p>Sadly, as more and more people use the internet, it&#x27;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 &quot;educated&quot; demographics.