Live data from Hacker News

The Great Cannon has been deployed again

cybersecurity.att.com

61–70 of 470 posts

Re: The Great Cannon has been deployed again

#61
post #18
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?

That's the implication but as with most cyber attacks it's impossible to really prove the source.

This is one of the cyber attacks where the source is proven.

Re: The Great Cannon has been deployed again

#62
post #37

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.

The problem is that the advertising companies wanted the offline marketing spend so much that they started selling the dream of tracking with specificity, which caused marketeers the world over to finally have an answer to the age old 'I don't know which half I spend wrong' question.

Re: The Great Cannon has been deployed again

#63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

Don't forget that the power behind the CCP's lies and violence is economic clout, both abroad and domestically.

Yes, absolutely. The economic clout gives them the confidence and means. That needs to be dealt with. Declaw!

Re: The Great Cannon has been deployed again

#64
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]

Re: The Great Cannon has been deployed again

#66
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?

According to the article, the attacks are currently ineffective for a number of reasons, one being their js code is bugged. Imagine Gavrillo Princip's gun was prone to jamming consistently.

Re: The Great Cannon has been deployed again

#67

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.

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.

Re: The Great Cannon has been deployed again

#68
post #64
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]

[flagged]

Re: The Great Cannon has been deployed again

#69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But these folks still have no answer for how free websites they consume daily (e.g. news) are to be funded, they don't pay, and don't want to see ads either. Yet they still expect these websites to exist. This folk has an answer: display ads the ol' fashioned way, with a pair of and tags.

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.
Post reply on HN