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China's Man-On-the-Side Attack on GitHub

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Re: China's Man-On-the-Side Attack on GitHub

#61

Post by RA_Fisher »

jjcc wrote: post #35

Most people might not know what kind of organization GreatFire really is because too much context is missing. I only discovered recently it's not so simple. There have been a lot of talks about the behavior of GreatFire for quite for a while but most of the talks are in Chinese. There are some in English though, to give everybody a glimpse here is an example: https://github.com/greatfire/wiki/issues/1 I have an impre…

The personal is political. It's not possible to exist in a non-political state. It's a lot like Stallman's victim-perpetrator phrase. Nobody wants to think of themselves as either a victim or perpetrator, but here we are and wishing it away unfortunately can't make it true.

Re: China's Man-On-the-Side Attack on GitHub

#62

Post by WizzleKake »

karcass wrote: post #45
j42 wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Actually, someone here (who I cannot remember) said quite eloquently yesterday that our biggest export--and "influence" on the world--is culture. For the first time I realized that pissing people off may, in fact be the objective as the other reply stated. China and Russia are both (quite unique) examples of countries with an unfathomable degree of control over their citizens. It can be hard to grasp occasionally, co…

> the entire reality they see and what they believe to be true is heavily distorted--in that, it is defined by the vision of the oligarchy and information is carefully controlled to produce a desired set of beliefs. That's pretty much how I feel about the Fox-watching population of the US.

> That's pretty much how I feel about the Fox-watching population of the US.

It's how I feel about everyone who gets their information from TV.

Re: China's Man-On-the-Side Attack on GitHub

#63

Post by wyaeld »

rsuelzer wrote: post #56
jfoutz wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a big freaking gamble. How effective does Github's mitigation need to be to make the costs tolerable? They're already using a full 1% of the traffic to ddos, they can only double that 7 times. Really, at this point Github could probably put together a really nice blacklist of baidu users outside of china, and whitelist those that actually use the service. I can think of a couple of cute ways to accelerate the…

Side question, does GitHub run ruby on rails? If so, I'm pretty impressed.

They do, but a real ruby on rails site typically serves most html content out of memcache, even higher for users that aren't logged into the platform. Its not unknown to see 5-10ms response times in those scenarios

Re: China's Man-On-the-Side Attack on GitHub

#64

Post by jakejake »

JohnTHaller wrote: post #57

Since the question of "why" and "how" is coming up again, here's a quick summary I posted on reddit: From a few different analysis on HN and elsewhere... Baidu has an analytics product and an ads product, much like Google Analytics and Google AdSense, which are used on all kinds of websites via Javascript. China has set the Great Firewall of China to modify some of Baidu's assets so that any non-Chinese IP gets a mod…

Do those requests show up as coming from China? I thought it was only people outside China who are being giving the poisoned javascript, and the requests are being made on the client-side from them - which would appear to be just random traffic?

Perhaps Baidu still shows up as the referring URL, though?

Re: China's Man-On-the-Side Attack on GitHub

#65

Post by jjcc »

carboncopy wrote: post #48
jjcc wrote: post #35

Most people might not know what kind of organization GreatFire really is because too much context is missing. I only discovered recently it's not so simple. There have been a lot of talks about the behavior of GreatFire for quite for a while but most of the talks are in Chinese. There are some in English though, to give everybody a glimpse here is an example: https://github.com/greatfire/wiki/issues/1 I have an impre…

Thanks for providing context. It might be unfair to thrust GitHub, and all Chinese developers into this fight. The Chinese government— if the DDoS fails — may very well just block access to Github, developer needs be damned. Of course that would provide an opportunity for a Chinese counterpart of Github to take market share, perhaps a favorable outcome?

I don't think so, Most Chinese developers love github not only because of infrastructure, but also the wealth of content. There's no substitute.

Re: China's Man-On-the-Side Attack on GitHub

#66

Post by greenleafjacob »

j42 wrote: post #23
mraison wrote: post #10

I still don't really get it. What's the actual goal behind the attack? When the Chinese government decides to block a website, I can at least understand their motivations, as bad as they may be. But DDOSing Github just seems to be pissing the whole world off for a few hours without any actual long term consequences.

Actually, someone here (who I cannot remember) said quite eloquently yesterday that our biggest export--and "influence" on the world--is culture. For the first time I realized that pissing people off may, in fact be the objective as the other reply stated. China and Russia are both (quite unique) examples of countries with an unfathomable degree of control over their citizens. It can be hard to grasp occasionally, co…

> China and Russia are both (quite unique) examples of countries with an unfathomable degree of control over their citizens. It can be hard to grasp occasionally, coming from a western mindset but for the vast majority within said countries, the entire reality they see and what they believe to be true is heavily distorted--in that, it is defined by the vision of the oligarchy and information is carefully controlled to produce a desired set of beliefs. North Korea is an extreme caricature of this pattern.

Perhaps you ought to read the retracted preface from Animal Farm [1].

[1]: http://home.iprimus.com.au/korob/Orwell.html

Re: China's Man-On-the-Side Attack on GitHub

#67

Post by gbog »

mraison wrote: post #10

I still don't really get it. What's the actual goal behind the attack? When the Chinese government decides to block a website, I can at least understand their motivations, as bad as they may be. But DDOSing Github just seems to be pissing the whole world off for a few hours without any actual long term consequences.

I'm working in a 100% Chinese high-tech company, and asked my colleagues: they think it is just a test (that was my first impression too).

Re: China's Man-On-the-Side Attack on GitHub

#68

Post by PlzSnow »

karcass wrote: post #45
j42 wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Actually, someone here (who I cannot remember) said quite eloquently yesterday that our biggest export--and "influence" on the world--is culture. For the first time I realized that pissing people off may, in fact be the objective as the other reply stated. China and Russia are both (quite unique) examples of countries with an unfathomable degree of control over their citizens. It can be hard to grasp occasionally, co…

> the entire reality they see and what they believe to be true is heavily distorted--in that, it is defined by the vision of the oligarchy and information is carefully controlled to produce a desired set of beliefs. That's pretty much how I feel about the Fox-watching population of the US.

It's also how I feel about the RT-watching population of the US.

Re: China's Man-On-the-Side Attack on GitHub

#69

Post by jmgrosen »

dlgeek wrote: post #59
samlambert wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hi Djent, Would you mind sending an email to support@github.com with details on what you were doing when that happened? Thanks

It's happening for me constantly - just clicking the link from the discussion - I get a (very) slow page load, then the unicorn page. I'm assuming it's a timeout on the backend.

Same here. Sometimes it loads, but not usually.

Re: China's Man-On-the-Side Attack on GitHub

#70

Post by pmontra »

e79 wrote: post #31

I wonder how GitHub mitigated the attack so successfully. I can't find any baidu scripts using the injected code anymore (in fact the original tracking scripts on baidu's own domain return nothing), and GitHub is now serving the two repos that were originally targeted. What happened? Whatever it is, I'm glad they were able to mitigate the attacks.

The attack is still going on. Details at https://status.github.com/messages They describe what they're doing to mitigate it.

The latest message is

0:09 UTC

Hour 118: Mitigation remains effective and service is stable.

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