The Great Cannon has been deployed again • Hacker News Board

Re: The Great Cannon has been deployed again

#201

Post by goodluckchuck » Fri, Dec 06, 2019, 4:50 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…

Hobbes would say this is backwards, since the state of nature is a state of war.

"Peace" is built from war's stalemates. As the most violent (and therefore effective) means become ineffective, combatants shift towards less effective means, to the point that the war (which is still ongoing) continues through diplomacy and trade.

Hence, "war is diplomacy by other means."

Diplomacy and trade are means of gaining an advantage in the underlying (now "cold") warfare. They're maneuvers to defeat the existing stalemate. If either side is able to obtain an economic (or other advantage) sufficient to defeat their opponent in a more violent form of warfare, then they will return to violence because that is the basal state of nature.

The worst thing you could ever have in trade / diplomacy is a good working relationship that isn't balanced and equal. A trade failure is itself a stalemate which can strengthen peace, so long as it occurs before too great of an advantage is gained any group.

Re: The Great Cannon has been deployed again

#202

Post by seganddr » Fri, Dec 06, 2019, 4:50 PM UTC

qxnqd wrote: post #176

emmelaich wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 trac…

Says a brand new account....

Re: The Great Cannon has been deployed again

#203

Post by dmix » Fri, Dec 06, 2019, 4:50 PM UTC

ethbro wrote: post #67

i_am_proteus wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Please. For it not to be the government would mean that there's an extra-governmental organization within the PRC with the resources and network access to conduct a massive DDoS attack, which the communist government would never allow.

> conduct a massive DDoS attack That's not an accurate summary of what they're doing. They're intermittently serving poisoned js in place of known analytics scripts. Which changes the potential "who" a bit.

Either someone hacked the root Baidu servers, Baidu is involved, or the network requests are being manipulated by Chinese controlled entities.

There’s a high probability this is state run. There’s probably tons of offensive cyber teams in China and these are hitting sites like Greatfire.org which documents Chinese censorship (which was also why Github was hit if I’m not mistaken).

It’s not surprising that the organs of censorship would be used to target attempts to expose said censorship.

Re: The Great Cannon has been deployed again

#204

Post by tandr » Fri, Dec 06, 2019, 4:51 PM UTC

booleandilemma wrote: post #178

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…

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

(not grandposter)

As the grandparent said - steps can be skipped. Since 3 is a relatively new medium for offensive actions, I suspect there are not a lot of well-known examples around. Would be interesting to see if any currently active conflicts were preceded by DoS (not necessarily Distributed, could be just a "cable cut" from outside), and how long before it escalated to active conflict.

Re: The Great Cannon has been deployed again

#205

Post by dmead » Fri, Dec 06, 2019, 4:51 PM UTC

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.

that's what they want. a bifurcation of the internet.

Re: The Great Cannon has been deployed again

#206

Post by jacquesm » Fri, Dec 06, 2019, 4:52 PM UTC

xucheng wrote: post #155

jacquesm wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So it does work. It doesn't really matter where you break the chain as long as it gets broken.

It only works if you somehow remove entire China from the Internet.

That would be the kind of signal that would be hard for the Chinese to spin in such a way that it would make them look good, and the economic effect would be pretty much instantaneous.

There is plenty of historical precedent for this: spammers' IP ranges would be blackholed to send a message to their ISPs that such behavior wasn't tolerated. That the Chinese authorities decide to play this game at the nation state level should not give them a free pass, but should result in a nation state level response.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_hole_(networking)

Re: The Great Cannon has been deployed again

#207

Post by rahuldottech » Fri, Dec 06, 2019, 4:53 PM UTC

yumraj wrote: post #89

Can/shouldn't the rest of the world create a Greater firewall to block the traffic from China? Let China enjoy it's solitude and we'll enjoy our openness.

Yeah except we will effectively be cutting off _all_ outside information from the Cinese citizens, who already have to face incredible amounts of censorship.

Cut them off completely, and we will never find out about all the human rights violations taking place in their country, and their government will be able to brainwash its citizens even more easily.

Re: The Great Cannon has been deployed again

#208

Post by jacquesm » Fri, Dec 06, 2019, 4:53 PM UTC

dmead wrote: post #205

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.

that's what they want. a bifurcation of the internet.

No they don't. They want to use it as a weapon against targets of their choosing and co-opt the rest of the net in doing so. The economic importance of the internet to China can not be overstated.

Re: The Great Cannon has been deployed again

#209

Post by crazygringo » Fri, Dec 06, 2019, 4:53 PM UTC

I'm curious: is it technically and politically possible for the operators of all internet cables receiving traffic from China to filter out malicious scripts?

AT&T's writeup says the injection is only possible because it's HTTP (not HTTPS), and that there are two specific JavaScript files which sometimes serve up the malicious code.

So in case of known malware like this being served from within a geographic region... is there any way to filter this out at scale? Or is that computationally infeasible at scale, so it would have to be built into the browser or something?

The article also doesn't make clear -- is this DDoS coming exclusively from outside of China? Or is it injecting the same malicious code inside of China as well, and they're just not bothering to distinguish between requests coming from inside or outside the country? (In which case, the DDoS will continue regardless, just not with the rest of the world's help.)

Re: The Great Cannon has been deployed again

#210

Post by gruez » Fri, Dec 06, 2019, 4:56 PM UTC

dmix wrote: post #194

gruez wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

It’s coming from a Baidu domain which is one of the biggest sites in the world. That might be a bit difficult...

If you're negligent in securing your site and it gets infected, your site should be blocked. You shouldn't be able say "well it's technically not us, it's the CCP!" whilst not doing anything about it. As for badiu being a major site, that can be resolved by browser vendors displaying a special page explaining to its users of the situation.