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Comment by DanielBMarkham | Hacker News Reader

I think we should all be clear on what's happening: China's use of tons of man and computer power to attack commercial interests has led to the militarization of the internet (which, in all fairness, would have probably happened anyway)

So those saying "it's all the same" -- no, it is not. You don't bring up a new server at a site in South America and see a hundred attacks from American computers, but you'll sure as shit see attacks from China. The Chinese have notified the world early on through their actins that the internet exists to be plundered. While in the west the net is a symbol of individual freedom and power, to the Chinese it is another tool of the state.

This will continue to escalate until it ends up with people dying or both sides back down.

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Ah, USA good, China bad. I suspect the Chinese will see it differently.

You are correct, there is a difference. The USA precisely targets, relatively, and China scatter guns. I guess China is working the way it best can, and the USA is way more advanced and efficient.

Perhaps the US might like to share its spying and espionage software with China so that it might do its evil in a more acceptable way?

I think it's worth remembering that the U.S. government funded the development of the Internet in the first place, and then made an affirmative decision to release its technologies as a freely available public good. Tim Berners-Lee, a British citizen in Western Europe, followed suit with his WWW.

As far as I know, China has brought nothing to the technological infrastructure of the Internet but crime and annoyance.

They'll reverse engineer the infrastructure, change it around, re-patent it, and call it "Chinese Innovation".

For those who are updated with international news you know they love using that term. They used it a lot after they copied and re-patented German and French high speed rail technology then started selling it off as their own.

This will continue to escalate until it ends up with people dying or both sides back down.

Or everyone just keeps up this new internet war just like we kept the cold war going for decades, with no one being killed by it.

Don't think for a second that no one died either indirectly, or directly from the Cold War.

Plenty of people died (directly or indirectly) due to the cold war.

Well yes. Plenty because even one human is plenty. But plenty compared to how many people died in WWII? Or WWI? Or any real war we had before?

Compared to what happened immediately before, the cold war was incredibly peaceful.

So I suspect this new cyber war will continue the trend and keep real killings to 0. I do believe we will have a real internet hacking and protecting and counter hacking "war" if you will. But I suspect, and obviously hope, no one actually dies from it.

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