8 ms·

I'm confused - what is the reason behind it ?

by ionwake 12y ago

oneeyedpigeon 12y ago
Gizmodo has some info. but I wanted to find a less trashy source; the register has a story [1]. In short, it's suspected that the Chinese government is behind the attack because there are some projects hosted on GitHub that it ideologically disagrees with. [1] http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/03/27/github_under_fire_from_weaponized_great_firewall/ http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/03/27/github_under_fire_fr...
- mrweasel 12y ago
  Which raises the question: when will the rest of the world kick China of the internet? First it was redirecting Chinese internet users to random IPs, if the government didn't like their DNS queries and now they're doing ddos attack on a site that host a large percentage of open source code, used for a whole host of service and products. At some point it's going to make more economical sense to kick China of the internet.
  - atmosx 12y ago
    > Which raises the question: when will the rest of the world kick China of the internet? Careful with that, because the moment some nation can kick out another nation out of the internet for whatever reason we're toasted. Plus, it's better to wait and see some hard evidence (if any can be found) before jumping into conclusions.
  - est 12y ago
    > > Which raises the question: when will the rest of the world kick China of the internet? Well, that's exactly what the DDoS wanted, so the government could just happily control all access to Internet in mainland China The DDoS targets github.com/greatfire and github.com/cn-nytimes by their so called "collateral freedom" [1] Suppose github could just ban Chinese IP all together, but @greatfire could easily jump to another host and abuse ToS to hosting "neutral" political content, like bitbucket[2] Many webmasters have already banned all Chinese IPs, so gradually, every public hosting service will eventually ban all Chinese IPs, Chinese government could easily destroy the rest of circumvention methods [1]: https://en.greatfire.org/blog/2014/jan/collateral-freedom-faq https://en.greatfire.org/blog/2014/jan/collateral-freedom-fa... [2] https://bitbucket.org/greatfire https://bitbucket.org/greatfire
    - wongarsu 12y ago
      If that was what the Chinese government wanted they could simply block all access from China to github. In fact they did that once but had to undo that because the damage to the IT sector would be too big. China doesn't want github inaccessible, they want github to take down repos which the Chinese censor doesn’t like.
      - gpvos 12y ago
        Hmm, maybe Github could block all access from China except for these two projects, serve a special home page with install instructions, and make it so that with either of these installed you can access all of Github from China?
        army 12y ago
        They can't selectively block parts of github when it's going over HTTPS. All they see is an encrypted connection from inside China to github.com.
    - mike_hearn 12y ago
      The first attack based on the Javascript wasn't actually using Chinese IPs to do the attack. As otherwise it'd indeed be very easy to block by just blackholing Chinese traffic. What it was actually doing was a massive MITM attack against non-SSLd HTTP connections from inbound connections to China, from Chinese users abroad visiting Chinese websites. It's an extremely clever trick that is only possible if you have the ability to mount mass MITM attacks on an entire country, but what it gives you is a massive ever shifting botnet. The lesson I draw from this is that we need more SSL, we need it everywhere and we need it yesterday. I hope this stuff puts to rest the idea that some websites aren't worth being encrypted.
      - KMag 12y ago
        I agree in general, but in this specific case, Beijing can just demand access to Baidu's private keys and MITM all traffic passing through the GFWoC.
  - rmc 12y ago
    Well, the USA engaged in a mass spying operation. Should we kick the USA off the internet?
    - ryannevius 12y ago
      * is constantly engaged in... FTFY
  - tvvocold 12y ago
    In fact, we have kick out from github pages.(Chinese users cannot open *.github.io now.) BTW: Here is the Cloudflare way: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9234367 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9234367
  - Toenex 12y ago
    The internet is how we maintain dialogue between peoples when our Governments behave like posturing (arse|ass)+holes. The worse a Government behaves the more (not less) internets the country should receive.
    - oneeyedpigeon 12y ago
      "arseassarseholes"?!
      - coderdude 12y ago
        It's legit. https://regex101.com/r/qY0tO9/1 https://regex101.com/r/qY0tO9/1
      - ColinWright 12y ago
        Taking your question at face value, some people say "arseholes", some people say "assholes", and some people just say "holes". We can factor out the "holes" to get that some people say "arse", some people say "ass", and some say nothing extra. We get alternation in regular expressions by separating them with a vertical bar, so we have a regular expression: arse | ass That's optional, so we have the regular expression: (arse|ass)+ Put back the "holes" and we get the regular expression: (arse|ass)+holes Clear?
        teddyh 12y ago
        Taking your confusion at face value, what you should have done is to use a question mark ‘?’ instead of a plus sign ‘+’. Otherwise, the string which oneeyedpigeon posted also matches your regexp.
        ColinWright 12y ago
        Hah! That explains it! Yes, the "+" usually means "1 or more" rather than the "optional" which I assumed. I rarely use either, because in my computing history I've used RexExp engines that didn't use those symbols consistently. I'll leave my comment there as a testament to writing from memory and experience, rather than taking the time to check modern standards, and how things might have changed. Thank you.
  - seanmcdirmid 12y ago
    And turn China into North Korea? Think about it: the government wants to cut us off from the rest of the world, that would make them happy, but would PISS a lot of people off. Anyways, if the westerners did it for the Chinese government, the people would be angry at them rather than the government... If you try to complain to China Telecom about not being able to access Facebook, they already blame it Facebook since none of these sites are "officially" blocked. This would just play into that lie big time.
    - jacquesm 12y ago
      > the government wants to cut us off from the rest of the world, that would make them happy Chinas ability to manufacture and sell hinges critically on internet connectivity. Of all the sanctions that would be effective I think an internet blockade is one of the more practical and effective ones.
      - seanmcdirmid 12y ago
        I don't think they would be too concerned about an internet blockade, it would work to their advantage EVEN if it would hurt the economy and make a lot of the people's lives harder. That they could blame the "imperialist westerners" for this means that they can easily deflect any dissent outwards (as often happens in hard times...e.g. see the most recent anti-Japanese protests). Let's just please not go there.
        LiweiZ 12y ago
        Highly same-minded swarm at this size is very dangerous. The controller is using it for its own purpose. The best strategy might be waiting for the swarm loosing it's basic power supply and falling apart. But this would affect the world economy as well, especially after 2007.
  - wongarsu 12y ago
    >when will the rest of the world kick China of the internet? One day we're advocating net neutrality and the next day we want to ban entire countries from the internet? I still prefer net neutrality, thank you.
    - freshyill 12y ago
      I don't think banning countries from the Internet is the answer, but net neutrality seems like a completely separate issue.
      - wongarsu 12y ago
        Net neutrality is about carriers treating all traffic equally. Banning a country from the internet is discriminating traffic by origin. That sounds like a net neutrality issue if there ever was one. Whether the discrimination happens in the hardware or in the software stack is a mere implementation detail.
        jasonwocky 12y ago
        > Net neutrality is about carriers treating all traffic equally If it was simply "about" that, then that would include DDOS traffic. Which no one in their right mind wants to treat equally.
        cubano 12y ago
        Sure it is, but if some carriers are a state-sponsored arm of a bad actor and are told by their masters not to treat traffic equally, thus breaking the net neutrality pact, then what are the responsibilities of the the other carriers? Worms, meet can.
      - vacri 12y ago
        So because the Chinese government are being hostile, all the chinese companies innocently doing their own business should have their comms cut off as well? Chinese families should not be able to contact their travelling members? This is definitively the exact same issue - the Chinese government is not the only entity to use the Chinese intertubes.
  - DasIch 12y ago
    It would be a huge mistake to cut of China from the internet. Whatever power the US wields militarily as well as economically is an absolute joke compared to the power it wields culturally. American culture through movies, tv and music dominates global culture, allowing it define what normal society looks like. You want the people in China consuming more and not less of it.
    - ronnier 12y ago
      > You want the people in China consuming more and not less of it. Want all you wish, the Chinese government is actively stopping and blocking the outside internet at an alarming rate. I was in Beijing a few weeks ago and couldn't load google, youtube, gmail, gmaps, instangram, facebook, twitter, various chatting apps, imgur, and on and on. Even using VPNs were difficult. I don't see this stopping anytime soon since it allows 1) control of the people and 2) growth from copying a western products and forcing the people inside the firewall to use the Chinese cloned version.
      - pdm55 12y ago
        I spend about 6 months of the year in China. Yes, I am forced, as you say, to use the Chinese versions of everything, but, to be honest, it doesn't worry me. I use Baidu to put my teaching notes online for my students - it is as good as DropBox. Bing is allowed and works fine as a search engine, even if it blocks any results for "naughty" words. It becomes a bit of a game to see which double entendres it doesn't recognise. Conversing on English corner one night, a student asked me what I thought about their government blocking Google. I think my answer surprised him: I said, "Do you want Google to rule the world?" My implication is that I think services like Baidu are good competition for Google. I honestly think that the governments blocking of Western services is a business decision. It's highly likely sites like Bauidu pay the government a cut to continue the blockade. Imagine a world where you don't get continually served with Google ads. That's pretty close to Nirvana in my opinion.
        semi-extrinsic 12y ago
        Are you really serious? Adblocking is trivial and does not require government censorship. And how does allowing access to Google let them rule the world?
  - buro9 12y ago
    > when will the rest of the world kick China of the internet? By "rest of world" do you mean the USA? Or Europe? Or basically "the west"? When does it sound like cultural imperialism? Are countries (and their citizens) only permitted to be connected to the internet if their culture matches that of your country/federation? How is that not an offensive idea? Usually, I reverse statements and if I find them offensive in reverse they are probably offensive full stop. This one is pretty offensive.
    - jasonwocky 12y ago
      > Are countries (and their citizens) only permitted to be connected to the internet if their culture matches that of your country/federation? Don't be so easily offended. Nobody said anything about their culture. The reason the question is being raised is because of the unignorable number of DDOS attacks being launched from their Internet space. Stop that, and you'll have less calls for cutting their connection.
    - hueving 12y ago
      It has nothing to do with culture. It has to do with committing crimes against the global infrastructure. Nobody is calling for the disconnect of Japan, Vietnam, South Korea, or even North Korea because none of those countries are taking a dump in the swimming pool we are all trying to use.
  - belorn 12y ago
    China will be kicked from the internet at about the same time US and their NSA will be kicked. Which is quite unlikely. We don't kick out USA because NSA breaks into backbone routers, steal encryption codes from sim cards, and steal traffic from google search, Gmail and Facebook. China attacks github, and the reaction will be likely the same. At some point, it is going to make a economical sense to issue a treaty against this kind of behaviors. A treaty that forbids attacking fellow nations infrastructure and businesses over the Internet will benefit everyone, and it is going to take a long time before it is commonly understood.
    - slowmovintarget 12y ago
      If the PRC were merely snooping, and not actively attacking, that equivalence would work. I was also under the impression that this is already in violation of treaty, the only saving grace for the PRC being that it hasn't been proven it's them.
      - belorn 12y ago
        I'm sorry, snooping? Remotely transmitted malware. Hardware caught in transit and infected by malware. Firmware infected with malware at factories. Bricked backbone routers, causing widespread outage during civil war. Hacked phone companies. Stuxnet, a computer worm designed to sabotage industrial centrifuges. A $6 billion trade contract being manipulated in favor of Boeing. A $1.3 billion contract trade contract being manipulated in favor of American defense contractor Raytheon. Weakening products and standards that Internet users. Should I continue? The list goes on and on and on as more leaks are reported on. Using that definition of snooping, we can just call PRC action snooping too.
        slowmovintarget 12y ago
        > Remotely transmitted malware. For data acquisition (snooping). > Hardware caught in transit and infected by malware. For... hmm... backdoors to data? (Laptops with Stuxnet covered below) > Firmware infected with malware at factories. For, yes, transmission snooping. The PRC has also altered routers and other computerized electronics, including those intended for use by militaries in various Western countries. > Bricked backbone routers, causing widespread outage during civil war. Yes, by accident [1] while attempting to surveil (snoop). Not sure if disabling Syria's internet is worse or better than China's DNS poisoning which affected everyone... by accident. > Hacked phone companies. For what purpose, I wonder? > Stuxnet, a computer worm designed to sabotage industrial centrifuges. A. Not done over the internet, done by sneakernet. B. Nuclear reactor facilities in Iran are really not the same as GitHub. > A $6 billion trade contract being manipulated in favor of Boeing. That's nefarious, I'll agree... except, the NSA just blew the whistle on Airbus who was bribing Saudi officials. The information was indeed gained from--wait for it--snooping. [2] > ...Raytheon Same deal there... The CIA was the whistle blower against the French competition. [3] > Weakening products and standards that Internet users.[sic] LOL. Of the two actions you do cite that aren't surveillance, one has nothing to do with the internet and the other was for the purpose of surveillance. So no, the U.S. government's surveillance program is not the same as the PRC performing a DDoS attack on Github. [1] http://gizmodo.com/snowden-the-nsa-turned-off-syrias-internet-1621068611 [2] http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/820758.stm [3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ECHELON#cite_note-60
- thejosh 12y ago
  They also have a pretty good weapon to aid them in this - their internet users. They've been redirecting traffic of its user to load GitHub, which is a very smart/evil tactic to use - this is what certain sites did years ago to take down their smaller competitors.
- gojomo 12y ago
  This speculative attribution seems a bit fishy to me. This attack is a clumsy way to harass those projects. It's not sure to work, and is bringing the specific projects more attention in the meantime. As an official (or easily-attributable) extra-territorial action, it seems both unprecedented and disproportionate. It's also drawing extra attention to the border machines and their capability to do man-in-the-middle tampering. I'd have thought CNGov would want to be miserly with that capability, to suppress awareness of the risk or development of countermeasures/workarounds. I wouldn't completely rule out that this might be an action by some other party that intends, in a roundabout way, to raise an alarm about Chinese net borders.
- imron 12y ago
  I doubt the Chinese government is behind the attack - except for maybe not caring enough to do anything about it. Basically the government doesn't really care what other people do outside the Chinese Internet, and just block anything they don't want local people to read. Far more likely is a 'red hacker', e.g. Someone hacking for patriotic reasons and has taken issue with those projects hosted on GitHub. It may well be that the person has government connections or works in some way for the government but I'd be surprised if it was a government sponsored/sanctioned attack - especially because there are far more likely candidates who will be far easier to take offline than GitHub. The Chinese government's strategy has generally been about keeping things out, not taking things down.
  - teawithcarl 12y ago
    Your comment is flatly wrong. 完全不对。 I've lived in and researched China for 28 years.
    - imron 12y ago
      It's not flatly wrong. I might not have lived in and researched China for 28 years, but I'm not exactly a stranger to the place and have spent the better part of a decade in China and the greater China area and have been circumventing the great firewall for almost 15 years. Unless your China research has been limited to something like the tea cultivating habits of the Bulang minority, you should be able to list off the top of your head a half dozen better targets than the current attack, which is two relatively small projects, largely unknown to the Chinese people, and hosted on another website (GitHub) that is once again largely unknown to majority of Chinese Internet users. I still stand by my statement that the Chinese government doesn't really care what the rest of the world reads/watches so long as they can control what their local citizens have access too. If the Chinese government wanted those projects gone they would just block those project pages. Their current infrastructure is more than sufficient to do that both from a technical perspective in blocking just those projects rather than the entire GitHub domain, and from a man power perspective (tens of thousands of people employed to monitor the web for 'objectionable' content). If the government was really interested in knocking material they find objectionable off the internet through a DDoS then thanks to the GFW they already have a big list of sites and content they don't like and they could take the total GitHub DDoS traffic and proportion it among the top however many sites they don't like and bring them down far more easily than bringing down GitHub, and with far less people caring about it. P.S. If you want me to take you seriously as an expert on China, you probably shouldn't put google-translated Chinese messages on your twitter feed.
frabcus 12y ago
My view - based on no evidence, just reasoning from what we know - is that China are scared of Github. They can't shut it down fully, because doing so would shut down their software engineering capability (it has got that important). And people can host basically anything there, including anti-censorship software. Attack feels like a power play to me. Either to pressurise Github into censoring for the PRC - "block the repos we hate, or we DOS your whole service again". And/or to build a local competitor. The more Github is down, the more it is considered "anti-China" in China, the easier to build a local competitor. This is all just my immediate hypothesis from the news. I'd love to see somebody who knows more about software development in China to say what might be really going on.
- rmc 12y ago
  And/or to build a local competitor. The more Github is down, the more it is considered "anti-China" in China, the easier to build a local competitor. Or even globally. GitHub is, as you say, very important for the IT industry. Maybe China thinks it's too important. Make Github unusable for everyone else in the world and people, even outside China, might start looking elsewhere.

I'm confused - what is the reason behind it ?

by ionwake 12y ago

I'm confused - what is the reason behind it ?

Gizmodo has some info. but I wanted to find a less trashy source; the register has a story [1]. In short, it's suspected that the Chinese government is behind the attack because there are some projects hosted on GitHub that it ideologically disagrees with. [1] http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/03/27/github_under_fire_from_weaponized_great_firewall/ http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/03/27/github_under_fire_fr...

mrweasel 12y ago
Which raises the question: when will the rest of the world kick China of the internet? First it was redirecting Chinese internet users to random IPs, if the government didn't like their DNS queries and now they're doing ddos attack on a site that host a large percentage of open source code, used for a whole host of service and products. At some point it's going to make more economical sense to kick China of the internet.
- atmosx 12y ago
  > Which raises the question: when will the rest of the world kick China of the internet? Careful with that, because the moment some nation can kick out another nation out of the internet for whatever reason we're toasted. Plus, it's better to wait and see some hard evidence (if any can be found) before jumping into conclusions.
- est 12y ago
  > > Which raises the question: when will the rest of the world kick China of the internet? Well, that's exactly what the DDoS wanted, so the government could just happily control all access to Internet in mainland China The DDoS targets github.com/greatfire and github.com/cn-nytimes by their so called "collateral freedom" [1] Suppose github could just ban Chinese IP all together, but @greatfire could easily jump to another host and abuse ToS to hosting "neutral" political content, like bitbucket[2] Many webmasters have already banned all Chinese IPs, so gradually, every public hosting service will eventually ban all Chinese IPs, Chinese government could easily destroy the rest of circumvention methods [1]: https://en.greatfire.org/blog/2014/jan/collateral-freedom-faq https://en.greatfire.org/blog/2014/jan/collateral-freedom-fa... [2] https://bitbucket.org/greatfire https://bitbucket.org/greatfire
  - wongarsu 12y ago
    If that was what the Chinese government wanted they could simply block all access from China to github. In fact they did that once but had to undo that because the damage to the IT sector would be too big. China doesn't want github inaccessible, they want github to take down repos which the Chinese censor doesn’t like.
    - gpvos 12y ago
      Hmm, maybe Github could block all access from China except for these two projects, serve a special home page with install instructions, and make it so that with either of these installed you can access all of Github from China?
      - army 12y ago
        They can't selectively block parts of github when it's going over HTTPS. All they see is an encrypted connection from inside China to github.com.
  - mike_hearn 12y ago
    The first attack based on the Javascript wasn't actually using Chinese IPs to do the attack. As otherwise it'd indeed be very easy to block by just blackholing Chinese traffic. What it was actually doing was a massive MITM attack against non-SSLd HTTP connections from inbound connections to China, from Chinese users abroad visiting Chinese websites. It's an extremely clever trick that is only possible if you have the ability to mount mass MITM attacks on an entire country, but what it gives you is a massive ever shifting botnet. The lesson I draw from this is that we need more SSL, we need it everywhere and we need it yesterday. I hope this stuff puts to rest the idea that some websites aren't worth being encrypted.
    - KMag 12y ago
      I agree in general, but in this specific case, Beijing can just demand access to Baidu's private keys and MITM all traffic passing through the GFWoC.
- rmc 12y ago
  Well, the USA engaged in a mass spying operation. Should we kick the USA off the internet?
  - ryannevius 12y ago
    * is constantly engaged in... FTFY
- tvvocold 12y ago
  In fact, we have kick out from github pages.(Chinese users cannot open *.github.io now.) BTW: Here is the Cloudflare way: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9234367 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9234367
- Toenex 12y ago
  The internet is how we maintain dialogue between peoples when our Governments behave like posturing (arse|ass)+holes. The worse a Government behaves the more (not less) internets the country should receive.
  - oneeyedpigeon 12y ago
    "arseassarseholes"?!
    - coderdude 12y ago
      It's legit. https://regex101.com/r/qY0tO9/1 https://regex101.com/r/qY0tO9/1
    - ColinWright 12y ago
      Taking your question at face value, some people say "arseholes", some people say "assholes", and some people just say "holes". We can factor out the "holes" to get that some people say "arse", some people say "ass", and some say nothing extra. We get alternation in regular expressions by separating them with a vertical bar, so we have a regular expression: arse | ass That's optional, so we have the regular expression: (arse|ass)+ Put back the "holes" and we get the regular expression: (arse|ass)+holes Clear?
      - teddyh 12y ago
        Taking your confusion at face value, what you should have done is to use a question mark ‘?’ instead of a plus sign ‘+’. Otherwise, the string which oneeyedpigeon posted also matches your regexp.
        ColinWright 12y ago
        Hah! That explains it! Yes, the "+" usually means "1 or more" rather than the "optional" which I assumed. I rarely use either, because in my computing history I've used RexExp engines that didn't use those symbols consistently. I'll leave my comment there as a testament to writing from memory and experience, rather than taking the time to check modern standards, and how things might have changed. Thank you.
- seanmcdirmid 12y ago
  And turn China into North Korea? Think about it: the government wants to cut us off from the rest of the world, that would make them happy, but would PISS a lot of people off. Anyways, if the westerners did it for the Chinese government, the people would be angry at them rather than the government... If you try to complain to China Telecom about not being able to access Facebook, they already blame it Facebook since none of these sites are "officially" blocked. This would just play into that lie big time.
  - jacquesm 12y ago
    > the government wants to cut us off from the rest of the world, that would make them happy Chinas ability to manufacture and sell hinges critically on internet connectivity. Of all the sanctions that would be effective I think an internet blockade is one of the more practical and effective ones.
    - seanmcdirmid 12y ago
      I don't think they would be too concerned about an internet blockade, it would work to their advantage EVEN if it would hurt the economy and make a lot of the people's lives harder. That they could blame the "imperialist westerners" for this means that they can easily deflect any dissent outwards (as often happens in hard times...e.g. see the most recent anti-Japanese protests). Let's just please not go there.
      - LiweiZ 12y ago
        Highly same-minded swarm at this size is very dangerous. The controller is using it for its own purpose. The best strategy might be waiting for the swarm loosing it's basic power supply and falling apart. But this would affect the world economy as well, especially after 2007.
- wongarsu 12y ago
  >when will the rest of the world kick China of the internet? One day we're advocating net neutrality and the next day we want to ban entire countries from the internet? I still prefer net neutrality, thank you.
  - freshyill 12y ago
    I don't think banning countries from the Internet is the answer, but net neutrality seems like a completely separate issue.
    - wongarsu 12y ago
      Net neutrality is about carriers treating all traffic equally. Banning a country from the internet is discriminating traffic by origin. That sounds like a net neutrality issue if there ever was one. Whether the discrimination happens in the hardware or in the software stack is a mere implementation detail.
      - jasonwocky 12y ago
        > Net neutrality is about carriers treating all traffic equally If it was simply "about" that, then that would include DDOS traffic. Which no one in their right mind wants to treat equally.
      - cubano 12y ago
        Sure it is, but if some carriers are a state-sponsored arm of a bad actor and are told by their masters not to treat traffic equally, thus breaking the net neutrality pact, then what are the responsibilities of the the other carriers? Worms, meet can.
    - vacri 12y ago
      So because the Chinese government are being hostile, all the chinese companies innocently doing their own business should have their comms cut off as well? Chinese families should not be able to contact their travelling members? This is definitively the exact same issue - the Chinese government is not the only entity to use the Chinese intertubes.
- DasIch 12y ago
  It would be a huge mistake to cut of China from the internet. Whatever power the US wields militarily as well as economically is an absolute joke compared to the power it wields culturally. American culture through movies, tv and music dominates global culture, allowing it define what normal society looks like. You want the people in China consuming more and not less of it.
  - ronnier 12y ago
    > You want the people in China consuming more and not less of it. Want all you wish, the Chinese government is actively stopping and blocking the outside internet at an alarming rate. I was in Beijing a few weeks ago and couldn't load google, youtube, gmail, gmaps, instangram, facebook, twitter, various chatting apps, imgur, and on and on. Even using VPNs were difficult. I don't see this stopping anytime soon since it allows 1) control of the people and 2) growth from copying a western products and forcing the people inside the firewall to use the Chinese cloned version.
    - pdm55 12y ago
      I spend about 6 months of the year in China. Yes, I am forced, as you say, to use the Chinese versions of everything, but, to be honest, it doesn't worry me. I use Baidu to put my teaching notes online for my students - it is as good as DropBox. Bing is allowed and works fine as a search engine, even if it blocks any results for "naughty" words. It becomes a bit of a game to see which double entendres it doesn't recognise. Conversing on English corner one night, a student asked me what I thought about their government blocking Google. I think my answer surprised him: I said, "Do you want Google to rule the world?" My implication is that I think services like Baidu are good competition for Google. I honestly think that the governments blocking of Western services is a business decision. It's highly likely sites like Bauidu pay the government a cut to continue the blockade. Imagine a world where you don't get continually served with Google ads. That's pretty close to Nirvana in my opinion.
      - semi-extrinsic 12y ago
        Are you really serious? Adblocking is trivial and does not require government censorship. And how does allowing access to Google let them rule the world?
- buro9 12y ago
  > when will the rest of the world kick China of the internet? By "rest of world" do you mean the USA? Or Europe? Or basically "the west"? When does it sound like cultural imperialism? Are countries (and their citizens) only permitted to be connected to the internet if their culture matches that of your country/federation? How is that not an offensive idea? Usually, I reverse statements and if I find them offensive in reverse they are probably offensive full stop. This one is pretty offensive.
  - jasonwocky 12y ago
    > Are countries (and their citizens) only permitted to be connected to the internet if their culture matches that of your country/federation? Don't be so easily offended. Nobody said anything about their culture. The reason the question is being raised is because of the unignorable number of DDOS attacks being launched from their Internet space. Stop that, and you'll have less calls for cutting their connection.
  - hueving 12y ago
    It has nothing to do with culture. It has to do with committing crimes against the global infrastructure. Nobody is calling for the disconnect of Japan, Vietnam, South Korea, or even North Korea because none of those countries are taking a dump in the swimming pool we are all trying to use.
- belorn 12y ago
  China will be kicked from the internet at about the same time US and their NSA will be kicked. Which is quite unlikely. We don't kick out USA because NSA breaks into backbone routers, steal encryption codes from sim cards, and steal traffic from google search, Gmail and Facebook. China attacks github, and the reaction will be likely the same. At some point, it is going to make a economical sense to issue a treaty against this kind of behaviors. A treaty that forbids attacking fellow nations infrastructure and businesses over the Internet will benefit everyone, and it is going to take a long time before it is commonly understood.
  - slowmovintarget 12y ago
    If the PRC were merely snooping, and not actively attacking, that equivalence would work. I was also under the impression that this is already in violation of treaty, the only saving grace for the PRC being that it hasn't been proven it's them.
    - belorn 12y ago
      I'm sorry, snooping? Remotely transmitted malware. Hardware caught in transit and infected by malware. Firmware infected with malware at factories. Bricked backbone routers, causing widespread outage during civil war. Hacked phone companies. Stuxnet, a computer worm designed to sabotage industrial centrifuges. A $6 billion trade contract being manipulated in favor of Boeing. A $1.3 billion contract trade contract being manipulated in favor of American defense contractor Raytheon. Weakening products and standards that Internet users. Should I continue? The list goes on and on and on as more leaks are reported on. Using that definition of snooping, we can just call PRC action snooping too.
      - slowmovintarget 12y ago
        > Remotely transmitted malware. For data acquisition (snooping). > Hardware caught in transit and infected by malware. For... hmm... backdoors to data? (Laptops with Stuxnet covered below) > Firmware infected with malware at factories. For, yes, transmission snooping. The PRC has also altered routers and other computerized electronics, including those intended for use by militaries in various Western countries. > Bricked backbone routers, causing widespread outage during civil war. Yes, by accident [1] while attempting to surveil (snoop). Not sure if disabling Syria's internet is worse or better than China's DNS poisoning which affected everyone... by accident. > Hacked phone companies. For what purpose, I wonder? > Stuxnet, a computer worm designed to sabotage industrial centrifuges. A. Not done over the internet, done by sneakernet. B. Nuclear reactor facilities in Iran are really not the same as GitHub. > A $6 billion trade contract being manipulated in favor of Boeing. That's nefarious, I'll agree... except, the NSA just blew the whistle on Airbus who was bribing Saudi officials. The information was indeed gained from--wait for it--snooping. [2] > ...Raytheon Same deal there... The CIA was the whistle blower against the French competition. [3] > Weakening products and standards that Internet users.[sic] LOL. Of the two actions you do cite that aren't surveillance, one has nothing to do with the internet and the other was for the purpose of surveillance. So no, the U.S. government's surveillance program is not the same as the PRC performing a DDoS attack on Github. [1] http://gizmodo.com/snowden-the-nsa-turned-off-syrias-internet-1621068611 [2] http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/820758.stm [3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ECHELON#cite_note-60
thejosh 12y ago
They also have a pretty good weapon to aid them in this - their internet users. They've been redirecting traffic of its user to load GitHub, which is a very smart/evil tactic to use - this is what certain sites did years ago to take down their smaller competitors.
gojomo 12y ago
This speculative attribution seems a bit fishy to me. This attack is a clumsy way to harass those projects. It's not sure to work, and is bringing the specific projects more attention in the meantime. As an official (or easily-attributable) extra-territorial action, it seems both unprecedented and disproportionate. It's also drawing extra attention to the border machines and their capability to do man-in-the-middle tampering. I'd have thought CNGov would want to be miserly with that capability, to suppress awareness of the risk or development of countermeasures/workarounds. I wouldn't completely rule out that this might be an action by some other party that intends, in a roundabout way, to raise an alarm about Chinese net borders.
imron 12y ago
I doubt the Chinese government is behind the attack - except for maybe not caring enough to do anything about it. Basically the government doesn't really care what other people do outside the Chinese Internet, and just block anything they don't want local people to read. Far more likely is a 'red hacker', e.g. Someone hacking for patriotic reasons and has taken issue with those projects hosted on GitHub. It may well be that the person has government connections or works in some way for the government but I'd be surprised if it was a government sponsored/sanctioned attack - especially because there are far more likely candidates who will be far easier to take offline than GitHub. The Chinese government's strategy has generally been about keeping things out, not taking things down.
- teawithcarl 12y ago
  Your comment is flatly wrong. 完全不对。 I've lived in and researched China for 28 years.
  - imron 12y ago
    It's not flatly wrong. I might not have lived in and researched China for 28 years, but I'm not exactly a stranger to the place and have spent the better part of a decade in China and the greater China area and have been circumventing the great firewall for almost 15 years. Unless your China research has been limited to something like the tea cultivating habits of the Bulang minority, you should be able to list off the top of your head a half dozen better targets than the current attack, which is two relatively small projects, largely unknown to the Chinese people, and hosted on another website (GitHub) that is once again largely unknown to majority of Chinese Internet users. I still stand by my statement that the Chinese government doesn't really care what the rest of the world reads/watches so long as they can control what their local citizens have access too. If the Chinese government wanted those projects gone they would just block those project pages. Their current infrastructure is more than sufficient to do that both from a technical perspective in blocking just those projects rather than the entire GitHub domain, and from a man power perspective (tens of thousands of people employed to monitor the web for 'objectionable' content). If the government was really interested in knocking material they find objectionable off the internet through a DDoS then thanks to the GFW they already have a big list of sites and content they don't like and they could take the total GitHub DDoS traffic and proportion it among the top however many sites they don't like and bring them down far more easily than bringing down GitHub, and with far less people caring about it. P.S. If you want me to take you seriously as an expert on China, you probably shouldn't put google-translated Chinese messages on your twitter feed.

frabcus 12y ago

My view - based on no evidence, just reasoning from what we know - is that China are scared of Github. They can't shut it down fully, because doing so would shut down their software engineering capability (it has got that important). And people can host basically anything there, including anti-censorship software. Attack feels like a power play to me. Either to pressurise Github into censoring for the PRC - "block the repos we hate, or we DOS your whole service again". And/or to build a local competitor. The more Github is down, the more it is considered "anti-China" in China, the easier to build a local competitor. This is all just my immediate hypothesis from the news. I'd love to see somebody who knows more about software development in China to say what might be really going on.

rmc 12y ago
And/or to build a local competitor. The more Github is down, the more it is considered "anti-China" in China, the easier to build a local competitor. Or even globally. GitHub is, as you say, very important for the IT industry. Maybe China thinks it's too important. Make Github unusable for everyone else in the world and people, even outside China, might start looking elsewhere.