The Great Cannon has been deployed again • Hacker News Board

Re: The Great Cannon has been deployed again

#171

Post by gpm » Fri, Dec 06, 2019, 4:34 PM UTC

chewbacha wrote: post #161

MR4D wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

War seems to progress as follows: 0 - Peace 1 - Trade War 2 - Financial War 3 - Electronic War 4 - Shooting War Note that 1 & 2 are different types of Economic war, and could be grouped together. The steps occur in order, but steps can be skipped. From a US-centric point of view, North Korea and Iran seem to be at #3. China & Russia are at a limited version of #2. Chinese/HK seem to be at #3 with each other.Given how…

I don't know who to attribute this to but I've heard a saying: "Countries that trade with each other don't make war with each other." As we isolate countries and disrupt trade we definitely are increasing the risk of conflict.

You are interpreting a correlation as a causality. More likely (IMO) is a common cause, countries that consider themselves enemies for whatever reason are both unlikely to trade with eachother, and likely to go to war with eachother.

Re: The Great Cannon has been deployed again

#172

Post by gruez » Fri, Dec 06, 2019, 4:35 PM UTC

marcosdumay wrote: post #138

criddell wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

HTTPS will help your users not getting infected by code that a 3rd party injected on your site. But it will probably not help against the cannon, because the Chinese probably have some china controlled certificate installed.

>But it will probably not help against the cannon, because the Chinese probably have some china controlled certificate installed.

The whole point of the cannon is that you can leverage the bandwidth of other countries. The CCP already controls the telecoms in China. They don't need to hijack Chinese computers for DDoS attacks when they can directly DDoS from their ISP's backbone.

Re: The Great Cannon has been deployed again

#173

Post by jroschen » Fri, Dec 06, 2019, 4:35 PM UTC

dhimes wrote: post #37

Waterluvian wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the primary argument line is something along: 1. Online ads today are so bad they must be blocked 2. But blocking ads blocks revenue for sites we like 3. So we should pay for them more directly 4. But I'm not about to set up 100 different monthly subscriptions. These corporations are not trustworthy and I cannot monitor this many bills. 5. We need a solution to simplify money -> content -> creator transfer 6.…

Serve content related ads and don't track. I'd be fine with that.

Shameless plug: this is what we are trying to do at https://contextcue.com. Ads that are targeted to the website you’re on, instead of the person viewing the ad. We’d love any feedback about what we are trying to accomplish!

Re: The Great Cannon has been deployed again

#174

Post by nullc » Fri, Dec 06, 2019, 4:36 PM UTC

The web needs to start moving towards a strong same-origin policy for all embedded content-- require sites to proxy requests if they want third party content.

The first step could be sending CORS preflight, then requiring it, then just not allowing cross origin to different domains (but allow sub-/sibling- domains).

Re: The Great Cannon has been deployed again

#175

Post by dmix » Fri, Dec 06, 2019, 4:37 PM UTC

gpm wrote: post #171

chewbacha wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know who to attribute this to but I've heard a saying: "Countries that trade with each other don't make war with each other." As we isolate countries and disrupt trade we definitely are increasing the risk of conflict.

You are interpreting a correlation as a causality. More likely (IMO) is a common cause, countries that consider themselves enemies for whatever reason are both unlikely to trade with eachother, and likely to go to war with eachother.

China not wanting to mess with the amazing economic success is one of the strongest things pushing back against any military aggression by them.

Tons of CPP members are getting rich off the economy which includes a lot of trade and foreign debt.

There’s plenty of correlation here.

Re: The Great Cannon has been deployed again

#176

Post by qxnqd » Fri, Dec 06, 2019, 4:37 PM UTC

emmelaich wrote: post #128

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?

Pretty sure they don't care. They're also directing lasers at helicopter pilots, which is much closer to a actual war than mere bits. https://www.abc.net.au/news/2019-12-06/chinese-fishing-vesse...

"They" as if it was the military doing it. It's probably bored fishermen.

Edit: user "Apes" responded with: "Why is China giving their fishermen access to military grade lasers with helicopter tracking gear? I guess I'm just not familiar enough with fishing to understand how these military lasers would help catch fish."

My response to his comment is: The part where they are "military grade lasers with helicopter tracking gear" is lucubration. You can blind any aircraft pilot using a 10€ laser from aliexpress. There have been lots of incidents of people blinding aeroplane pilots using those.

Re: The Great Cannon has been deployed again

#177

Post by erikpukinskis » Fri, Dec 06, 2019, 4:37 PM UTC

romaaeterna wrote: post #104

polityagent wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is not true, the traffic for the previous github incident with the great cannon was co located[0] with the great firewall (which is indisputably under the control of the chinese government). [0] https://citizenlab.ca/2015/04/chinas-great-cannon/

Colocated with the Great Firewall is an entirely different claim, and not one that ATT makes. Your citizenlab article provides a possible case for it, but that's a different discussion. And even then, it could be some third party cache poisoning attack, etc. The citizenlab evidence would look exactly the same. This is likely China, as I said, but let's not pretend that we know more than we do.

Why does it matter whether ATT made the claim?

Re: The Great Cannon has been deployed again

#178

Post by booleandilemma » Fri, Dec 06, 2019, 4:38 PM UTC

MR4D wrote: post #142

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?

War seems to progress as follows: 0 - Peace 1 - Trade War 2 - Financial War 3 - Electronic War 4 - Shooting War Note that 1 & 2 are different types of Economic war, and could be grouped together. The steps occur in order, but steps can be skipped. From a US-centric point of view, North Korea and Iran seem to be at #3. China & Russia are at a limited version of #2. Chinese/HK seem to be at #3 with each other.Given how…

Can you cite examples of when it went from 3 to 4?

Re: The Great Cannon has been deployed again

#179

Post by gruez » Fri, Dec 06, 2019, 4:38 PM UTC

zhte415 wrote: post #97

fortytw2 wrote: post #6

I didn’t see this anywhere in the article (maybe I missed it), but because this utilizes the Great Firewall, it’s undoubtedly done by the Chinese government, right?

The first paragraph of the article mentions > operates by injecting malicious Javascript into pages served from behind the Great Firewall. These scripts, potentially served to millions of users across the internet, hijack the users’ connections to make multiple requests against the targeted site. These requests consume all the resources of the targeted site, making it unavailable:

So basically browser vendors need to add all Chinese hosting sites to their safebrowsing blacklist?

Re: The Great Cannon has been deployed again

#180

Post by goalieca » Fri, Dec 06, 2019, 4:38 PM UTC

nullc wrote: post #174

The web needs to start moving towards a strong same-origin policy for all embedded content-- require sites to proxy requests if they want third party content. The first step could be sending CORS preflight, then requiring it, then just not allowing cross origin to different domains (but allow sub-/sibling- domains).

The problem right now is that the originating server sets an http response header. Given the MITM can modify that header.. it indicates things need to be done automagically in the browser. But that will break A LOT.