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Comment by johnthedebs | Hacker News Reader

Disclaimer: I am not a security expert, but I did study networking and network security for a few years.

This article seems a bit over the top. It's pure speculation, and it seems much more likely that an engineer configured a router incorrectly, panicked for 15 minutes, then fixed it.

"What set this incident apart from other such mishaps was the fact that China Telecom could manage to absorb this large amount of data and send it back out again without anyone noticing a disruption in service."

We've got a technically inclined community here: When your Internet access is slow for a while, what do you attribute it to? I doubt anyone's first instinct is "must be a man-in-the-middle attack." Again, it seems much more likely that they simply had the capacity to handle most of that traffic (biggest country in the world, modernization, etc.) and no one noticed because the Internet is often flaky.

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When my internet is slow, my first inclination is traceroute (mainly so I can complain to comcast is it's their fault which it usually is), which presumably would show what was happening.

I wouldn't consider your behavior normal. :)

The parent makes a valid claim.

I've only done traceroute a couple of times, normally when my internet is crawling at a bizarre time of day. I expect some slow down at primetime when everyone is home from work and school, I don't expect it when I'm up at 5-6am.

More than once a traceroute has shown traffic stopped at my home router, and a walk outside and around the house showed the comcast man fiddling with the junction box. No knock on the door or "hey, I'm going to be yanking the cable out of your house. hope you saved that file you were editing in vim"

I mostly sometimes remember to use gnu screen now.

I'd also emphasize the unlikelihood that China can handle that amount of traffic.

As anyone who's surfed on the internet in China can attest, the bandwidth into and out of China is basically nil. You can test this out yourself by trying to watch anything on youku.com - it takes years to load. If they magically had the capacity to actually handle the load of the world, I wish they would turn it on already.

The fact that the internet service for regular users is terrible does not mean that China does not have the capacity to make it otherwise. My impression of China's relationship with the internet is that they would prefer if their citizens stayed off it. Maybe the crap service for the average person is intentional?

If you're running a large chinese business with billions of dollars of dealings I bet they sort you out a decent pipe.

Re both of you:

Yeah, it could be by design, and yes a number of corporations have direct fiber lines out to Japan. I used to work at Microsoft in Beijing, which had a line out to Japan and it was easily the fastest internet I've ever use in my life (goes without saying also uncensored).

From my understanding, one of the main reasons that internet is so slow in China is because everything has to pass through the Great Fire Wall.

When my Internet access is slow, I'm inclined to attribute it to Comcast. Then I log into my router, verify things are down own that link (I multihome with a slower DSL connection), and reboot my cable modem. Sadly, that fixes things nine times out of ten.

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