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The Great Cannon has been deployed again

cybersecurity.att.com

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Re: The Great Cannon has been deployed again

#81

Post by riffraff »

revicon wrote: post #42
romaaeterna wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No. "Behind the Great Firewall" is another way of saying "served from China". Perhaps -- or even most likely -- it is the government. But this is hardly a smoking gun. There are plenty of people on the mainland that hate what's going on in HK, and who are not the government.

How would a non-government entity achieve this?

pwn a couple ad servers and service the poisoned js. It doesn't seem something that a dedicated malicious hacker group couldn't do.

Re: The Great Cannon has been deployed again

#82

Post by kradroy »

pkilgore wrote: post #7

So if the cannon is created using the great firewall, how does the Chinese government establish any sort of plausible argument that this isn't state-sponsored activity? Do they just not care? Some day soon a war will not be started with an assassins bullet but with a tool like this. I wonder when we start looking at them the same way?

Bullets have been obsolete for decades. Wars are currently fought by selling shitty financial instruments en masse to your opponents while you sit and watch them implode from afar.

Re: The Great Cannon has been deployed again

#83

Post by criddell »

fred_is_fred wrote: post #45
pkilgore wrote: post #7

So if the cannon is created using the great firewall, how does the Chinese government establish any sort of plausible argument that this isn't state-sponsored activity? Do they just not care? Some day soon a war will not be started with an assassins bullet but with a tool like this. I wonder when we start looking at them the same way?

Why should they care, what's anyone going to do about it?

For one, we should all be making sure our websites use https all the time. If all you have is a personal website serving up mostly static content then it might not seem like you need to bother with a certificate but things like the Great Cannon are a great argument that you do. It's not unlike a public health argument for why everybody should be vaccinated.

Re: The Great Cannon has been deployed again

#85

Post by jefftk »

brenden2 wrote: post #2

This is a good counter example for whenever you find yourself in an argument with anti-adblocker folks.

This is not a good counterexample: the attacker is only able to do this because the analytics scripts are being served over HTTP. If you include the analytics on your site over HTTPS this sort of attack is not relevant.

Re: The Great Cannon has been deployed again

#86

Post by mminer237 »

jacquesm wrote: post #70

So, maybe firewall off China for a couple of days? Sure, it would hurt on both sides but at least it would be clear that abuse at this scale leads to being blackholed.

LIHKG requires a Hong Kong ISP to register anyway, so it's not like that site blocking mainland China would hurt it at all.

Re: The Great Cannon has been deployed again

#87

Post by nradov »

FDSGSG wrote: post #58
nradov wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not a matter of excuses. Baidu, like almost all large Chinese companies, is effectively an arm of the Chinese Communist Party. They will do as they're told.

Which is exactly why Baidu should face the same consequences as other malware distributors. (i.e. safebrowsing block, dnsbl listings and so on)

Be careful what you wish for. Ironically the Chinese government would probably prefer it if Western companies and governments cut off a lot of Chinese traffic. It would give them political cover for their own blocking activities and allow them to plausibly claim that everyone is doing it.

Re: The Great Cannon has been deployed again

#88

Post by pavel_lishin »

hombre_fatal wrote: post #69
Someone1234 wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ad blockers still remove them. They have tried not to and the users intentionally moved to ad blockers that still did. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adblock_Plus#Controversy_over_...

Also, aside from the two HNers who claim they actually do, nobody is turning off their adblocker as they go to see if a given site has acceptable ads.

"Sir, I know the last seventeen hundred cups I've offered you were full of piss, but surely this time I'm being honest and genuine!"

Re: The Great Cannon has been deployed again

#90

Post by cobookman »

LandR wrote: post #64
pkilgore wrote: post #7

So if the cannon is created using the great firewall, how does the Chinese government establish any sort of plausible argument that this isn't state-sponsored activity? Do they just not care? Some day soon a war will not be started with an assassins bullet but with a tool like this. I wonder when we start looking at them the same way?

[flagged]

People care, however policy changes don’t happen overnight.

https://forward.com/opinion/424071/jews-are-speaking-out-aga...

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