RE: wikileaks - Web Architecture and Robustness

Yes, profile makes a difference. When my or my client's sites are blocked in
China or other countries (often not for anything the site says or does, but
simply because it is not yet approved or because it sits in a block of ip
addresses that are disapproved perhaps due to other sites' content), there
is no notice so you don't know you are blocked, and there is no clear
recourse. Who do you appeal to in China and what is the process to be
unblocked? What about other countries?

Smaller companies do not have the capability to navigate other government
organization's and address these issues or to work around them.

-----Original Message-----
From: www-tag-request@w3.org [mailto:www-tag-request@w3.org] On Behalf Of
Robin Berjon
Sent: Monday, December 06, 2010 6:21 AM
To: Melvin Carvalho
Cc: Karl Dubost; www-tag@w3.org WG
Subject: Re: wikileaks - Web Architecture and Robustness

On Dec 5, 2010, at 23:07 , Melvin Carvalho wrote:
> On 4 December 2010 19:49, Karl Dubost <karld@opera.com> wrote:
>> 
>> And here a poster showing the domain name being created and blocked step
by step.
>>
http://jaffiche.fr/les-pays-dont-la-france-partent-a-la-chasse-au-wikileaks-
566
> 
> The Web seems to be demonstrating a degree of fault tolerance on this
issue.
> 
> http://wikileaks.ch/mirrors.html
> 
> There are 200 'mirrors' now listed, and counting.

Only because this is a high profile case with a large sympathetic community.
If similar censorship methods had been levelled at a smaller, less popular
cause that isn't a press and Twitter darling, it would likely be offline by
now (or at the very least see its operation much more seriously affected).

WikiLeaks is also simpler because it's static content — you can mirror it
with a single wget command. With a more elaborate service requiring complex
setup, or the synching of a DB, it would be far more problematic. In other
words, we shouldn't take WikiLeaks' resilience as a general indication.

-- 
Robin Berjon - http://berjon.com/

Received on Monday, 6 December 2010 17:35:58 UTC