11 ms·

Chinese originated spam and abuse is so outrageously widespread, I don’t understand why there isn’t a conversation going on about cutting them off from the wide

by toxik 5y ago

Chinese originated spam and abuse is so outrageously widespread, I don’t understand why there isn’t a conversation going on about cutting them off from the wider internet. They blocked most of it anyway.

wyager 5y ago
I would rather have a global network with marginally more spam than a regional network with marginally less.
- systemvoltage 5y ago
  I believe in reciprocity. China has blocked a lot of the western traffic. So, the west should block China. If they open up, we should welcome them with open arms. Similar spirit as some open source licenses - reciprocity creates fairness and increases collaboration, prevents hawks in a population of doves and improves stability. We are already doing this with trade. The amount of leeway and free lunch China has gotten from the west is insane. I don’t blame China, I blame the west and the rest of the world for not preventing it. Asymmetrical policies are often exploited by capitalism and governments have been caught off guard. I’m not an Anti-China lunatic. It’s just common sense.
  - yarcob 5y ago
    I really don't think blocks and embargoes are going to help anyone. They just suck for all the affected people, but I don't think they are very effective at convincing foreign governments to open up.
    - systemvoltage 5y ago
      We're talking about blocking IPs originating from China. How would that hurt the affected people outside of China? In regards to trade war, HN has discussed this ad-nauseum, I think we should restrict the discussion to internet traffic even though I brought it up as an analogy about asymmetric response from the west in general: https://hn.algolia.com/?q=trade+war https://hn.algolia.com/?q=trade+war
      - yarcob 5y ago
        > We're talking about blocking IPs originating from China. How would that hurt the affected people outside of China? Most of the affected people would obviously be inside China.
  - dvfjsdhgfv 5y ago
    The lives of people in China trying to use Internet services outside are already miserable; let's not make it worse and alienate others. We should treat them just like the rest: if extensive malicious traffic arrives, we drop it, but we don't ban the entire country.
    - toxik 5y ago
      The internet is built on institutional trust. You can’t have a properly functioning network when a sizable part is just not giving a shit about its users abusing your users. It very much echoes the problems of intellectual property theft in China.
      - crumbshot 5y ago
        This supposed 'intellectual property theft' is mostly just reverse engineering of technology. It's not really a problem anyway. If some capitalists in the US and Europe don't get to skim off a slice of profit from another country's manufacturing output, then so what?
      - wyager 5y ago
        > The internet is built on institutional trust. No it’s not. What is this even supposed to mean?
        posguy 5y ago
        Autonomous system (AS) operators should not act in bad faith towards other AS networks they peer with. BGP hijacking is an example of abuse of this institutional trust, same for DNS hijacking. If this trust is repeatedly broken, peering networks may be forced to depeer the AS as a result, like what happened to McColo when they were depeered.
  - snowwrestler 5y ago
    The Chinese government operates their Internet blocks (the “Great Firewall”). But overwhelmingly, it is the Chinese people who are trying to access information on the public Internet. Blocking the entire country will do little to hurt the government (who can employ state resources to get whatever information they want) and do quite a bit more to harm the Chinese people by reducing whatever level of information independence they still have. If there is going to be significant change in China, it will have to come from the Chinese people. Cutting them off from the Internet vindictively does not advance that goal. There are specific people in China doing specific bad things with specific computing resources. It would be far better for the U.S. government to dedicate more resources to finding and partnering with orgs and projects (like icanhazip or Cloudflare) to find the info they need to apply targeted mitigations. “China does it, so we should do it too” only makes sense as a strategy if our goal is to become exactly like China is today. I don’t think that should be our goal.
    - systemvoltage 5y ago
      > “China does it, so we should do it too” only makes sense as a strategy if our goal is to become exactly like China is today. I don’t think that should be our goal. I very strongly disagree. An eye for an eye is exactly what needs to be done and should have been done from the beginning. Unfortunately, it is too late. 1989 massacre should have been condemned more solidly and trade restrictions should have been placed in the 90's. The bet that western alliances made is that China would open up in the 2000s leading into 2010s. That has gone horribly wrong. The west is finally waking up: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inter-Parliamentary_Alliance_on_China https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inter-Parliamentary_Alliance_o...
  - wyager 5y ago
    I’m very glad that my government is probably not allowed to prevent me from accessing content from China. That’s why I live here and not in China.
    - Ir0nMan 5y ago
      To be fair, I think OP's suggestion was more like blocking "incoming" traffic from China.
      - TchoBeer 5y ago
        I don't see how that's any different than what GP was talking about
  - yesenadam 5y ago
    > I believe in reciprocity. China has blocked a lot of the western traffic. So, the west should block China. If they open up, we should welcome them with open arms. This sounds like a couple of people I've met, who have a philosophy of "treating people the way they treat me". And what if the other person/side also "believes in reciprocity", what happens then? This seems to rely on other people being nice first, and then always treating them how they treated you, imitating their behaviour, like Tit-for-tat[0]—except Tit-for-tat begins by being nice. It's not easy to put my finger on what seems fishy about that strategy, but it doesn't at all seem the easy solution to being fair and just (or whatever word you most prefer here) its proponents seem to think it is. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tit_for_tat https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tit_for_tat (See particularly "Problems" and the next section)
    - systemvoltage 5y ago
      One can have a tit-for-tat policies on a geopolitical scale but also excercise forgiveness in most situations in life. I think Tit-for-tat is a terrible strategy on the whole and agree with your philosophical stance - I hope you didn't mean it on the personal level.
      - yesenadam 5y ago
        Sorry—you hope I didn't mean what on the personal level?
        systemvoltage 5y ago
        Apologies, I was hoping you didn't mean to judge my personal character from a single data point on China's policy. I think I am pretty forgiving and excercise tolerance because I know when these things are difficult is exactly when it matters the most. Tolerance is the price we pay for freedom and liberty.
        yesenadam 5y ago
        Hehe no, sorry to give you that impression. Thanks for explaining!
- jjeaff 5y ago
  I don't think every country in the world minus one or two would be "regional".
- kortilla 5y ago
  This false dichotomy is impressive. A single country accounting for for 50+% sets up the choice to be, “a global network with a lot less spam and a regional island with a lot of spam” vs “a global network with a ton of spam barely connected to a regional network that much of the spam originates from”.
  - npteljes 5y ago
    That "single country" is of 1.4B people.
    - sumedh 5y ago
      Why does that matter?
      - alach11 5y ago
        Calling China "a single country" minimizes the fact that it contains 18% of the world's people. It's hard to call something a "global network" if it leaves out that much of the world.
        sumedh 5y ago
        What is your definition of global then? Why isnt 82% of the worlds's people global?
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
croes 5y ago
Maybe that is the plan, that we cut them off, so they don't have to
jmartrican 5y ago
The other trending article on HN today is about Chinese fishing boats abusing the world's oceans. Its ok, we'll learn to get used to it.
- swinglock 5y ago
  Wouldn't want to be rude.
- corndoge 5y ago
  Any criticism of China can be construed as being pro-US and we can't have that. Criticism of Chinese traditional medicine, which is a forcing function for the endangering and extinction of species across the globe, is also unacceptable since criticism of any aspect of a culture is just racism (unless it's the one culture that's okay to criticize). As long as the truth doesn't match what the preferred narrative is we'll continue to suffer the consequences, which is true of so many things beyond just attitudes towards China.
  - mwcampbell 5y ago
    > the one culture that's okay to criticize That would be one's own culture, whichever one that is.
  - xwolfi 5y ago
    Many of us in China are absolutely saying Chinese Traditional Medicine is garbage and there s no "western medicine", just medicine. It's not racist in China to say the truth, why is it where you are ? You probably live in an oppressive political regime with a biparty dictating what you can think ? :P
    - peteretep 5y ago
      > It's not racist in China to say the truth mmm, I have had a number of Chinese people explain to me the “truth” about people of various races over the years
    - yourapostasy 5y ago
egypturnash 5y ago
China currently makes some absurdly large percentage of the world's consumer goods, and the discussions about producing them are probably being had over the internet. Cut them off of the internet and we have to rebuild manufacturing capacity everywhere else. Which might not be a bad thing overall, but it's sure not gonna make any transnational corporation's bottom line happy over the next few quarters, so they'll be waving a lot of money at politicians to make this not happen.
- ALittleLight 5y ago
  China is an oppressive authoritarian state currently engaged in ethnic cleansing. How is enabling them indefinitely an option?
  - julianlam 5y ago
    Because doing so would essentially push China towards a China-only internet, which they're already halfway towards. The benefits of gobalization and the spread of democracy (or even just alternative governance models) via exposure to other cultures cannot be understated
    - theli0nheart 5y ago
      Not a strong reason. I would be shocked if the average Internet user has heard of any of the top ten most visited websites in China. Their entire infrastructure, from the technological layer to the bureaucratic layer, has ensured that the average Chinese Internet user knows very little about the outside world that hasn’t been pre-vetted or filtered out completely by the GFW.
      - xwolfi 5y ago
        Im in China and met a Xinhua journalist once. At day she would edit propaganda stories that she knew were complete horseshit, at night her and her colleagues would go to their boss watch netflix together because he had a working VPN. Even if just one port is left open, people will be curious enough to find it and use it. Chinese people are humans too :D
jedberg 5y ago
It's not even a new trend either. Back in 2003 when I worked at eBay and PayPal doing security, the bulk of the attempts came from China and Romania (Romania at the time had one ISP for the whole country that was fast but didn't care about abuse at all).
mwcampbell 5y ago
It stands to reason that an especially large volume of abuse will originate from the most populous country in the world. I don't think that's a reason to cut them off from the global Internet. If it's true that their government is already oppressing their own people (I don't know what's truth and what's propaganda), then the rest of us shouldn't make it worse for those people by cutting off whatever outside connections they manage to have. Also, I'm generally bothered by comments like this one that stir up the general human tendency toward xenophobia. We should be fighting that tendency within ourselves, not fighting the out group. Whichever group of people we want to demonize, we should remember that they're people just like us. We shouldn't punish the majority of them for what a minority are doing to us.
- toxik 5y ago
  They are not the most connected country, but a long shot. Why isn’t India no. 2 by your logic? Stop apologizing for unacceptable behavior from a country that openly purports to become “the superpower of the world”.
  - mwcampbell 5y ago
    I'm not apologizing for anyone's bad behavior; I just don't want us to escalate an already tense situation. "The only winning move is not to play", right?
    - toxik 5y ago
      No, you can’t let somebody poke you with a stick and go “the only winning move is not to play” and pretend like it’s raining.
  - xwolfi 5y ago
    But that's fair they become it. After all they're 20% of humanity...
  - rakoo 5y ago
    Yes, they are the most connected country in number of users (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_number_of_Internet_users https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_number_of...) and that's what matters: the more users there are, the more malicious activity there will be
liveoneggs 5y ago
15+ or so years ago I worked in the NOC of the 3rd or so largest ISP in the US and a random network engineer did this one evening. We got a big influx of customers complaining about email not working to their family, etc, until I finally figured it out. That network guy (classic long hair "security" guy) was a lazy asshole for doing it then and the internet needs to have the technology to deal with bad actors beyond AS/geo-level blocking now.

by toxik 5y ago

wyager 5y ago

I would rather have a global network with marginally more spam than a regional network with marginally less.

systemvoltage 5y ago
I believe in reciprocity. China has blocked a lot of the western traffic. So, the west should block China. If they open up, we should welcome them with open arms. Similar spirit as some open source licenses - reciprocity creates fairness and increases collaboration, prevents hawks in a population of doves and improves stability. We are already doing this with trade. The amount of leeway and free lunch China has gotten from the west is insane. I don’t blame China, I blame the west and the rest of the world for not preventing it. Asymmetrical policies are often exploited by capitalism and governments have been caught off guard. I’m not an Anti-China lunatic. It’s just common sense.
- yarcob 5y ago
  I really don't think blocks and embargoes are going to help anyone. They just suck for all the affected people, but I don't think they are very effective at convincing foreign governments to open up.
  - systemvoltage 5y ago
    We're talking about blocking IPs originating from China. How would that hurt the affected people outside of China? In regards to trade war, HN has discussed this ad-nauseum, I think we should restrict the discussion to internet traffic even though I brought it up as an analogy about asymmetric response from the west in general: https://hn.algolia.com/?q=trade+war https://hn.algolia.com/?q=trade+war
    - yarcob 5y ago
      > We're talking about blocking IPs originating from China. How would that hurt the affected people outside of China? Most of the affected people would obviously be inside China.
- dvfjsdhgfv 5y ago
  The lives of people in China trying to use Internet services outside are already miserable; let's not make it worse and alienate others. We should treat them just like the rest: if extensive malicious traffic arrives, we drop it, but we don't ban the entire country.
  - toxik 5y ago
    The internet is built on institutional trust. You can’t have a properly functioning network when a sizable part is just not giving a shit about its users abusing your users. It very much echoes the problems of intellectual property theft in China.
    - crumbshot 5y ago
      This supposed 'intellectual property theft' is mostly just reverse engineering of technology. It's not really a problem anyway. If some capitalists in the US and Europe don't get to skim off a slice of profit from another country's manufacturing output, then so what?
    - wyager 5y ago
      > The internet is built on institutional trust. No it’s not. What is this even supposed to mean?
      - posguy 5y ago
        Autonomous system (AS) operators should not act in bad faith towards other AS networks they peer with. BGP hijacking is an example of abuse of this institutional trust, same for DNS hijacking. If this trust is repeatedly broken, peering networks may be forced to depeer the AS as a result, like what happened to McColo when they were depeered.
- snowwrestler 5y ago
  The Chinese government operates their Internet blocks (the “Great Firewall”). But overwhelmingly, it is the Chinese people who are trying to access information on the public Internet. Blocking the entire country will do little to hurt the government (who can employ state resources to get whatever information they want) and do quite a bit more to harm the Chinese people by reducing whatever level of information independence they still have. If there is going to be significant change in China, it will have to come from the Chinese people. Cutting them off from the Internet vindictively does not advance that goal. There are specific people in China doing specific bad things with specific computing resources. It would be far better for the U.S. government to dedicate more resources to finding and partnering with orgs and projects (like icanhazip or Cloudflare) to find the info they need to apply targeted mitigations. “China does it, so we should do it too” only makes sense as a strategy if our goal is to become exactly like China is today. I don’t think that should be our goal.
  - systemvoltage 5y ago
    > “China does it, so we should do it too” only makes sense as a strategy if our goal is to become exactly like China is today. I don’t think that should be our goal. I very strongly disagree. An eye for an eye is exactly what needs to be done and should have been done from the beginning. Unfortunately, it is too late. 1989 massacre should have been condemned more solidly and trade restrictions should have been placed in the 90's. The bet that western alliances made is that China would open up in the 2000s leading into 2010s. That has gone horribly wrong. The west is finally waking up: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inter-Parliamentary_Alliance_on_China https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inter-Parliamentary_Alliance_o...
- wyager 5y ago
  I’m very glad that my government is probably not allowed to prevent me from accessing content from China. That’s why I live here and not in China.
  - Ir0nMan 5y ago
    To be fair, I think OP's suggestion was more like blocking "incoming" traffic from China.
    - TchoBeer 5y ago
      I don't see how that's any different than what GP was talking about
- yesenadam 5y ago
  > I believe in reciprocity. China has blocked a lot of the western traffic. So, the west should block China. If they open up, we should welcome them with open arms. This sounds like a couple of people I've met, who have a philosophy of "treating people the way they treat me". And what if the other person/side also "believes in reciprocity", what happens then? This seems to rely on other people being nice first, and then always treating them how they treated you, imitating their behaviour, like Tit-for-tat[0]—except Tit-for-tat begins by being nice. It's not easy to put my finger on what seems fishy about that strategy, but it doesn't at all seem the easy solution to being fair and just (or whatever word you most prefer here) its proponents seem to think it is. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tit_for_tat https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tit_for_tat (See particularly "Problems" and the next section)
  - systemvoltage 5y ago
    One can have a tit-for-tat policies on a geopolitical scale but also excercise forgiveness in most situations in life. I think Tit-for-tat is a terrible strategy on the whole and agree with your philosophical stance - I hope you didn't mean it on the personal level.
    - yesenadam 5y ago
      Sorry—you hope I didn't mean what on the personal level?
      - systemvoltage 5y ago
        Apologies, I was hoping you didn't mean to judge my personal character from a single data point on China's policy. I think I am pretty forgiving and excercise tolerance because I know when these things are difficult is exactly when it matters the most. Tolerance is the price we pay for freedom and liberty.
        yesenadam 5y ago
        Hehe no, sorry to give you that impression. Thanks for explaining!
jjeaff 5y ago
I don't think every country in the world minus one or two would be "regional".
kortilla 5y ago
This false dichotomy is impressive. A single country accounting for for 50+% sets up the choice to be, “a global network with a lot less spam and a regional island with a lot of spam” vs “a global network with a ton of spam barely connected to a regional network that much of the spam originates from”.
- npteljes 5y ago
  That "single country" is of 1.4B people.
  - sumedh 5y ago
    Why does that matter?
    - alach11 5y ago
      Calling China "a single country" minimizes the fact that it contains 18% of the world's people. It's hard to call something a "global network" if it leaves out that much of the world.
      - sumedh 5y ago
        What is your definition of global then? Why isnt 82% of the worlds's people global?

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

croes 5y ago

Maybe that is the plan, that we cut them off, so they don't have to

jmartrican 5y ago

The other trending article on HN today is about Chinese fishing boats abusing the world's oceans. Its ok, we'll learn to get used to it.

swinglock 5y ago
Wouldn't want to be rude.
corndoge 5y ago
Any criticism of China can be construed as being pro-US and we can't have that. Criticism of Chinese traditional medicine, which is a forcing function for the endangering and extinction of species across the globe, is also unacceptable since criticism of any aspect of a culture is just racism (unless it's the one culture that's okay to criticize). As long as the truth doesn't match what the preferred narrative is we'll continue to suffer the consequences, which is true of so many things beyond just attitudes towards China.
- mwcampbell 5y ago
  > the one culture that's okay to criticize That would be one's own culture, whichever one that is.
- xwolfi 5y ago
  Many of us in China are absolutely saying Chinese Traditional Medicine is garbage and there s no "western medicine", just medicine. It's not racist in China to say the truth, why is it where you are ? You probably live in an oppressive political regime with a biparty dictating what you can think ? :P
  - peteretep 5y ago
    > It's not racist in China to say the truth mmm, I have had a number of Chinese people explain to me the “truth” about people of various races over the years
  - yourapostasy 5y ago

egypturnash 5y ago

China currently makes some absurdly large percentage of the world's consumer goods, and the discussions about producing them are probably being had over the internet. Cut them off of the internet and we have to rebuild manufacturing capacity everywhere else. Which might not be a bad thing overall, but it's sure not gonna make any transnational corporation's bottom line happy over the next few quarters, so they'll be waving a lot of money at politicians to make this not happen.

ALittleLight 5y ago
China is an oppressive authoritarian state currently engaged in ethnic cleansing. How is enabling them indefinitely an option?
- julianlam 5y ago
  Because doing so would essentially push China towards a China-only internet, which they're already halfway towards. The benefits of gobalization and the spread of democracy (or even just alternative governance models) via exposure to other cultures cannot be understated
  - theli0nheart 5y ago
    Not a strong reason. I would be shocked if the average Internet user has heard of any of the top ten most visited websites in China. Their entire infrastructure, from the technological layer to the bureaucratic layer, has ensured that the average Chinese Internet user knows very little about the outside world that hasn’t been pre-vetted or filtered out completely by the GFW.
    - xwolfi 5y ago
      Im in China and met a Xinhua journalist once. At day she would edit propaganda stories that she knew were complete horseshit, at night her and her colleagues would go to their boss watch netflix together because he had a working VPN. Even if just one port is left open, people will be curious enough to find it and use it. Chinese people are humans too :D

jedberg 5y ago

It's not even a new trend either. Back in 2003 when I worked at eBay and PayPal doing security, the bulk of the attempts came from China and Romania (Romania at the time had one ISP for the whole country that was fast but didn't care about abuse at all).

mwcampbell 5y ago

It stands to reason that an especially large volume of abuse will originate from the most populous country in the world. I don't think that's a reason to cut them off from the global Internet. If it's true that their government is already oppressing their own people (I don't know what's truth and what's propaganda), then the rest of us shouldn't make it worse for those people by cutting off whatever outside connections they manage to have. Also, I'm generally bothered by comments like this one that stir up the general human tendency toward xenophobia. We should be fighting that tendency within ourselves, not fighting the out group. Whichever group of people we want to demonize, we should remember that they're people just like us. We shouldn't punish the majority of them for what a minority are doing to us.

toxik 5y ago
They are not the most connected country, but a long shot. Why isn’t India no. 2 by your logic? Stop apologizing for unacceptable behavior from a country that openly purports to become “the superpower of the world”.
- mwcampbell 5y ago
  I'm not apologizing for anyone's bad behavior; I just don't want us to escalate an already tense situation. "The only winning move is not to play", right?
  - toxik 5y ago
    No, you can’t let somebody poke you with a stick and go “the only winning move is not to play” and pretend like it’s raining.
- xwolfi 5y ago
  But that's fair they become it. After all they're 20% of humanity...
- rakoo 5y ago
  Yes, they are the most connected country in number of users (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_number_of_Internet_users https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_number_of...) and that's what matters: the more users there are, the more malicious activity there will be

liveoneggs 5y ago

15+ or so years ago I worked in the NOC of the 3rd or so largest ISP in the US and a random network engineer did this one evening. We got a big influx of customers complaining about email not working to their family, etc, until I finally figured it out. That network guy (classic long hair "security" guy) was a lazy asshole for doing it then and the internet needs to have the technology to deal with bad actors beyond AS/geo-level blocking now.