101–110 of 323 posts
For me the most interesting thig about this incident is how the GFW is being used offensively. Most other governments so far have protested online censorship from a kind of moral standpoint, but not from a security standpoint per se. Now it's quite clear the GFW is being leveraged offensively - did anyone spot this capability previously?
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It seems completely bizarre. At least the government has the wisdom to not publicly take credit for it. It looks really bad when one of the most powerful nations on earth, over a billion strong, can't stop a little 300 person operation. Github is smart and talented, and i'm sure that bandwidth cost is horrible. But they are up against an organization 7 orders of magnitude larger, and seem to be holding up just fine.…
>can't stop a little 300 person operation. Police forces can infiltrate world-wide gangs. What's stopping China from infiltrating Github if this DDoS doesn't work out?
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.
Can I black-hole all of China in my hosts file? Off the top of my head I'm not going to miss anything, and I'd hate to be an unwitting participant in future attacks.
Can I black-hole all of China in my hosts file? Off the top of my head I'm not going to miss anything, and I'd hate to be an unwitting participant in future attacks.
Can browsers or OSs not treat the corrupted Baidu analytics as malware?
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During an ongoing attack? I wonder why not...
Right. Not looking for specifics. My curiosity would be satisfied by something like "we've reached out to Baidu and they've done X and Y. Meanwhile, traffic has decreased so we've unblocked the affected repos." Just a bit more transparency on the situation.
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?
> 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
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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.
And because we have free speech, there are multiple alternatives that act as checks and balances across our culture as a whole.
In other words, comparing Fox to the media situation in China or Russia is just ridiculous and irresponsible.
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> 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 t…
> [China] an unfathomable degree of control over their citizens You obviously haven't been there. I think Chinese gov have the same level of control over its citizens as France: very erratic, sometime works well, some people try to play with fire, but overall the Chinese are all but lobotomized robots in the hands of a few puppet masters. There's over 500 strikes a year in China, not counting all the ones not big eno…
Usually when you reside in a country for a long time, you don't think the government as a whole, big, flat thing. The size of the it is gigantic, so that anything you do, you might be interacting with government at some level. I'm not judging this but giving you an image of what it's like living in China, salt, gas, newspaper, movies, all the crazy stuff, are controlled by different departments of government.
But here we are talking about the internet, the thing that Chinese government cannot control, they tried, they tried hard to stop people from accessing free, open internet, from playing foreign games, from using foreign softwares, but much of them were failed. There were years that Chinese Expansions of the World of Warcraft were years late than the rest of the world, and yet, Diablo III is still not public, the stated reasons were, erotic and violence content, on the other hand, there are more bizarre webgames on Chinese market, trolling millions of millions of money from players pocket, and of course they are poorly designed, some of them even has copyright infringement.
With this event (DDoSed Github),the message is quite clear, China wants to fork their own internet, for their own people. This is certainly a very high "degree of control over their citizens."