[HN Gopher] Wikipedia globally blocks Apple Private Relay IP ran...
___________________________________________________________________
Wikipedia globally blocks Apple Private Relay IP ranges from
editing
Author : larcher
Score : 137 points
Date : 2022-04-15 13:58 UTC (9 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (meta.wikimedia.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (meta.wikimedia.org)
| xoa wrote:
| Stupid and disappointing. Wikipedia and others should move
| decisively away from using IP addresses as any form of unique ID
| and address the actual problem in a way that still preserves the
| option for useful pseudonymity and participation. The basic issue
| with moderation is the balance between the time/resource cost of
| moderation and the time/resource cost of evading it times the
| quantity of bad actor interest. Like if it costs the site two
| cumulative human minutes and paying for that somehow ($2 at
| $60/hour, or limited volunteer resources that should still be
| valued) to make a moderation decision but bad actors can evade in
| seconds for free then the site will eventually suffer from
| resource exhaustion if there is enough attacker interest.
| Conversely if it the cost on the site side is two minutes/$2 but
| hours/$10+ on the attacker side the site is going to win. At some
| level of imbalance even the best funded attacker will run out
| first. IP addresses have been used as an extremely clumsy and
| increasingly bad proxy for cost, because it takes some level of
| effort/time/expertise to evade it. But as well as evasion being
| automatable and growing worse (hard to see how IPv6 won't be the
| final nail in the coffin there at long last) the side effects
| against innocent and important usage are very bad too. Some sites
| use money as a proxy (SomethingAwful's (in)famous 10bux say) and
| that can work in some niche cases, but is also less than ideal
| for anything that aspires to be global and widely inclusive given
| gross inequalities in income. It's impossible in most cases to
| set a level that isn't simultaneously a blocker for many while
| not even being a speedbump for others.
|
| Instead it's way past time they just attacked the problem
| directly with some flavor of more formalized cryptographic
| representation of time. Like just give new users a number to do
| prime factorization on tuned to a desired target, then sign the
| result. Ensure they need to do a few hours/days/whatever of
| crunching (could be graduated, a few hours gets you initial
| editing rights then you're expected to crunch a bit more over the
| following months to reach full user level). Scale over time with
| increasing processing power. Near zero cost to verify. Now even
| with hacked routers and so on it still always takes some time.
| For people who don't get banned it's a one-time cost, no problem,
| amortized over years/decades (Wikipedia is 21 years old now, and
| there are other older forums still around too). Anyone in the
| world can participate no money required, just a computer. But for
| attackers it's a constant burn. And it changes to calculations
| for things like soft bans too. If you've got a token representing
| a week's worth of compute built up over a few years and get a 48
| hour ban, the incentive against ban evasion is high. It's not
| possible to build back up another token before the ban expires.
|
| It's a shame there isn't some standard for this, no reason in
| principle a handful of authorities couldn't make chrono-tokens
| that any site could recognize and keep their own DB of. No
| permanent identity involved, no law enforcement, always the
| chance to start fresh, every site can choose whether to worry
| about other sites' bans or not (or contribute back their own or
| not). A token need not be tied to any account at all in fact. And
| no algorithms involved either, humans can take the driver's seat
| again because the cost equation is firmly back in moderators'
| favor and they have a dynamic tool to respond to abuse (they can
| just temporarily increase the time req during an attack surge as
| high as needed to quench it while not hurting long time users or
| even stopping new ones from signing up then lower it smoothly
| back down to let new people start faster as whatever caused the
| attack winds down).
|
| It stinks we're into the 2020s and moderation doesn't really seem
| much different than the 90s.
| charcircuit wrote:
| >It's not possible to build back up another token before the
| ban expires.
|
| I think you fail to realize how slow low end devices that can
| use wikipedia is compared to the latest high performance
| processors.
| CodesInChaos wrote:
| Using hashcash and other proof-of-work schemes to limit spam
| and similar abuse sounds appealing, but I don't see how you can
| make it work in practice.
|
| 1. Defenders use standard PCs and mobile phones. Attackers use
| GPUs, FPGAs and ASIC and run them in places where electricity
| is cheap.
|
| For traditional hash algorithms this gives the attacker a
| thousandfold or so advantage. There has been some work on
| closing the gap in the context of crypto currencies, but I
| don't know how close they got.
|
| 2. It takes a phone (or even a PC) a long time to burn through
| $2.
|
| 3. Attackers have large botnets and don't pay for the
| electricity consumed by these.
| recursive wrote:
| > Wikipedia and others should move decisively away from using
| IP addresses as any form of unique ID
|
| I think they're already there.
|
| > Proxy blocks are not targeted at individuals
|
| There are italics on the original page.
| thrwaway348 wrote:
| > address the actual problem in a way that still preserves the
| option for useful pseudonymity and participation
|
| You mean like supporting use of pseudonymous accounts that
| don't require more than an email to register, just like HN?
| Wikipedia already does this. It's trivial to sign up with a
| throwaway email account. No one cares unless you try to abuse
| or game editing by making sockpuppets to sway debates.
|
| They're also exploring how to mask IPs.
| https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/IP_Editing:_Privacy_Enhancem...
| hombre_fatal wrote:
| These ideas always fall short for various reasons in practice.
| One is that you mainly punish honest users who have to install
| and run this PoW crapware just to make a small but legit edit.
| Wait, I have to lock up my CPU for how long to fix a typo I
| stumbled upon? Lol, forget it then.
|
| Meanwhile, abusers just farm PoW solutions and make it
| negligible. You end up with a solution that's even easier to
| farm than quick expiry captcha.
|
| And your idea doesn't stop you from having to implement
| moderation anyways. You have to do the same work.
| xoa wrote:
| When making a response it helps to actually _read_ the
| comment and engage in good faith.
|
| > _One is that you mainly punish honest users who have to
| install and run this PoW crapware just to make a small but
| legit edit._
|
| I covered this. It's trivial in such a system to still have
| no-cost be the default, and ramp up only for certain criteria
| or during hot spells. Which is what I wrote. Also, an RSA
| cracker can run fine as javascript, no need to install
| anything. And legitimate users can build up over long
| periods. Further, how do IP bans, the existing default, line
| up with your "honest users" thing hmmmmm? You did at least
| read the title of this comment section right? You are aware
| that this is all in the context of something that is also a
| broad sledgehammer right?
|
| > _And your idea doesn't stop you from having to implement
| moderation anyways._
|
| I never suggested it did? Quite the contrary? Hello?
|
| > _You have to do the same work._
|
| No, you don't have to the same work if attackers cannot
| attack as quickly and cheaply. Duh.
| vmoore wrote:
| Where does this end? Like if the end goal is to block every IP
| that has a bad reputation score, why not go all in and block
| every Tor exit IP and every popular VPN exit node too? If you're
| gonna do something, do it right.
|
| That said, there's nothing stopping me hacking a residential
| router to make my (anonymous) Wikipedia edits.
| Semaphor wrote:
| > why not go all in and block every Tor exit IP and every
| popular VPN exit node too? If you're gonna do something, do it
| right.
|
| Everything sounds like that is already the case? Is it not?
|
| > Communities typically block edits from IP addresses that
| obscure individual users.
| perryprog wrote:
| Open proxies and Tor exit nodes are very often blocked on sight
| already on the English Wikipedia; see
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Open_proxies.
| kube-system wrote:
| A lot of websites do just that.
| criddell wrote:
| I think it ends with flipping from default open to default
| closed. Want to edit Wikipedia? Register and provide your
| identification.
| Kim_Bruning wrote:
| A lot of smaller sites based on wiki-technology do that
| already. The only reason wikipedia can stay (semi) open is
| because it has enough people to do regular patrols.
|
| As usual it's a small misbehaving minority in the world who
| make it difficult to Have Nice Things.
| sarsway wrote:
| It not going to end. AI will make bots indistinguishable from
| humans, it's already a problem, and will become a major
| challenge for online services, the internet, all digital
| content in general. Proof of Human is something that has to be
| solved sooner or later. The solution is already being explored,
| governments will have to issue citizens ID-Tokens on some new
| blockchain, specifically made for that purpose. That way, all
| content will be signed, and can be verified as genuine.
| Complete anonymity will be a thing of the past, but I don't
| think there's really any other way.
| Shadonototra wrote:
| wow, what a poorly managed foundation, tracking users by IP...
| how delusional and lost they are..
| Kim_Bruning wrote:
| Shouldn't the link be to
| https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Apple_iCloud_Private_Relay ?
|
| Now it's linking to the discussion page. Which is definitely very
| interesting and useful, but probably not the page that was
| intended?
| bannedbybros wrote:
| mc4ndr3 wrote:
| Even for authenticated users?
| ushakov wrote:
| can someone explain why an account isn't a requirement to
| contribute to Wikipedia?
| nickvincent wrote:
| In practice, I believe the reason is historical: that's how
| Wikipedia started and it hasn't changed. But there's pretty
| compelling evidence that it provides Wikipedia some unique
| benefits relative to an account-locked alternative:
|
| Hill, B. M. and Shaw, A. (2021) 'The Hidden Costs of Requiring
| Accounts: Quasi-Experimental Evidence From Peer Production',
| Communication Research, 48(6), pp. 771-795. doi:
| 10.1177/0093650220910345.
| Kinrany wrote:
| Why should it be?
| moate wrote:
| Because that seems to be what the people in charge actually
| want but are half-assing in the name of optics.
|
| IDGAF one way or the other, but if you're going to be banning
| millions of users from editing via their IP, just commit to
| saying "We need to be able to identify you vandals, and a
| user account is the easiest way".
|
| You're either true to a mission statement, or you should stop
| virtue signaling beliefs you don't hold with your mission
| statement.
| fennecfoxen wrote:
| > Because that seems to be what the people in charge
| actually want but are half-assing in the name of optics.
|
| Most certainly not. The people in charge actually want it
| to be open. You are simply watching those ambitions
| splinter somewhat as they are beset by the crashing waves
| of the harsh reality that is the Internet.
| moate wrote:
| This is a semantics debate, and a good faith read of each
| our comments seems to show agreement in our understanding
| of the situation. "Want" does a lot of lifting, and they
| want 2 contradictory things (no vandals, anyone can edit)
| and are prioritizing those wants.
|
| I'm saying that by prioritizing the want of "no vandals"
| you are making want of "open to everyone" untenable. I'm
| sure their actual top priority is "the best, most
| accurate listing of information" and everything else is
| in service of that goal, but I don't really care.
|
| My point stands: If you want anyone to be able to edit
| anywhere at any time, you can have that but you make
| trade-offs. Saying "vandals are bad and need to be
| stopped" is actually not an objective fact, it's a choice
| about what information you hold valuable.
| KennyBlanken wrote:
| "Want it to be open" but ban mobile network IP addresses,
| which basically guarantees people below a certain
| socioeconomic status can't contribute. Loads of people
| don't have a desktop/laptop, or even internet service at
| home - just cell service.
| Kim_Bruning wrote:
| If the concern is socioeconomic status: One could still
| edit from a library, for instance.
|
| But yeah, the internet has changed over time, and it is
| not as nice a place as it used to be.
|
| I think it's important that there are still sites where
| people don't need an account to be able to participate.
| Wikipedia is one of the last holdouts in the West, and
| they clearly are having some amount of trouble keeping it
| 100% that way.
|
| Given that you need to prevent abuse, how would you
| propose to keep things (more) open?
| moate wrote:
| >>If the concern is socioeconomic status: One could still
| edit from a library, for instance.
|
| Just to be clear, your response to "disadvantaged people
| would likely have a hard time editing Wikipedia from an
| 'anon' IPs" is "take time and energy (finite resources
| that are in many cases more valuable than money) and
| travel somewhere to edit". This is...not a very good
| argument in your favor? Also, it makes the extremely bold
| assumption that the library (or whatever publicly
| available resource) is not IP banned itself because some
| vandal had the exact same thought.
|
| >>I think it's important that there are still sites where
| people don't need an account to be able to participate.
|
| Why? If this is important, why isn't it important for
| everyone? The point I, and other commenters have made, is
| that you shouldn't say "We care about a free and open
| internet" when what you mean is "We care about a free and
| open internet as long as nobody does anything we don't
| like and we're able to regulate it as we see fit".
|
| These things are a binary, not a scale, despite what some
| people want to argue. When you start blanket bans that
| harm people who have done nothing wrong, you're taking a
| step towards authoritarian and away from pure openness.
| "The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few" is
| pointedly saying "we are not prioritizing your needs" and
| that's what moderation is.
|
| >>Given that you need to prevent abuse, how would you
| propose to keep things (more) open?
|
| You're admitting defeat here, and showing how useless a
| word like "free" or "open" is. The site is not more or
| less open, it's open or closed for some. You being able
| to freely edit does nothing for my inability to freely
| edit. You can't average these things together and say
| "99% of people are free to do what they want" as if that
| was a meaningful statement for the people who can't.
| Moderation is antithetical to "free" or "open" speech.
| I'm for moderation, I just want people to stop pretending
| that you can have it both ways.
| Kim_Bruning wrote:
| I appreciate your advocacy for Wikipedia to continue to
| allow everyone to edit anonymously. When I was a
| wikipedia regular I also pushed for this.
|
| Unfortunately, as with everything, some people do abuse
| this facility. Some abuse it to place misinformation on
| wikipedia. Other people (like bored teenagers) might
| vandalize the wiki by deleting all the content on the
| page and replacing it with a pithy epithet. Then there
| are bots that skim the internet looking for mediawiki
| sites and filling them with adverts.
|
| Sometimes you need to block these kinds of activity.
| Sometimes such abuse comes from a shared address or
| range, and sometimes such a block thus leads to
| (hopefully temporary) blocking of innocent bystanders.
| That is bad.
|
| There _are_ facilities in place to help prevent innocent
| bystanders from getting caught up. But it 's a constant
| arms race. And if nothing is done at all, wikipedia would
| quickly cease to operate.
|
| The community discussion is about this situation. Current
| internet trends have more people editing from behind
| proxies or shared IP addresses. If these trends continue,
| perhaps wikimedia will have to figure out new ways to
| fight abuse and while still allowing people to continue
| to edit anonymously. This is not something that has
| happened or will happen by itself. It takes and will take
| constant monitoring.
|
| I don't think it's a good idea to then just go ahead
| abolish anonymous editing like some people suggest. Being
| anonymous on the internet is a great thing that should be
| a right. We need to continue to find ways to preserve
| anonymity (and pseudonymity!), and also continue to find
| ways to keep bad actors from ruining it for anyone else.
|
| Having anonymous participants is orthogonal to whether
| your community is moderated by the way. In fact you can
| even have anonymous moderation (which has been a part of
| how wikipedia works) .
| moate wrote:
| I think you make valid points pretty much top to bottom.
| Less tracking on the internet would make me feel better.
| "Bad" content on a site will corrupt or ruin its ability
| to function.
|
| I just (ironically?) hate crusaders, and the type of
| people who proclaim (as wikipedia does) that they're
| Doing Their Best(tm) to adhere to their stated
| goal(pseudo-anon editing with IP based tracking) while
| doing something that undercuts that goal for millions
| (blanket IP bans).
|
| I guess my ultimate complaint is that the continued mercy
| of the inability of the human mind to correlate all of
| its contents causes people to do things antithetical to
| what they say they want. That people refuse to live in
| nuance and continue to pretend they hold themselves to a
| higher standard that they frequently do not when pressed
| with any sort of complication.
|
| I understand we live in a society and in order for it to
| function there are tradeoffs, and I'm not one of these
| "free speech has been completely killed by cancel
| culture" nutjobs, but I hate when people speak out of
| both sides of their mouth which is what Wikipedia does
| (IMO) when it comes to their moderation/contributor
| policy. Abolishing anon editing puts everyone on a level
| playing field (you want to contribute, you have to sign
| up).
|
| Am I being Just or just Vindictive? IDK, and I'll admit
| that's open to interpretation. It just feels more fair to
| me to throw your hands up and admit that vandals are why
| we can't have nice things than to say APR users are
| collectively lesser than AT&T users. One feels
| defensibly, the other feels like logical contortion.
| hombre_fatal wrote:
| They can thank abusers for that.
|
| But note that requiring authentication to edit doesn't
| necessarily change anything about abuse, yet this thread
| seems to suggest that people think it does.
|
| Just means you need to farm a POST /register. You can
| attach a one time use account to every abusive edit and
| it's no big deal.
| Kim_Bruning wrote:
| I'll let Aaron Swartz explain.
|
| http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/whowriteswikipedia
|
| It turns out the long tail of anonymous editors is actually a
| force to be reckoned with. Or was at the time of writing, at
| least!
| currysausage wrote:
| While we're talking about Private Relay: with it enabled (on an
| iPhone), Google won't show me search suggestions. Both google.com
| and Safari's address/search bar are affected. It's a small
| feature, but a feature that I rely on often, so it's quite the
| dealbreaker for me.
| sparqlittlestar wrote:
| h2odragon wrote:
| mardifoufs wrote:
| I don't think you realize the amount of vandalism that used to
| occur before wider IP range bans were put in place. It was just
| insane, and even now it is sometimes still hard to manage.
| moate wrote:
| Between this and the T-Mobile IP ban, why not just say "Only
| registered users can edit pages" and be done with it? When
| you're blocking millions from unregistered editing, just go
| full tilt.
| drivebycomment wrote:
| Because blocking millions out of billions can still be a
| reasonable tradeoff, if majority of abuse comes from those
| millions.
| moate wrote:
| My whole point is "reasonable" is an opinion, and really
| easy to justify when you're not part of the out-group. The
| stakes on this (who can edit one website that represents
| the de-facto knowledge on the internet) are either very
| high or very low depending on who you ask. The idea that
| people want to protect that makes sense.
|
| What I feel does not make sense is pretending that you're
| "open" when you stifle millions of (innocent) people. To
| show the escalation, there are people who would gladly
| round up millions out of billions to throw in jail or
| murder for the sake of the safety of the rest of the group.
| And it would be reasonable to them because it provides the
| billions with safety. But I think its extremely reasonable
| for the millions (and in particular the innocent among
| them) to complain that "this isn't really the open, free,
| democratic society you promised and maybe you should admit
| that at this point".
|
| TL;dr- Let's stop pretending Wikipedia is open to all and
| isn't about Wikipedians controlling Wikipedia.
| danielktdoranie wrote:
| Clearly Wikipedia doesn't need my annual donation anymore.
| SheinhardtWigCo wrote:
| Indeed they don't:
| https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/foundation/1/1e/Wikim...
| mfer wrote:
| There are malicious editors out there. For example, someone
| repeatedly edited the Kubernetes page on Wikipedia to make some
| changes that were not true and contradicted by the reference that
| was used. This is just one example.
|
| There is a very real problem, even in technical circles, of wrong
| information being put on there.
|
| In this example, it was always by an anonymous account.
|
| How does the Wikimedia foundation attempt to handle this? I'm not
| suggesting I have ideas on what to do. But, this is a real
| debatable question they have to wrestle with.
| KennyBlanken wrote:
| Wikipedia is dominated not by the truth, but by two things:
|
| - people who treat articles like their own fiefdoms and have
| obsessively memorized every sentence of policy and can drown an
| edit they don't like with subjective assertions that an edit
| violates a particular policy
|
| - no-life basement neckbeards who do thousands and thousands of
| edits on subjects they couldn't possibly have knowledge or
| experience on and respond instantly to edits to "their" pages
|
| Further, in disputes, it essentially comes down to who the rest
| of the community likes more. The ultimate ad hominem is that
| some random IP address vs an established 'wikipedian', even if
| the 'wikipedian' is full of shit? The wikipedian wins.
|
| The page for AA is a great example. There's a dude who is
| completely unhinged and suppresses any negative information
| about AA, such as the problems with abuse, predation, and
| sexual assault. Or studies showing poor efficacy compared to
| science-based treatment.
|
| I posted a HN comment as such and was more than a little
| surprised to come across a reply made barely a few hours later,
| apparently from that dude, accusing me of being someone he'd
| had a tiff with on wikipedia.
|
| You look at the edit history and his behavior is clearly
| gatekeeping and enforcing a particular viewpoint. Yet,
| curiously, he's never been subject to any censure?
| oceanplexian wrote:
| Wikipedia was awesome some time before 2015/2016.
|
| Look up anything even mildly controversial, e.g Gender,
| Marxism, Capitalism, Globalism, Election Laws, Freedom of
| Speech, Racism, and then compare 10 years ago to today, using
| archive.org or by looking at edit history. It feels like a
| parallel universe, as if history was totally re-written.
| collegeburner wrote:
| 100% this, same as you get with reddit moderators and those
| types of people. There are a lot of people there with agendas
| who use "the rules" to kill any opinions they don't like.
| uuyi wrote:
| Same as if you have above 500 karma here and someone
| criticised Microsoft legitimately after Nadella arrived on
| the scene...
|
| I regularly throw accounts out in disgust at the political
| voting.
| xoa wrote:
| > _How does the Wikimedia foundation attempt to handle this?_
|
| Add a time cost to accounts that is independent from IP or real
| identity. I gave a suggestion to factoring the product of
| primes, basically breaking crypto with far fewer bits then
| would ever be used in a real system to tune to time to a
| desired target. Another option would be to require a security
| key for anonymous editing of hot articles then ban the key if
| needed, which would essentially be a fairly anonymous proxy for
| money. Now attackers need to spend a key each ban. Although
| unlike just doing it purely for Wikipedia that might result in
| a market of "used, banned" keys which isn't really great. But
| they shouldn't do it via IP, they absolutely could do better.
| NovemberWhiskey wrote:
| Is the premise over at Wikipedia still that an IP address
| meaningfully identifies a single editor? I think that ship
| sailed.
| VWWHFSfQ wrote:
| > an IP address meaningfully identifies a single editor
|
| I'm fairly certain that the GDPR believes an IP address is PII
| and imposes a bunch of fairly onerous restrictions on how
| network administrators are able to log and analyze them. So it
| doesn't seem like that ship has sailed at all. If anything it's
| been reinforced by actual law that it _does_ meaningfully
| identify someone.
| NovemberWhiskey wrote:
| The GDPR also protects your name that way too, despite the
| fact that it might actually identify a multitude of different
| people (like if you're called John Smith). It does so on the
| basis that it _may_ under some circumstances be sufficient to
| identify you personally; same for IP address.
|
| It is very seldom in my experience the case that legislation
| tells us anything at all about what is true about technology.
| fennecfoxen wrote:
| "I cannot stress this enough, and I think it's important to
| frame this debate correctly when it comes to discussing these
| blocks. I have made somewhere around 1200 rangeblocks of
| webhosting providers in the last 5 weeks or so. Not one of them
| was targeted at a user." -- [[User:Blablubbs]] in linked page
|
| Wikipedia doesn't block to punish individuals. It blocks to
| protect itself. There are plenty of ways around most blocks,
| like simply creating an account.
| jhugo wrote:
| AFAIK their policy is to block IPs that "obscure individual
| users". Another commenter quoted:
|
| > Communities typically block edits from IP addresses that
| obscure individual users.
|
| Surely they are aware that this is basically all IPs
| nowadays...?
|
| If that's genuinely the policy then it should be almost
| equivalent to just requiring an account for all edits, so why
| not just do that?
| m-p-3 wrote:
| > AFAIK their policy is to block IPs that "obscure
| individual users". Another commenter quoted:
|
| > > Communities typically block edits from IP addresses
| that obscure individual users.
|
| > Surely they are aware that this is basically all IPs
| nowadays...?
|
| > If that's genuinely the policy then it should be almost
| equivalent to just requiring an account for all edits, so
| why not just do that?
|
| With the shortage of IPv4 addresses and the lack of
| progression to IPv6 from many ISPs, we're likely going to
| see users unable to anonymously edit if they start blocking
| those behind a CGNAT.
| gnfargbl wrote:
| > Surely they are aware that this is basically all IPs
| nowadays...?
|
| There are indeed many classes of IP address which multiplex
| large numbers of users (mobile network exits, VPN exits,
| ISPs with CGNAT, some corporate web filtering systems,
| shared public wifi, tor, satellite ground station exits,
| residential proxies, ...).
|
| However, claiming that "basically all" IPs are multiplexed
| is definitely wrong. A home or small office broadband line
| typically gets a dynamic-but-ephemerally-unique IP, same as
| it always did.
|
| The effect of IPv6 on this isn't totally clear to me yet.
| If anything, as IPv6 deployment among ISPs increases, the
| trend seems to be for less multiplexing and not more.
| jrockway wrote:
| Is that true? I've worked at two ISPs and we never made
| an effort to make the IPs ephemeral. (OK, at the second
| ISP we didn't even have DHCP servers. We made everyone
| set up every device on their own!)
|
| My current home broadband setup gives me the same IP
| address for months at a time, across router reboots.
| Advertisers love it, I'm sure.
| gnfargbl wrote:
| That's a great point and very fairly made. For my own ISP
| (BT in the UK), I get a new IP on each router reboot. I
| understand that for some others like Virgin, the IP is
| very stable over long periods.
| naoqj wrote:
| For most ISPs making IPs ephemeral is the only solution
| to the scarcity of IP addresses. You don't want IPs
| allocated to people who have turned off their routers.
| jhugo wrote:
| > However, claiming that "basically all" IPs are
| multiplexed is definitely wrong. A home or small office
| broadband line typically gets a dynamic-but-ephemerally-
| unique IP, same as it always did.
|
| IPs assigned to homes and small offices are still
| multiplexed. It's just a case of magnitude. (In other
| words, it's rare for a home or small office to contain
| just a single person.)
|
| The policy as stated makes no sense, if they intend for
| it to be something like "more than 5 people per IP" they
| should just say so.
|
| > The effect of IPv6 on this isn't totally clear to me
| yet. If anything, as IPv6 deployment among ISPs
| increases, the trend seems to be for less multiplexing
| and not more.
|
| FWIW, every ISP I've used in the last ~10 years has
| delegated me an IPv6 prefix, resulting in each device in
| the network getting a unique IPv6 address. I've never
| seen any kind of NAT used in the wild for residential
| IPv6.
| gnfargbl wrote:
| You're absolutely correct. But: Wikipedia aren't trying
| to ban all multiplexed IPs. Instead, they're seeking to
| ban the IPs that bad actors disproportionately use -- and
| those are the _heavily_ multiplexed ones.
|
| It's kind of the internet equivalent of keeping drug
| dealers out of your club by banning anyone who lives in a
| poor area. A lazy (and likely discriminatory) policy, but
| a simple one, and effective.
| NovemberWhiskey wrote:
| I find this all vaguely baffling; I'm by no means a WP
| expert. If they're not targeted at users, what are they
| targeted at? Bots?
| TurningCanadian wrote:
| The tragedy of the commons that happens when you can't
| establish the reputation of your visitors because regular
| users are indistinguishable from malicious actors when
| signals like IPs are intentionally obscured.
| bdamm wrote:
| That's only because they're using weak authentication. If
| they required users to use something like WebAuthn, the
| bot problems would be significantly easier to deal with.
| drivebycomment wrote:
| True, but that would significantly increase the barrier
| for contributions, especially at the long tail. As
| always, it's a trade-off, not a black-or-white situation.
| mimsee wrote:
| How come? Last I checked there was a devtool to create
| virtual authenticators. Unless there's a way for
| wikipedia to permit only certain vendors like Yubico,
| akin to browsers trusting certain CAs, I don't see how
| one couldn't make a bot register thousands of accounts
| with virtual authenticators.
| bdamm wrote:
| Yes, assertion for manufacturing source is part of
| WebAuthn.
| NovemberWhiskey wrote:
| The reasoning here just seems perverse. WP wants to allow
| contributions by anonymous users, which seems noble. But
| it also realizes that it needs to be able to block some
| people from anonymous contribution "to protect itself".
|
| The implementation of the blocking mechanism is IP
| addresses/ranges, which is imprecise (to say the least).
| But now you have to worry about abusive users bypassing
| your technical control by obscuring their IP addresses.
| So you block all IP ranges that implement e.g. CGNAT,
| VPNs, 464XLAT.
|
| So now you're mass-blocking access to millions of people
| who have never shown any inkling of malicious intent due
| to rational technology choices by their service providers
| or due to a reasonable desire to protect their personal
| privacy.
|
| If you're OK with blocking users in such an entirely
| capricious and arbitrary way, why not just insist on
| registration?
| dtech wrote:
| Not blocking anything is infeasible due to abuse,
| requiring registration is effectively blocking anonymous
| editing access for everyone. If you want anonymous
| editing, providing it to some is strictly better than
| providing it to none.
|
| Your argument is as flawed as saying we shouldn't have
| email because spammers must be blocked.
| moate wrote:
| >>If you want anonymous editing, providing it to some is
| strictly better than providing it to none.
|
| Objectively: Not always. You're creating a tiered
| society. The argument is saying "Why do some people
| deserve freedom but not others?" It's great if you're
| part of the in-group, but exceedingly unjust if you're
| non-vandal bycatch due to the blanket bans. You can't
| have _some_ democracy, it 's all or none.
|
| I'm unable to anonymously edit by default because I have
| T-mobile for my phone and internet services and there is
| a blanket ban on T-mobile IPs. This is the 3rd largest
| telcom in the US with about 108 million users. I'm going
| to assume that less than 1/10th of them are Wikipedia
| vandals, but a blanket ban has been put in place.
|
| Explain how it's "good" that a random AT&T user can make
| an edit, but I (or another random T-mobile user) can't?
| Follow up, explain why making everyone who wants to edit
| register an account is a net bad if it's the only choice
| for millions of people?
|
| *edited for typos
| Kim_Bruning wrote:
| It is good that a random AT&T user can edit anonymously.
| It is bad that you can't. The "but" clause is a trap. You
| should be able to edit anonymously too.
|
| If trends continue, less people will be able to edit
| anonymously. This trend needs to be reversed so that as
| many people as possible can edit anonymously.
| NovemberWhiskey wrote:
| Actually: if your premise is that you're an open access
| facility, then having arbitrary treatment of different
| users is a really excellent way of undermining that
| premise.
|
| For example, as was pointed out elsewhere on this
| discussion, having blocking controls that tend to create
| a higher bar for people without home internet access
| means you're discriminating against groups that can only
| afford a personal mobile device, or only have internet
| access at a library, or come from a particular national
| origin, etc.
|
| If you care about anonymous editing, creating
| underclasses that cannot have it seems an unlikely way to
| further your mission. It's effectively a form of red-
| lining.
|
| I don't understand what your email analogy is getting at,
| so I'm going to leave that alone.
| em-bee wrote:
| yes, but it is way to broad. hosting service ranges are
| blocked even though individual servers have static IPs. it is
| possible to get an IP unblocked, but then someone else blocks
| another range with that IP again. it's impossible to keep up.
|
| the problem with accounts is that the editing history is
| public, making it impossible to keep even a pseudo-anonymous
| identity because everyone would know who i am based on what i
| edit.
|
| didn't jimmy wales himself say that the editing and viewing
| history is sensitive personal data?
|
| i don't mind wikipedia itself knowing my identity, just like
| i don't mind hackernews admins knowing who i am, but i'd like
| wikipedia to help me keep my identity hidden from the public.
| nonameiguess wrote:
| Not gonna speak to why they're blocking Apple Private Relay,
| but clearly, no, they're not implying that an IP uniquely
| identifies an individual. In some cases, it can identify an
| organization, though. One of my good friends worked for
| Wikipedia a while back, and he claims one of the bigger
| problems they had was Congressional staffers edit-warring on
| pages, so they blocked the IP range of US Congressional
| offices. They weren't trying to target a single staff. They
| were targeting all of them.
| JohnTHaller wrote:
| The EU legally recognizes IP addresses as personally
| identifiable information.
| hombre_fatal wrote:
| It's more that some IP ranges give you disproportional amounts
| of abuse.
| marginalia_nu wrote:
| In my experience it's extremely effective to filter IP blocks
| where a lot of trouble seems to come from. Services that don't
| scrutinize their customers very carefully tend to accumulate
| questionable customers.
| asdfasgasdgasdg wrote:
| Abuse-mitigation policies don't always have to be perfect. They
| just have to have a >1 benefit-to-cost ratio.
| duxup wrote:
| It's the worst, and sometimes also the best / most effective
| tool available.
| mistrial9 wrote:
| Wikipedia appears to be living proof that "no good deed goes
| unpunished" today.. coincidentally on Good Friday in this part of
| the world
| diebeforei485 wrote:
| Just require an account for edits, blocking IP addresses is very
| strange.
| TameAntelope wrote:
| I'm finding it a bit hard to follow the structure of this
| document so forgive me if this is what's being discussed, but
| wouldn't it make the most sense to block _Anonymous_ editing from
| Apple Private Relay IP ranges? Once signed in, there is again a
| way to track the editor, and a way to deal with bad actors.
| fennecfoxen wrote:
| Linked page: "We are looking for answers to the following
| questions: Are you seeing problems related to the current
| iCloud Private Relay global blocks [1] on your wiki? Do you
| think that it's likely that good-faith editors will be affected
| by blocks? While we do not know for sure, we think that this
| situation may grow over the next couple of years. It is
| possible that other browsers, such as Chrome and Firefox, could
| follow a similar pattern and also restrict access to IP
| addresses. If this happens, it will be a major change in how
| the internet works. What do you think, in what ways would this
| change affect the wikis?"
|
| [1] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Global_blocks
|
| "Global blocks are technical actions performed to prevent an IP
| address or range of IP addresses from editing all Wikimedia
| wikis, for a fixed period of time or indefinitely. Global
| blocks disable account creation from the blocked IP by default,
| and can also prevent editing while logged in to an account."
| brigandish wrote:
| I'm regularly blocked from editing because I'm on a VPN. I
| don't get it, as long as I'm logged in then what's the problem?
| I'd love to know.
| horsawlarway wrote:
| My strong suspicion is that the blocking is done at a
| different layer.
|
| Much easier to simply block posts/puts to certain paths from
| ip ranges in the ingress layer, before they ever reach the
| application and are authenticated.
| kemayo wrote:
| Nah, the blocks happen inside mediawiki. There's nothing
| technically stopping it from exempting logged in users,
| just a policy choice.
|
| Basically: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Help:Range_blocks
| kemayo wrote:
| For what it's worth, there's a policy for requesting an
| exemption to an IP block:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:IP_block_exemption
| fmajid wrote:
| I've tried, it's next to impossible to get an exception, at
| least for English-language Wikipedia.
| josephcsible wrote:
| That doesn't work because Wikipedia doesn't store your IP
| forever if you have an account. If they allowed what you
| described, then you could make a bunch of accounts with your
| real IP, wait 90 days for the IP you made it from to be
| forgotten, then vandalize with them all over VPNs, and they
| couldn't do anything about it other than reactively blocking
| each account individually.
| brigandish wrote:
| Then grade accounts by more than one metric. I've my
| account for _years_ and made plenty of edits but it 's
| treated like some newbie account that may be a bot? Because
| I value my privacy?
|
| I use Britannica for anything that isn't celebrity/pop
| culture based now, I thought Wikipedia had killed off
| "proper" dictionaries but they're going in reverse. I enjoy
| the irony of that.
| [deleted]
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| I assume the website owner intends to want to show ads or
| track me for marketing or other data harvesting purchases
| if they try to do further verification than password +
| 2FA code. They are forcing CAPTCHAs because they want to
| make it inconvenient enough such that I disable content
| blockers on their website.
| oefrha wrote:
| My decade-old account with thousands of edits and zero
| vandalization still get hard-blocked behind VPN. I once
| checked out the exemption process but felt discouraged to
| make a request (can't remember why now). It's pretty
| stupid.
| TameAntelope wrote:
| > other than reactively blocking each account individually.
|
| That doesn't seem all that unviable, at least specifically
| for Apple Private Relay IP ranges, is my point.
| sitic wrote:
| Hard IP bans are the exception and used when a lot of sock
| puppets are involved operating from the same IP range. Soft
| IP blocks don't prevent logged in users from editing. On
| enwiki you can try to get a 12-month IP block exemption:
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:IP_block_exemption
| kemayo wrote:
| The link is to the discussion page for some reason, which is a
| lot harder to follow. The actual article page for this one has
| a whole summary of the situation:
| https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Apple_iCloud_Private_Relay
| [deleted]
| sammy2244 wrote:
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