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> > 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 j
by 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 agoIf 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 agoHmm, 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 agoThey 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 agoThe 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 agoI 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.
- im2w1l 12y agoThat would be the death of Baidu among the Chinese diaspora.
- Kiwikwi 12y agoBuh? Encryption is de-facto illegal in China. To the extent SSL is used, you can be sure that the government already has a copy of the master key. I've worked on Chinese deployed train systems, and we were banned from encrypting train control signals (signing was allowed, though), just in case someone might try to sneak in a political message in an ATO control telegram...
- im2w1l 12y agoNot breaking encryption itself. Breaking encryption to serve malicious scripts.
- 12y ago
- thret 12y agoHopefully never. IMO access to the internet is a basic human right, like clean water and immunization. I wouldn't choose to deny these things to citizens of any country.
- tedunangst 12y agoWhat happens when providing those things to another country means denying them to your own country?