Blocking Wikipedia and the "Streisand Effect"
On the night of 24 on 25 in August, 2015, a number of Internet providers in Russia, blocked access to the Wikipedia electronic encyclopedia in Russian. The blockage occurred by a decision of the Chernoyarsky District Court of the Astrakhan Region. The district prosecutor appealed to the court in the interests of an indefinite circle of people about the availability of information on Wikipedia, demonstrating a method of making the narcotic substance “charas” (a type of hashish). Based on this decision, Roskomnadzor demanded the removal of prohibited information. It was not removed, and Roskomnadzor attempted to block the banned page. The attempt was not thought out technically and led to the blocking of the entire Wikipedia in Russian. Foreign language versions in most cases remained available. Realizing the scale of blocking, Roskomnadzor withdrew Wikipedia from the registry of prohibited sites on the same day.
Wikipedia is written in 277 languages and it is almost impossible to limit it.
The attempt of state control over the Russian information field was unsuccessful. but in science, a negative result of an experiment is no less significant than a positive one. Analyzing that, as well as, the main thing, why it happened so, we can draw conclusions about how to act next time.
The first step of the analysis is to determine why the Chernoyarsk District Prosecutor appealed to the court “in the interests of an indefinite circle of persons”. Such a formulation does not imply the pursuit of a particular crime, but the protection of the interests of society in a preventive manner. If Wikipedia had announced the chemical technology of the manufacture of a synthetic drug, such behavior would be understandable. But the “technology” of the charas is the modeling of the resin from the inflorescences of Indian hemp by hand. This technology has been known to fans of hashish for centuries and you can think of it yourself without any encyclopedic articles and definitions. Even if Wikipedia removed this information, it would have no effect on the consumption of marijuana in the country. And this is known to any specialist, first of all, to prosecutors.
It may well be that the prosecutor tried to achieve cheap glory by blocking access to the site. But Wikipedia is a very popular and too well known site. It is written in 277 languages and is one of the ten most visited sites in the world. Russian Wikipedia takes the 7-th place in the number of articles among the language sections of the encyclopedia, with today 1.248.297 articles. Such a "beast" is too tough for the Chernoyarsk Prosecutor's Office. Even in the event of a victory, the public outcry would have gone beyond Russia, and someone in the state administration would still have to backstage. Practice has shown that the attempt failed from the very beginning, and the ban lasted for only 8-10 hours, and even then not everywhere.
So the question is: Which government official will start a losing business, especially with such a resonance, which will roll around the world in 277 languages? Prosecutor Chernoyarsk area? Because of the “technology” charas? "In the interests of the indefinite circle of persons"? If someone believes in this, he must agree that the prosecutor has found his position and rank on the road, and he does not feel sorry for them at all.
The West has overlaid Russia with NATO sanctions and bases like a wolf. If tomorrow begins another color revolution, or even open war, it will not be unimportant that Wikipedia will write about this. Who fights on the barricades - militias or terrorists? What measures is NATO taking - preparing for armed aggression or “peace enforcement operation”? Deleting or blocking a single Wikipedia page may become a matter of life and death for Russia in the future. An experiment from 25 August showed that this is not yet possible. At the present stage of control in the Russian information space, it will be necessary either to block the entire Wikipedia, or not to touch it at all.
The experiment also showed that Russia has developed a modern, developed information society. This is a fundamentally new structure of the 21 century society, whose members have access to the world wide web. In an information society, any attempt to remove or limit the distribution of once published information leads to a stir. It speeds up the distribution of targeted information so that it reaches people who, under a normal situation, would not be interested in it at all. For the first time it was experienced by an American singer and actress Barbara Streisand.
In 2003, she went to court with the requirement to recover from photographer Kenneth Adelman and the site "Pictopia»$ 50 million, as the picture of her house was available among 12.000 other photos of the California coast. Adelman claimed that he photographed the house along with other houses on the coast as part of the project “California Coastal Records Project, Studying coastal erosion as authorized and ordered by the US government. Before Streisand filed a lawsuit, the photo with the 3850 number was downloaded from the project site just 6 times; of these, two downloads were made by Streisand’s lawyers. Journalist Paul Rogers (San jose mercury news) noted that as a result of the dissemination of information about the lawsuit, the photo of Streisand's house became very popular on the Internet. For example, a month after filing a claim, the image was viewed by more than 420 by thousands of visitors. Adelman said that the information about the suit attracted the attention of more than a million visitors to his website, and the photo was used in his photo archive by the news agency “Associated Press"And this, in turn, led to its reprinting in many newspapers around the world. Now this social phenomenon is known as the Streisand Effect.
Barbara Streisand House on the California Coast. Before filing a lawsuit in court, this picture was downloaded 6 times, and today is an encyclopedic example of the "Streisand effect"
Another victim of the effect - military radio station Pierre-sur-Oet in France. In March, 2013, the staff of the General Directorate of Internal Intelligence (DCRI) of France attempted to get the article removed from the French Wikipedia, citing the fact that the information in the article is secret. Wikimedia Foundation asked for an explanation of exactly which parts of the article give rise to claims, but DCRI refused to provide any additional explanations. After the Wikimedia Foundation refused to delete the article, DCRI got together to solve the problem on its own. 4 April 2013 DCRI summoned one of the Wikipedia volunteers. This participant, who had access to the page removal tools, was forced to delete the article right at the office, saying that otherwise he would be detained and prosecuted. Despite explanations from intelligence officials that Wikipedia was not working, the participant, under pressure, deleted the article because he had no choice. He warned other administrators that an attempt to restore the article would force them to answer before the law. The participant had nothing to do with the article never edited it and did not even know about its existence before joining the board. He was chosen and called because of the ease of recognition, since he regularly participated in promotions promoting Wikipedia and Wikimedia Foundation projects in France. If all this had happened in Russia, no less than a hundred liberal organizations would have raised a terrible howl around the world. This is at least an unlawful abduction of a person - there was no order for arrest and there was no reason for such an order, and there was also mockery of freedom of conscience and freedom of speech, along with threats to use brute force. But since the incident occurred in a democratic France, which is located in the super democratic European Union, the liberal organizations and the media were silent. Later, an article about the radio station was restored by another Wikipedia member (from Switzerland). The French Interior Ministry declined to comment on the incident. As a result of the incident, the article at the time became the most visited page of the French Wikipedia. It has been translated into many other languages.
The military radio station Pierre-sur-Ote in France, which DCRI wanted to remove from Wikipedia. Now the article about it is translated into the 33 languages of the world.
Wikipedia is based in the USA. Wikimedia Foundation is registered there, and he is obliged to comply with US law. This gives an undoubted advantage to Washington, which can force Wikipedia to delete a separate article, unlike Paris or Moscow. However, you should not complain about the fate of the villain. The world is unfair by definition, and if someone wants to have advantages over others, he needs to develop basic science and advanced technologies himself. Adapting to the realities and remembering the disgrace of DCRI, Russia went from the other side. She conducted a formal trial and repeatedly called on Wikipedia to remove prohibited content. Chernoyarsky District Court convicted 25 of June 2015, and the site was blocked by Roskomnadzor on the night of 24 on August 25, a month later. If everything turned out as it should, in case of urgent need the procedure could be repeated within a few days, or even hours. But it did not. In addition to reputational damage to Roskomnadzor, the Charas (narcotic substance) page rank has risen from 200-400 (before blocking) to more than 30 thousand views per day.
Usually access to Wikipedia is via HTTPS (HyperText Transfer Protocol Secure) - An extension of the HTTP protocol that supports encryption. Data transmitted over the HTTPS protocol is “packed” into the SSL or TLS cryptographic protocol. Unlike HTTP, the TCP port 443 is used by default for HTTPS. Under normal conditions, no one except the encyclopedia administrators can see who views what and which information complements Wikipedia, although access to the encyclopedia itself is recorded. Judging by the nature and duration of the blocking, Roskomnadzor came up with a “cunning” plan to block one page, despite HTTPS - by replacing certificates with providers. But the blockers did not take into account the smallest - in Wikipedia acts HSTS (HTTP Strict Transport Security) - the mechanism that activates the forced secure connection via the HTTPS protocol. In case of certificate spoofing, HSTS blocks access to the entire resource. As soon as Roskomnadzor realized that the “trick” had failed, and the whole site in Russian turned out to be blocked, the department immediately responded: the ban was lifted.
There are only two logical explanations for why this is exactly what happened. Alas, none of them can withstand serious criticism of the organizers of the lock.
In the first version, “for the purity of the experiment,” the prosecutor’s office and Roskomnadzor played extremely honestly and did not involve any advanced hackers. They simply indicated to providers to block access to the page by replacing the certificate, and they changed the way they were able - utterly bad and worthless.
In the second case, Roskomnadzor invented a very good plan (program? Algorithm?), But it turned out to be inapplicable in large-scale conditions, where there are no such specialists and technology.
To block the entire Wikipedia, or at least its Russian-language version, may seem like a good idea to someone, but it only seems. Russian is widely spoken in the world, not as widely as English, French or Spanish, but still widely. Russian Wikipedia is read all over the world, especially the peoples of Eastern Europe and Central Asia, and the Russian diaspora in the West. Blocking the entire site means to deprive almost all Russians living in their homeland the opportunity to edit Wikipedia. Foreigners and people living thousands of kilometers from their homeland will start writing Russian Wikipedia. And it will be worse than even the most liberal stuffing done by Russians who live at home. Although there are more liberals in the encyclopedia than normal people, there are plenty of patriots too. If they are not able to edit, a very dark script is possible. For about six months, the euphoria of the community that retains access, some kind of revolutionary romance, “underground”, opposition to the authorities, etc. And let some editors from Russia break through the blockade - there will be someone to meet them. And then what? And then slowly, but steadily, a return to reality takes place - there are no readers, a feeling of weak demand for what you do in Wikipedia will grow, feelings calm down, because there are no opponents from Russia who have rallying the rest of the community into a single group, apathy is growing, sluggish project development, minor squabbling of groups on minor issues. Then, groups of editors who are united on some basis, for example, proponents of gay or Ukrainian nationalists, maybe libertarians, or others, will start to stand out. Wins the one who will be angrier than others. After such a victory, the other groups will slowly leave the project. It will exist in the form of a grotesque, which millions of people around the world will perceive as real Russia ...
Block Wikipedia for a day or a week, too, it makes no sense because of the "Streisand effect." If only in an exceptional case, when in a day or two there will be no longer any meaning what will think. Although only the thought of a similar situation causes a shiver. The idea of free knowledge is remarkable and very inspiring. Everyone can edit Wikipedia and make the world around it a little better with it. Therefore, you can not be offended and deal with the "poor content". It is, but it is the inevitable price of free, uncensored knowledge. To make Wikipedia better, we all need to work on its good, objective content.
Wikipedia is written in 277 languages and it is almost impossible to limit it.
The attempt of state control over the Russian information field was unsuccessful. but in science, a negative result of an experiment is no less significant than a positive one. Analyzing that, as well as, the main thing, why it happened so, we can draw conclusions about how to act next time.
The first step of the analysis is to determine why the Chernoyarsk District Prosecutor appealed to the court “in the interests of an indefinite circle of persons”. Such a formulation does not imply the pursuit of a particular crime, but the protection of the interests of society in a preventive manner. If Wikipedia had announced the chemical technology of the manufacture of a synthetic drug, such behavior would be understandable. But the “technology” of the charas is the modeling of the resin from the inflorescences of Indian hemp by hand. This technology has been known to fans of hashish for centuries and you can think of it yourself without any encyclopedic articles and definitions. Even if Wikipedia removed this information, it would have no effect on the consumption of marijuana in the country. And this is known to any specialist, first of all, to prosecutors.
It may well be that the prosecutor tried to achieve cheap glory by blocking access to the site. But Wikipedia is a very popular and too well known site. It is written in 277 languages and is one of the ten most visited sites in the world. Russian Wikipedia takes the 7-th place in the number of articles among the language sections of the encyclopedia, with today 1.248.297 articles. Such a "beast" is too tough for the Chernoyarsk Prosecutor's Office. Even in the event of a victory, the public outcry would have gone beyond Russia, and someone in the state administration would still have to backstage. Practice has shown that the attempt failed from the very beginning, and the ban lasted for only 8-10 hours, and even then not everywhere.
So the question is: Which government official will start a losing business, especially with such a resonance, which will roll around the world in 277 languages? Prosecutor Chernoyarsk area? Because of the “technology” charas? "In the interests of the indefinite circle of persons"? If someone believes in this, he must agree that the prosecutor has found his position and rank on the road, and he does not feel sorry for them at all.
The West has overlaid Russia with NATO sanctions and bases like a wolf. If tomorrow begins another color revolution, or even open war, it will not be unimportant that Wikipedia will write about this. Who fights on the barricades - militias or terrorists? What measures is NATO taking - preparing for armed aggression or “peace enforcement operation”? Deleting or blocking a single Wikipedia page may become a matter of life and death for Russia in the future. An experiment from 25 August showed that this is not yet possible. At the present stage of control in the Russian information space, it will be necessary either to block the entire Wikipedia, or not to touch it at all.
The experiment also showed that Russia has developed a modern, developed information society. This is a fundamentally new structure of the 21 century society, whose members have access to the world wide web. In an information society, any attempt to remove or limit the distribution of once published information leads to a stir. It speeds up the distribution of targeted information so that it reaches people who, under a normal situation, would not be interested in it at all. For the first time it was experienced by an American singer and actress Barbara Streisand.
In 2003, she went to court with the requirement to recover from photographer Kenneth Adelman and the site "Pictopia»$ 50 million, as the picture of her house was available among 12.000 other photos of the California coast. Adelman claimed that he photographed the house along with other houses on the coast as part of the project “California Coastal Records Project, Studying coastal erosion as authorized and ordered by the US government. Before Streisand filed a lawsuit, the photo with the 3850 number was downloaded from the project site just 6 times; of these, two downloads were made by Streisand’s lawyers. Journalist Paul Rogers (San jose mercury news) noted that as a result of the dissemination of information about the lawsuit, the photo of Streisand's house became very popular on the Internet. For example, a month after filing a claim, the image was viewed by more than 420 by thousands of visitors. Adelman said that the information about the suit attracted the attention of more than a million visitors to his website, and the photo was used in his photo archive by the news agency “Associated Press"And this, in turn, led to its reprinting in many newspapers around the world. Now this social phenomenon is known as the Streisand Effect.
Barbara Streisand House on the California Coast. Before filing a lawsuit in court, this picture was downloaded 6 times, and today is an encyclopedic example of the "Streisand effect"
Another victim of the effect - military radio station Pierre-sur-Oet in France. In March, 2013, the staff of the General Directorate of Internal Intelligence (DCRI) of France attempted to get the article removed from the French Wikipedia, citing the fact that the information in the article is secret. Wikimedia Foundation asked for an explanation of exactly which parts of the article give rise to claims, but DCRI refused to provide any additional explanations. After the Wikimedia Foundation refused to delete the article, DCRI got together to solve the problem on its own. 4 April 2013 DCRI summoned one of the Wikipedia volunteers. This participant, who had access to the page removal tools, was forced to delete the article right at the office, saying that otherwise he would be detained and prosecuted. Despite explanations from intelligence officials that Wikipedia was not working, the participant, under pressure, deleted the article because he had no choice. He warned other administrators that an attempt to restore the article would force them to answer before the law. The participant had nothing to do with the article never edited it and did not even know about its existence before joining the board. He was chosen and called because of the ease of recognition, since he regularly participated in promotions promoting Wikipedia and Wikimedia Foundation projects in France. If all this had happened in Russia, no less than a hundred liberal organizations would have raised a terrible howl around the world. This is at least an unlawful abduction of a person - there was no order for arrest and there was no reason for such an order, and there was also mockery of freedom of conscience and freedom of speech, along with threats to use brute force. But since the incident occurred in a democratic France, which is located in the super democratic European Union, the liberal organizations and the media were silent. Later, an article about the radio station was restored by another Wikipedia member (from Switzerland). The French Interior Ministry declined to comment on the incident. As a result of the incident, the article at the time became the most visited page of the French Wikipedia. It has been translated into many other languages.
The military radio station Pierre-sur-Ote in France, which DCRI wanted to remove from Wikipedia. Now the article about it is translated into the 33 languages of the world.
Wikipedia is based in the USA. Wikimedia Foundation is registered there, and he is obliged to comply with US law. This gives an undoubted advantage to Washington, which can force Wikipedia to delete a separate article, unlike Paris or Moscow. However, you should not complain about the fate of the villain. The world is unfair by definition, and if someone wants to have advantages over others, he needs to develop basic science and advanced technologies himself. Adapting to the realities and remembering the disgrace of DCRI, Russia went from the other side. She conducted a formal trial and repeatedly called on Wikipedia to remove prohibited content. Chernoyarsky District Court convicted 25 of June 2015, and the site was blocked by Roskomnadzor on the night of 24 on August 25, a month later. If everything turned out as it should, in case of urgent need the procedure could be repeated within a few days, or even hours. But it did not. In addition to reputational damage to Roskomnadzor, the Charas (narcotic substance) page rank has risen from 200-400 (before blocking) to more than 30 thousand views per day.
Usually access to Wikipedia is via HTTPS (HyperText Transfer Protocol Secure) - An extension of the HTTP protocol that supports encryption. Data transmitted over the HTTPS protocol is “packed” into the SSL or TLS cryptographic protocol. Unlike HTTP, the TCP port 443 is used by default for HTTPS. Under normal conditions, no one except the encyclopedia administrators can see who views what and which information complements Wikipedia, although access to the encyclopedia itself is recorded. Judging by the nature and duration of the blocking, Roskomnadzor came up with a “cunning” plan to block one page, despite HTTPS - by replacing certificates with providers. But the blockers did not take into account the smallest - in Wikipedia acts HSTS (HTTP Strict Transport Security) - the mechanism that activates the forced secure connection via the HTTPS protocol. In case of certificate spoofing, HSTS blocks access to the entire resource. As soon as Roskomnadzor realized that the “trick” had failed, and the whole site in Russian turned out to be blocked, the department immediately responded: the ban was lifted.
There are only two logical explanations for why this is exactly what happened. Alas, none of them can withstand serious criticism of the organizers of the lock.
In the first version, “for the purity of the experiment,” the prosecutor’s office and Roskomnadzor played extremely honestly and did not involve any advanced hackers. They simply indicated to providers to block access to the page by replacing the certificate, and they changed the way they were able - utterly bad and worthless.
In the second case, Roskomnadzor invented a very good plan (program? Algorithm?), But it turned out to be inapplicable in large-scale conditions, where there are no such specialists and technology.
To block the entire Wikipedia, or at least its Russian-language version, may seem like a good idea to someone, but it only seems. Russian is widely spoken in the world, not as widely as English, French or Spanish, but still widely. Russian Wikipedia is read all over the world, especially the peoples of Eastern Europe and Central Asia, and the Russian diaspora in the West. Blocking the entire site means to deprive almost all Russians living in their homeland the opportunity to edit Wikipedia. Foreigners and people living thousands of kilometers from their homeland will start writing Russian Wikipedia. And it will be worse than even the most liberal stuffing done by Russians who live at home. Although there are more liberals in the encyclopedia than normal people, there are plenty of patriots too. If they are not able to edit, a very dark script is possible. For about six months, the euphoria of the community that retains access, some kind of revolutionary romance, “underground”, opposition to the authorities, etc. And let some editors from Russia break through the blockade - there will be someone to meet them. And then what? And then slowly, but steadily, a return to reality takes place - there are no readers, a feeling of weak demand for what you do in Wikipedia will grow, feelings calm down, because there are no opponents from Russia who have rallying the rest of the community into a single group, apathy is growing, sluggish project development, minor squabbling of groups on minor issues. Then, groups of editors who are united on some basis, for example, proponents of gay or Ukrainian nationalists, maybe libertarians, or others, will start to stand out. Wins the one who will be angrier than others. After such a victory, the other groups will slowly leave the project. It will exist in the form of a grotesque, which millions of people around the world will perceive as real Russia ...
Block Wikipedia for a day or a week, too, it makes no sense because of the "Streisand effect." If only in an exceptional case, when in a day or two there will be no longer any meaning what will think. Although only the thought of a similar situation causes a shiver. The idea of free knowledge is remarkable and very inspiring. Everyone can edit Wikipedia and make the world around it a little better with it. Therefore, you can not be offended and deal with the "poor content". It is, but it is the inevitable price of free, uncensored knowledge. To make Wikipedia better, we all need to work on its good, objective content.
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